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Dr. Nina Gilbert Shares Insights on The Black Educator Pipeline with U.S News & World Report
November 21, 2025Written by: Morehouse College
U.S. public school educators, most of whom are white, often don't reflect the racial student populations they teach in K-12 schools, research indicates. Black educators, for instance, make up about 6% of public K-12 teachers, according to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, while Black students are 15% of that population. On the other hand, white teachers represent 80% of public school educators, but less than half of students – 46% – are white.
"Between 1988 and 2018, the number of teachers of color hired in the U.S. increased at a faster rate than the number of white teachers, yet those diverse educators also left their positions much more quickly, on average," says Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based Center for Black Educator Development, host of the Black Men in Education Convening in Philadelphia Nov. 20–22, 2025. "To this day, there is not one state that nears the 35-50% of Black educators of the segregated era."
There are opportunities to rebuild the Black teacher pipeline specifically, he says, "but first, we need to tell the truth about teaching."
Q: What are you seeing colleges do to encourage more Black students, especially Black men, to pursue the teaching profession? What’s being done well in terms of recruitment strategies?
There are initiatives out there that are working to address student recruitment and retention. One notable college program that supports Black male educators is Call Me MiSTER, which provides holistic assistance, including tuition assistance and job placement, to future educators who commit to teaching in hard-to-staff communities. Morehouse College in Georgia – under the leadership of Nina Gilbert, executive director of The Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education – has been successful in recruiting and developing Black male educators to serve as culturally responsive leaders. Here at the Center for Black Educator Development, our Future Teachers of Excellence Fellowship, which currently has nearly 160 fellows in partnership with the United Negro College Fund, provides tuition support, academic coaching, mentoring and retention bonuses to support recruitment and retention.
Read the full article here.