3/21/2023 0 Comments You will make yourself a bywordIn 2018, El-Mekki and Terrell ran a pilot program where Black high school students were teaching younger students. He’d already been doing the work on nights and weekends through different initiatives, but he wanted to commit himself to it full-time. “But, ultimately, it was this idea of how do we rebuild a national Black teacher pipeline that’s sustainable, highly effective, predictable, and protected.” “That’s the gumbo pot that influenced the decision,” El-Mekki says. The early pipeline work was key for El-Mekki, Terrell says, to inspire people to become teachers at a young age instead of waiting until they’re in college when it’s “too late.” This is especially true for Black children, El-Mekki says, based on their own experiences. El-Mekki recalled a student who told him they wanted to become a teacher but said there was nowhere to learn to teach. Even though these educators were highly skilled and qualified credential-wise, districts refused to hire them to teach white students or be school administrators supervising white teachers.īut the strongest source of his motivation to build a Black educator pipeline was the youth. Board of Education, which, El-Mekki says, is when the Black teacher pipeline started “having holes drilled in it and became pretty leaky.” In the years after the 1954 decision that made racially segregated schools unconstitutional, more than 38,000 Black educators lost their jobs. Department of Education, El-Mekki realized a lack of Black educators wasn’t just a problem local to Philadelphia, but one that existed nationwide. And then, while doing a fellowship with the U.S. In his professional career, he found himself resonating with the connections between education and racial justice. “You can’t help but to be shaped by your experiences,” he says. His own Philadelphia elementary school was an all-Black school, including the staff. Rather, pieces of it had been planted in his mind from a young age. The idea for the Center for Black Educator Development didn’t come to El-Mekki in a dream. “It also steeled my spine because it gave me even further fuel to keep moving forward.” Planted Seeds, Growing “To be able to see all of that come to fruition was a bit overwhelming,” El-Mekki says.
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