Black Men Teach

The goal of Black Men Teach is to improve outcomes for children of color, with a special focus on Black male elementary students. Through partnerships with multiple stakeholders in the teacher development process, we recruit, place, and help retain Black male teachers in eight low-income Twin Cities public elementary schools over the next six years, so that 20% of the teaching staff in those schools are Black men. At capacity, we will place 30 Black male teachers annually and support 100 Black males in the teacher pipeline within 10 years. With approximately 25 students in a classroom, these Black male teachers will influence over 2,500 Twin Cities children annually.

Black Men Teach (BMT) provides structure and processes that bring together efforts of numerous key partners who are committed to educational equity and reform to build a stronger, more diverse teaching workforce.

RECRUIT
- Recruit Black men (BMT Fellows) at the high school, college, and mid-career levels to become teachers
- Create cohorts and offer a network of support and mentoring to all Fellows in our pipeline

PREPARE
- Place Fellows in partner nonprofit and community organizations working in youth development, to build valuable experience working with youth
- Mentor Fellows through individual pathways with teacher preparation partners

SUPPORT
- Provide stipends during unpaid student teaching (typically 12-16 weeks, and a requirement for becoming a licensed teacher
- Provide scholarships--partnering with Page Scholars and Wallin Education Partners, and direct scholarships from Black Men Teach - with additional one-on-one mentoring and support throughout the candidates education;

PLACE
- Guide new Fellows to K-5 partner schools with an induction process and a culture to designed to support their success
- Offer ongoing training, mentorship, and support
- Support organizational partners with onboarding process

RETAIN
- Help partner schools change adult culture in order to better retain teachers of color
- Offer networking opportunities and ongoing mentoring for Fellows during their first two years of teaching
- Provide student loan repayment assistance that incentivizes retention working in elementary school settings over a five year period.

Recruiting and retaining black male educators, indeed all BIPOC teachers, has been a challenge for our community, as is reflected by their limited numbers and attrition in the field. And although the reasons for this are well known within the education community, success has been elusive due to the many stakeholders in the teacher development pipeline, each working within their own specialty, with no one else working on a comprehensive approach. Black Men Teach is providing leadership to overcome this issue.

BMT brings together all stakeholders – colleges and universities, alternative teacher preparation programs, policy makers, community-based organizations, K-12 school systems, and corporate and foundation leaders – to work together in a seamless fashion. BMT provides leadership and coordination of these efforts. Through its partnerships, BMT addresses issues that have proven problematic for BIPOC candidates, including lack of recruitment, inadequate teacher training, poor induction, unwelcoming school culture, low entry-level compensation and lack of meaningful career paths. Addressing one or a few of the challenges, while leaving others unaddressed, will not lead to success. BMT has assembled and will continue to lead a committed group of partners, creating a paradigm shift that will lead to transformation in the teacher development process.

Our board, providing strategic guidance, is composed of one current and two former metropolitan area school district superintendents, a university president, a former legislator and others with significant expertise in how our education system works and what must be done to increase the number of teachers of color. While diverse, this board is majority Black. Having Black leadership for this effort, and Black community engagement, both core values for BMT, is critical to our success.

Black Men Teach was incorporated June 2018. Since then we have built our board of education and youth development leaders, policy advocates and business leaders. This diverse board is majority Black. Our executive Director, Markus Flynn, was hired January, 2021. We have secured partnerships with the 8 elementary schools we will work with, a number of traditional and two non-traditional teacher training programs and a number of community-based organizations that will assist with recruiting and training. As of fall 2021, Black Men Teach has placed three men in elementary school teaching positions and we have 12 men in the post-secondary reacher training pipeline.

Our recruitment efforts now include the offering of concurrent enrollment classes "Introduction to Education," to juniors and seniors in area high schools. In 2021 we launched our first high school Fellows program with 14 men enrolled in a Minneapolis high school. BMT will assist in recruiting Black men to take this class, exposing them to the idea of teaching, and we will recruit Black teachers to lead the class. We have also begun on-campus outreach to non-teaching majors, encouraging them to consider teaching as a career and a way to make a positive impact on their community and next generation of students.

We have secured partnerships with two scholarship programs, ensuring all Fellows will receive partial scholarships to support their education.