Pipeline To Tomorrow

Nontraditional teacher candidates often must make herculean efforts and financial sacrifices to prepare for new careers in the classroom. A model program helps smooth the way.

Story by Lee Sherman, Photos by Mount Burns

Portland, Oregon— A trio of third-graders files solemnly into the office that Lemil Speed shares with another teacher at Ball Elementary School. Two little girls, neatly coiffed in pigtails and cornrows, and a very small boy, as serious as a diplomat on a dangerous mission, line up before him. It's impossible to miss the respect in their wide eyes as they wait for Mr. Speed to speak.

You'd expect this powerfully built man (who looks more like a former football player than the ex-banker he is) to talk in the booming tones of a coach. But as he leans toward their expectant faces, his voice is softly reassuring, quietly encouraging. With congratulations for their good work and a gentle admonition to keep it up, Speed awards daily stickers to the threesome before sending them back to class.

As you follow Speed around this struggling inner-city school, as you watch him teach a writing lesson, pinch-hit for the principal, or mentor another teacher on meeting benchmarks, you'd think he'd been an educator forever. But teaching is a second career for this 56-year-old who grew up in an all-black community in the segregated South. After a long stint in the Air Force, a couple of years at McDonald's, and then a solid banking career that included being affirmative action officer for First Interstate, Speed found himself out of work during the recession of the 1980s. It was then that someone told him about the Portland Teachers Program. And it was there that he found his calling. Now in his seventh year of teaching, he says of the profession: "I don't see myself doing anything else."

For 13 years, the Portland Teachers Program has been redirecting the talents and ambitions of people like Lemil Speed toward the classroom. A public school-university partnership that recruits and supports minority teacher candidates throughout their professional training, the program serves students ranging in age from 18 to 55. The average age is 29. These nontraditional students are, in the words of PTP Director Deborah Cochrane, "entrenched in reality."

"We tend not to take the kinds of people who have stars in their eyes," says Cochrane, who runs the program almost single-handedly out of the northeast Portland campus of one of the program's sponsors, Portland Community College (PCC). Many of the 65 current students are parents themselves; many have steered their own kids through Portland Public Schools, another PTP partner. Virtually all have had some first-hand experience working with kids, lots of them as paraeducators. The program waives full-time tuition at PCC for two years, and then at Portland State University for upper-division and School of Education graduate requirements. But students are on their own to pay bills and buy groceries throughout the five-year program. Most must make a Herculean effort to support themselves and their families.

"These are amazing people," says Cochrane, who herself grew up with hardship as a child of rural poverty. "I was talking to one of my graduate students last night, and she waits till her kids are in bed to do enormous amounts of homework after student teaching all day and taking courses in the late afternoon and early evening."

Lemil Speed is no exception to this characterization. He and his wife tried to scrape by on her income and keep up with child support payments to his former spouse. But when the budget wouldn't stretch anymore, he took a $6-an-hour job at the Expo Center as a laborer.

His keystone through the five-year grind was PTP. When the going got rough, he and his fellow students found comfort in the comradeship of others with a similar struggle and shared goals. Equally important was Cochrane herself. By all accounts, she is infinitely more than an administrator. Her role includes mentor, counselor, confidant, and, now and then, mother. For her students, she provides encouragement, problem solving, advocacy, and guidance.

"There were a lot of people who helped me along the way," says Speed, "but Deborah was the one who was always there, always checking in. To me, she is the Portland Teachers Program."

Speed's career has taken off.

Last year, he was recruited for a new position at Ball — instructional specialist — created to assist teachers in a districtwide push to raise academic standards at struggling schools. And he has been accepted into a competitive principal preparation program sponsored by the district.

Numerous Initiatives

PTP is one of the oldest of a number of programs throughout the Northwest designed to pull nontraditional candidates into the teacher-preparation pipeline (see sidebar). The need for new teachers over the next decade is critical. The need for minority teachers who reflect the growing diversity of America's student population is perhaps even more acute.

In Oregon, for example, minority students make up almost 20 percent of public school enrollment. Yet, minority teachers, including administrators, account for only 4 percent of faculty employed by school districts and education service districts, according to the Minority Teacher Report: A Ten-Year Perspective prepared by the Oregon University System and the Governor's Office of Education and Workforce Policy and presented to the legislature in February 2001. The report describes progress on Oregon's Minority Teacher Act of 1991, which called for equalizing the proportion of nonwhite teachers and the proportion of nonwhite students.

The act mandated that the Board of Higher Education require each public teacher education program to prepare a plan with specific goals, strategies, and deadlines for recruitment, admission, retention, and graduation of minority teachers. The numbers show, however, that 10 years later, the gap remains. Reasons cited in the report include sluggish school employment due to scarce resources and teaching's low salaries and prestige relative to other professions. Also, the legislature's mandate had no funds attached, and it coincided with the devastating impact of Oregon's property tax-limitation Measure 5.

But the picture is not all bleak. "In spite of resource scarcities," the report notes, "numerous initiatives have been instituted over the past decade to attempt to address the shortage of minority educators, particularly teachers, in Oregon schools." One such initiative was the November 1997 meeting, Diversifying the Teacher Workforce in the Northwest, sponsored by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. According to the report, the Oregon group formed a planning team that developed a "multistep plan" that included: (1) coordinated, statewide commitment and action; (2) multiple, targeted strategies among the key stakeholder groups; (3) statewide policy direction from the top; and (4) specific projects and initiatives with the highest priority on paraprofessional career-ladder programs, professional development of the current workforce, and a statewide Oregon diversity teacher program. That program, the group said, should be modeled on the Portland Teachers Program.

Over its lifetime, PTP has turned out 70 graduates, most of whom have gone to work in the increasingly diverse Portland School District. But it's not just the numbers that make the program an attractive model for others to follow — it's the quality behind the numbers. Cochrane is careful to point out that the program is selective and committed to turning out good teachers, not just minority teachers. "The PTP really pushes excellence — that's Number One," she says. "We expect that all the teachers who come out of the program will be exceptional teachers."

PTP students must keep their grades up and attend seminars, colloquia, and other special activities in addition to their formal coursework. Although students sign a contract promising to apply to teach in Portland, and if hired, to stay for at least three years, a job with the district is not guaranteed. "We want Portland Public Schools to hire them because they're the best person for the job," Cochrane explains, "not because they're African American, not because they're Native American, not because they're Latino or Asian American."

Following Her Heart

Takiyah Williams grew up on the West Indies island of Trinidad off the Venezuelan coast. The diverse people who populate this former British colony speak English, though their lineage spans the planet, particularly Africa, India, China, and Syria. When the islanders speak, consonants are soft and languid. Williams' voice as she teaches carries a melodious lilt hinting of rain forests and azure surf lapping at trackless sand. From the birthplace of calypso and steel drum, she also brings a love of music.

If you observe Williams at work with her first-graders at Faubian Elementary School, you're likely to be invited to join a joyous march around the room before recess to "The Marching Song" on a tape called Run, Jump, Skip, and Sing. You'll hear 20 tiny voices singing the days of the week in Spanish and see 20 tiny bodies gyrating to silly rhyming songs such as "My Dog Dingo" or "Luckless Lucy," created to teach letter sounds. And you'll see students smoothly transition from one activity to another at the cueing of a soothing Celtic tune.

"Music and the arts are really big for me," says Williams, lamenting that districtwide budget cuts have whittled most visual and performing arts programs down to bare bones.

Williams perfectly reflects the program's emphasis on excellence. "Principals fight over her," Cochrane reveals. Like so many PTP students, Williams started out in another field. For her it was business administration and computer applications, which she studied at City University of New York while living with relatives and earning money by babysitting, walking dogs, and any other flexible work she could find. The child of an impoverished family who was the first to finish college, Williams was initially motivated by the promise of a fat salary that could help lift her and her loved ones into the middle class. She managed a Wendy's fast-food restaurant in New York for a while, worked for the provost at CUNY, and then moved to Atlanta where she worked in human resources at MCI. The money was good, but she felt no passion for the work. "It just wasn't my thing," she recalls.

Determined to seek a career in teaching, she loaded her kids, then two and six, into the car and headed to Portland, where she has family. To save money on food for the seven-day drive, she bought a one-burner hot plate and cooked oatmeal, eggs, and rice in rest stops and supermarket parking lots along the way.

It wasn't long before she heard about PTP, but the application deadline was tight. With no typewriter or computer, she was frantically trying to finish the application on the bus just hours before the deadline. She flew off the bus, ran to the PTP office, squeezed herself into the crowded office, and begged to use the computer.

Cochrane says this kind of intensity is the norm for her students.

"I really feel passionate about the commitment level of my students — they really want to be here," she says from her office as she juggles a constantly jangling phone and a steady flow of students dropping in for a minute of her time. "When you ask them, 'Why do you want to be a teacher?' they say things like, 'I want to make a difference for someone like me,' or 'My kids are in public school, and I don't like what I see — I want to change it.' The career-change people say, 'This wasn't satisfying to me,' or 'I realized money's not important,' or 'I want to do something meaningful.' A lot of it is just wanting to give back to the community — somebody made a difference in their life, and they want to pass that on."

Role Models For All

Bud Mackay's ancestry is a blend of European and American Indian. Although his dad came from the Ute tribe (from which his home state of Utah got its name), he was raised by his mom and stepfather off the reservation. In the small town of Vernal, Mackay stood out.

"Nary did I ever have a teacher of color as a role model," he recalls. "It was not uncommon for me to be called 'nigger' as a child. I was the closest thing to black that they had in our district. It was painful and hurtful."

It was partly to spare other children the experience of being "negated" that he decided to pursue teaching after his used-car dealership failed during an economic downturn. He landed a job at Clark Elementary School, where he teaches ESL behind the scarlet curtains of a stage converted to a classroom. "I think it's very important that we have teachers of color in the classroom," he says. He felt validated the very moment he met Cochrane. "She gave me this feeling that 'you may have been negated then, but you're not going to be anymore.'"

Cochrane offers several reasons that kids should have teachers who represent all groups in the nation's multiethnic mix. First and most obvious, she says, children of color need role models who "look like they do." They need to see that "they, too, could achieve a position of authority and power — the power to pass on knowledge. They need to know that they can accomplish things, that they can go to college and get a degree and be a professional."

Second, she says, kids need teachers who are connected to their culture, teachers who "understand the cultural implications of learning, understand different learning styles, understand family dynamics and incorporate that into the curriculum."

Third, says Cochrane, these teachers can bring cultural insights into the school as a whole, sharing their perspective with other teachers and with administrators. And, finally, minority teachers are important role models for kids who don't look like them, as well.

"On a larger scale, long term, what you really hope is that having more diversity in the teaching workforce will have some impact on racism in this society," she says. "If children — all children — learn from a diversity of cultural and ethnic perspectives, then they grow up with a whole different view of reality."

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