On a late February afternoon, Angela Crawford, an English teacher, stood in front of about three dozen Philadelphia educators—mostly young, black women—as they all swapped stories of small victories and challenges in their classrooms. Dressed in a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt and slim black slacks, Crawford, at one point, reflected on what has helped her remain resilient while working in some of the nation’s least resourced and most segregated classrooms for 23 years.
“Black women are caretakers of everyone else but ourselves,” she said. “You need daily rituals for your mind, body, and soul to stay in this profession. No one is going to move me from my daily workout and sleep. Block out weekly time for yourself: sit in silence, read for pleasure, buy yourself a nice dinner and flowers. That’s how I will have energy tomorrow to honor, listen, and uplift my students.”
As a veteran black teacher, Crawford is an outlier in her hometown of Philadelphia—and in the country. Just 24 percent of Philadelphia’s public-school teachers are black, down from a third in 2001, in a district in which 53 percent of students are black. That mirrors a national pattern: Between 2003 and 2012, a net 26,000 black teachers disappeared from American classrooms, while the overall number of teachers grew by 134,000.
Crawford has observed firsthand the rise and fall of black teachers in the city. When she was a student in Philadelphia in the ’70s, the city’s schools were desegregating and federal and state governments were pouring extra resources into buildings serving black students to compensate for a long history of racial exclusion. A decade before that, black students and educators in the city led one of the largest youth walkouts of the civil-rights era, which resulted in more integrated schools, more black teachers, and the addition of African American history to the school curriculum.
Today, Martin Luther King High School, where Crawford has taught since 2014, is highly segregated: Ninety-three percent of its students are black and only 1 percent are white. It’s one of roughly 6,700 schools nationwide in which 1 percent or less of the student body is white. And it’s also in a state with one of the country’s most unequally funded education systems: Pennsylvania ranksnear the bottom of the country in the state share of education funding, making districts such as Philadelphia reliant on property taxes to fund its schools, which deepens the inequities between rich and poor districts. Pennsylvania is also one of 14 states that send more money to their wealthiest districts than their poorest ones.
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