Teachers Of Color: -- An Endangered Class -- As Their Numbers Grow Smaller, Calls Grow Louder To Have More Minority Role Models In Classrooms

"Hey, Brett," the coach shouts to his first baseman, "you goin' to be a teacher?"

"Not unless the salary goes up $10,000," the student says, turning back to the softball game.

It won't be the last time Mike Talley will bring up the subject. Since returning to his high-school alma mater as a physical-education teacher and coach seven years ago, he has been talking up the teaching profession. He's determined to wear down the resistance of his best students.

When African-American students at Hazen High School tell Talley teaching doesn't pay enough and teachers have to work too hard, he replies that if they want to earn more money in another field they may have to work even longer hours.

MONEY ISN'T ISSUE

Money isn't the issue for Talley, who credits Hazen's first black football coach, Ike Kieffer, with recruiting him for the Hazen football team and encouraging him to go to college.

When Talley went to the University of Idaho on a football scholarship, "I just figured I wanted to do the same things he did, to give kids some direction, to let them know their potential and let them use their potential. I love it, I love it. I wouldn't do anything else."

He's passing on the gift given to him.

But too few young blacks, Asian Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans are choosing teaching careers, according to educators, parents and those students who look to their teachers for guidance.

In the Renton School District, where Talley teaches, the ratio of black students to black teachers is 57 to 1. The ratio of white students to white teachers is 18 to 1. It is a racial and cultural gap found in school districts statewide.

Unless more students of color decide to become teachers, school districts won't be able to reach their goal of hiring a work force that is as racially and culturally diverse as their students. In a decade when racial minorities are approaching 20 percent of public-school enrollment in Washington, only 6 percent of newly certified teachers are minorities.

While advocates of diversity believe it is important for all children to see adults of different races in positions of authority and leadership, the issue is particularly acute for children of color.

Consider these stories:

-- Yolanda Gonzalez, a teacher at Day Elementary School in Seattle, asked a third-grader why her eyes were fixed on the teacher every second of the school day. "She said, `I've never seen a Mexican teacher before.' It meant a lot to her," Gonzalez recalls.

The girl, who was unable to read in the third grade, is now a fifth-grader who reads at the fourth-grade level.

-- A black girl went to Hazen High School Assistant Principal Cliff Donley in tears after a teacher chastised and disciplined her for repeated tardiness. When the black administrator asked the freshman why she was late, she explained that she hadn't seen her alcoholic mother for a week and had to get her younger siblings off to school before she could go to school.

Donley arranged for the children to move in with their aunt and suggested to the white teacher that she ask why a child is absent before imposing discipline.

-- At Showalter Middle School in Tukwila, which has no black teachers on its permanent staff, Assistant Principal Lee Allen is concerned that many black students view school as "a white thing."

It takes Allen back to his youth in southern Florida, during the early days of desegregation, when all his high-school teachers were white.

He studied hard, but said, "I'm still paying the price of that. I lost some of my friends. . . . A lot of my friends thought I sold out by studying. Unfortunately, a lot of those friends are dead, or in jail. I was quite isolated."

Today, Allen tells minority students it's OK to be different and to study hard. He plans to make recruiting a more diverse staff a priority when he becomes principal this summer.

A SPECIAL BOND IS FELT

Educators frequently use the term "role model" to describe the relationship of a teacher to a student of the same racial or ethnic group. Students use simpler language.

Showalter student Zane Adams says he's used to having white teachers. But he feels a special bond with Al Andrews, a black substitute teacher. "When I see him in the hall, he asks how I'm doing in school. If my grades aren't good, he says they had better be good."

"He pushes us, he tells us to keep working," adds Eric Nelson.

Lynn Lambie, a special-education teacher at Hazen, has concluded from her own experiences and those of her two sons that some white teachers simply don't expect as much from black children as they do from white.

Lambie believes she was not served well by her education in a Los Angeles school where most students were black and most teachers were white. By contrast, her friends who attended black schools in the South with black teachers "have a strong sense of who they are and what they can accomplish. That message was not handed to me through the school system that I came up in."

`MIXTURE' IN SCHOOLS URGED

The teachers, parents and students interviewed for this article did not suggest a return to segregation. But they called for more aggressive efforts by schools to hire more teachers of color.

"You had better have a mixture in your school because you're going to have a mixture out in the world," observes Showalter student Nicole Bennett.

Talley can recall seeing only six black students in programs that train hundreds of future teachers at the University of Idaho and Seattle Pacific University. And in four sessions of summer school for teachers at the University of Washington, he has seen only one other black man.

"I don't know where they're going to come from," he says. "There's a big-time need."