Education debate in black and white

Do African American teachers, teach African American kids better than white teachers?

You decide.....

Somebody named Terry Saskin had taken issue with a Philadelphia Daily News article that detailed the shortage of black teachers in city public schools and lauded Cheyney University's Call Me MISTER program, which trains African American teachers for elementary school classrooms.

Saskin's letter to the editor a few weeks ago brimmed with defiance. Under the headline "As a white teacher, I'm not good enough?" it read:

"I'm white and have been teaching in the district for 12 years. Most of my students are minorities. . . . They have achieved academic excellence. If my ethnicity were different, not a thing would change."

It went on: "The Call Me MISTER program seems solid, but playing the race card is just another example of how weak-minded some people are."

Uh-oh. There's the dreaded accusation of the race card again. Now my back was up.

But Saskin's letter did get me thinking about whether a teacher's race had any correlation to the success of an African American student. Especially as we see so few black teachers.

My own experience says yes. Sure, I had a string of white teachers I absolutely adored. But in sixth grade, Mrs. Corley, my first African American teacher, had the most profound impact.

She was the first black person I had seen who was a professional and looked like me - tall and brown-skinned. And she talked to me like my mother, affectionately and sometimes with no compromise. Plus, she was a great teacher.

Still, I couldn't dismiss this letter. The first of my many questions: Just who is this Saskin character, who previously had taken on everybody from the Ku Klux Klan to indifferent parents in his letter-writing campaigns, who, in all of his letters, mentioned the well-being of children?

Who also once challenged his students to write letters chronicling life in the inner city, and who gave $25 out of his own pocket to the 10 whose letters were published in the newspaper.

For somebody who seemed so in tune, could he really not understand the need for more black teachers in a district that's 62 percent African American?

Turns out, the 39-year-old Saskin is one of those rare teachers you don't see every day, whose passion goes way beyond the classroom.

Jewish by birth only, he says - "I married a shiksa and have tattoos all over my shoulders" - the Bensalem native has spent his entire career in public elementary education.

He taught for 10 years at Muñoz Marin School in Kensington, where the majority of his students were Latino. Spent two years at Frederick Douglass School in North Philly, where the student population was overwhelmingly African American.

Click here to read the rest of the article by Annette John-Hall