Men In Education Luncheon

Today’s educational system has continued to struggle to meet the needs of many students, particularly, male students of color. We all know that true change will not begin until we have honest conversations about increasing the presence of men in leadership roles and ways they can support each other.

The group meets in a facilitated setting to practice the three core principles: Cultivate highly effective men in educational leadership, Promote collegiality through a critical friends lens, and Engage in courageous conversations about the state of education and their role in changing the narrative and student achievement.

The Men In Educational Leadership is an invite-only group sponsored by REACH Educational Solutions. The purpose of the group is to ensure that the most vulnerable students, children of color, have male role models for inspiration and support.

Since 2014, ethnic and racial minorities make up more than half of the student population in U.S. public schools, yet about 80 percent of teachers are white and 77 percent of them are female. People of color make up about 20 percent of teachers; a mere 2 percent are black men.

Having at least one black teacher in third through fifth grades reduced a black student’s probability of dropping out of school by 29 percent, the study found. For very low-income black boys, the results are even greater – their chance of dropping out fell 39 percent.

The researchers replicated their findings by looking at black students in Tennessee who entered kindergarten in the late 1980s and participated in the Project STAR class-size reduction experiment. There, they found that students who had at least one black teacher in kindergarten through grade three were 15 percent less likely to drop out. Having at least one black teacher in those grades also increased a student’s chances of taking a college entrance exam by 10 percent.