Cepeda: Recruiting Hispanics to become teachers a tough assignment

For starters, becoming a teacher is expensive.

Not only do you need to earn at least a bachelor’s degree but, depending on your state, there are a battery of general and content-area tests to take, each of them costing a nice chunk of change. The capstone test — called the edTPA and now the standard for certification in 16 states — requires a high-quality video-taking device, video-editing skills and super-fast internet access to create and upload an extensive submission.

This is in addition to 15 to 20 weeks of unpaid mandatory student teaching, during which you’d have to be crazy to try to work elsewhere — if your university even allowed it — regardless of how dearly you needed the income.

And, as if that weren’t enough of a mountain to climb, for those altruistic souls devoted to teaching in low-income schools where the majority of students are black or Hispanic and the pay is likely to be low, the Trump administration is threatening to end the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which helps teachers who take on these difficult assignments.

Then there is the actual experience of being a teacher in a school where there are few or no other teachers of color — it’s not always a walk in the park.

I’ve been blessed to teach in schools chock full of absolutely caring, devoted, selfless and hard-working teachers and administrators who would do practically anything to ensure the academic success of all their students.

But even in such environments of pulling out all the stops to make sure kids progressed, there were still obvious ways in which white students were seen as academically ready to thrive while black and Hispanic students were considered lesser — too poor, too devoid of resources at home, too far behind peers or otherwise too downtrodden to succeed.

Throughout my years in education I’ve been present at meetings where such students were referred to as stupid or hopeless. Their parents were savaged as being clueless, unhinged or having been purchased by a spouse as a mail-order bride from a foreign country. In one case, my presence was not enough to hold the tongue of a teacher who suggested that a male Hispanic student’s career trajectory would peak with becoming a janitor.

Changing perspectives

A diverse teacher corps is not a panacea — the single most important factor in student achievement is the quality of the teacher regardless of race or ethnicity. But if more Hispanic college students can be recruited into teaching through a variety of supports and incentives, the way in which struggling students are perceived in schools can begin to change.

Teaching is not easy or particularly lucrative, relative to other highly skilled professions. But walking into a classroom and being a living, breathing example of all the possibilities that a good education can open up offers its own rewards.