Inequity in America for Latina Teachers By: Damaris Caraballo For many years I have suppressed the reality that I have faced as a Latina teacher in the American classroom. I realized, just this year, that I had never wanted to voice the marginalization, barriers, and the ill-treatment that I have received as a result of my race, for fear of seeming weak in the eyes of my superiors. I would hear myself thinking of voicing these thoughts and bring myself back to a time when I would hear my mother in the 80's come home complaining about her corporate banking job on Wall Street and all the harassment and discrimination she would suffer at work because she was Latina. I judged my mother, in those moments, because she was pulling the race card and that to me, ignorantly enough, was a sign of weakness. I vowed that I would never do that. Fast forward here we are in 2021, and I am a teaching professional in the critical shortage area of Special Education fully bilingual and know my race sets me apart from achieving the best results in my career. The inequity brown teachers face in the classrooms is shameful. In a country where the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing race, only 2% of Certified Special Education teachers speak Spanish.
I will assure you that teaching the special population is an extreme challenge. The biggest challenge I have faced was the mountain of barriers we face to apply for Special Education jobs, fight for fair compensation, and maintenance of executing and keeping our licenses. It is a nightmare to say the very least. I always knew teaching was a pink-collar profession. However, it is the one pink-collar profession in the United States where we do not see race equity and probably will not see it for an exceptionally long time.
The National Center of Education Statistics reports, in 2016, that 83% of the teachers in the United States were white. They also note that there was a 3% increase, in that year, in the hiring of white staff and yet we only see a 1% increase in hiring rates among the other minority teacher segments. Today, we see 49% of the students in our classrooms are minorities. The fact remains evident that the population of teachers of color has not caught up. David Figlio in his article, "The importance of a Diverse teaching workforce”, notes that minority students who are taught
by minority teachers outperform their peers on standardized assessments. Yet today we are faced with 40% of the schools in America having no minority teachers on staff and teachers of color are primarily placed in urban schools where working conditions are stressful.
It is a fact that zip codes determine the quality of materials and level of educational supports a building receives. It is also a fact that minority teachers are segregated into certain zones and are are alienated and marginalized. As a Latina teacher who has worked in buildings where there are only two brown educators, I have even seen the classrooms segregated by race and curriculum modified by race. For example, in Lee County, Fl minority students were placed with minority teachers and minority peers and were taught under the Reading Plus curriculum which forces us to teach African American students differently from all other race peers. As a teacher, this was unnerving since we know that race does not determine reading level.
We continue to also be the lowest-performing nation on the planet when it comes to student test scores and achievement. This is because other nations have an equitable workforces that focus on skills and strengths, not on race and antiquated paperwork trails laced with bureaucracy intended to outplace, overwork and underpay minority teachers. As a Latina Special Education teacher, I have had illegally large classroom sizes, no paraprofessional supports, no lunch or bathroom breaks, and mentorship that came in the form of telling you what you needed to do more of versus what the kids needed and were lacking. The truth is we must work twice as hard as our white peers to get paid less and treated unfairly.
This article is not intended to be a qualitative research piece loaded with stats and fact but a plea to breed awareness of an incredibly sad and ongoing problem we are facing in America. We are losing teachers at exponentially alarming rates and in fact, we see a decline in minority teacher recruitment year to year. I hope that every brown teacher reading this right now understands exactly what I am trying to convey. What we are faced with is an imbalance of power relations. In this country, it seems to not matter your level of education, experience, or skill set because your race will place you in the novice teacher category in the hood getting paid and treated as a novice teacher for life. Now I have seen a few outlier cases where this wasn't the case but this were few and far between. Latino teachers continue to lack mentorship and equal opportunities in the American teaching industry. This may be the reason why we see more than half of all Latino teachers exit the profession within the first three years.
The goal of this article is not to condemn or shame our country for continuing its racist separatist practices in our public schools, but to bring awareness to those who might be in positions of power. These are the people who can shift the outcomes and bring equity to all races and classrooms in our country. I finalize this article just to pay homage to all my Minority
teachers who have faced and are facing these struggles. If this is a topic that you would like to continue discussing, I can be reached at damarismunoz@yahoo.com. https://www.linkedin.com/in/damaris-caraballo-a8039129 https://www.linkedin.com/in/damaris-caraballo-a8039129