Call them MISTER

After working with at-risk youth for 10 years through the Department of Social Services, Benjamin Glover has found a job he thinks will allow him to make a bigger difference in the lives of children: Teaching third grade at James J. Davis Elementary School.

He is the only black male teacher at the school, where he has taught for two years.

"The male presence, period, is definitely needed in a classroom setting," he said. "With the plight of black America, the plight of African-American males, it is highly important that they have representation in elementary classrooms. ... It's good for them to see themselves as viable, successful young men."

That's why Glover supports recruitment programs such as Call Me MISTER (Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models), which the University of South Carolina Beaufort will launch this fall.

The program, developed at Clemson University 10 years ago, recruits black men to teach at the state's elementary and middle schools, particularly at the lowest-performing and highest-poverty schools. Participants are awarded scholarships or can participate in loan forgiveness programs.

About one-third of the Beaufort County School District's 19,500 students are black. However, only 2.4 percent of the district's 1,500 teachers are black men, according to district data for the 2008-09 school year.

Of the 750 teachers at the district's 17 elementary schools, only seven are black men, compared to 119 black women and 45 non-black men.

Identifying a need

Keith Parker has taught fourth and fifth grades at Whale Branch Elementary School for the past 10 years but spent the earlier part of his 28-year education career teaching middle and high school.

He switched to elementary education -- and went back to school to earn his elementary certification -- after realizing how few men taught at that level. For several years, he and a few janitors were the only black men at Whale Branch Elementary, he said. About 70 percent of the school's students are black.

"A lot of kids in this area don't have a male role model in their lives," Parker said. "I saw a need, an emptiness."

Vincent Dore, a black special-education teacher at Shell Point Elementary since 1982, saw the same void.

"(Teaching elementary school) provides the opportunity to serve as a good role model, to mold and shape them before they enter middle school, where a lot of students tend to get into some behavior issues," he said. "Just by them seeing the pure fact of my color, they feel some sort of identify or connection."

Roy Jones, director of the Call Me MISTER program, said most of the men recruited for Call Me MISTER are from poor communities and understand the challenges young black males from poor families face.

"Many have had to undergo and overcome the very same limitations and experiences and are able to relate," Jones said. "They come from similar backgrounds, they've done the same things, they've acted out the same way."

Black males tend to have more discipline problems and a higher drop-out rate than other demographic groups, Jones said.

"Where can we start to stem that trend?" he asks. "We could put black teachers in elementary classrooms."

Raising achievement

Don Doggett, principal at Davis Elementary School, said it's difficult to quantify the influence of black male teachers on student achievement because many of the positive effects he's noticed -- improved camaraderie and trust between a teacher and his students, for example -- can't be measured.

"Good instruction is good instruction, male or female," he said. "But in terms of having a black male on campus ... it does make a tremendous difference."

Social and cultural research suggests putting well-trained black male teachers in the classroom would have positive academic and social effects on students, said Lamont Flowers, a professor and director of the Charles H. Houston Center for the Study of the Black Experience in Education at Clemson University.

More quantitative research is needed, however, to better understand the specific effects black male teachers have on student learning and explain differences in teaching styles and classroom dynamics, he said.

Thomas Dee, a researcher and economics professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, has studied the effects of teachers' race and gender for about seven years and has published several papers on the topics.

"My results confirm that a teacher's gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students and students' engagement with academic material," he wrote in a 2006 article. "Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men."

His research has consistently found race and ethnic dynamics also affect achievement, he said. There is little research, however, to explain why that is, although several theories have been proposed.

Dee said more research is needed on why race and gender influence achievement before any type of public policy is put in place. Programs that heavily recruit under-represented teachers, such as Call Me MISTER, have been widely recommended to improve the performance among minority students.

However, Dee wrote in a 2005 paper this approach could have the unintended consequence of harming students who do not share the minority teacher's demographic traits.

Recruiting black men

Call Me MISTER was first used at historically black colleges. When it was developed 10 years ago, there were fewer than 200 black male elementary school teachers in South Carolina, Jones said.

Since 2004, 35 participants have graduated from the program. About 150 students are now enrolled in Call Me MISTER at 15 four-year and two-year colleges across the state.

Currently, only eight men -- none black -- are among the 102 education majors at USCB, according to spokeswoman Deborah Reynolds.

Larry Jackson, coordinator for Call Me MISTER at USCB, said he hopes the program will entice about five black men into the education program this fall.

Jackson, who taught kindergarten for 25 years, much of that time in Germany, will mentor the USCB students. He was often the only male teacher in school and said students would begin to mimic his proper English, neat habits and professional dress.

Parents couldn't wait to meet the man who had such an influence on their children, he said.

"A male in a school like that, you become the hero of the school," Jackson said. "All I have to do is show (teaching) to them, and they'll love it."

Overcoming obstacles

Although Jackson is confident simply introducing more students to teaching will convince them to consider the career, several factors have deterred men of all races.

One is a lack of exposure, Jones said.

"You hear, 'You'd be a great point guard or linebacker' ... or 'You're good at math; go into engineering,' " Jones said. "No one is saying, 'Take those skills, those natural attributes, and you need to apply it to being a great teacher.' "

Another is salary. First-year teachers make about $34,000 in Beaufort County.

"If you're single, it's not bad, but not everyone stays single forever," Jackson said, adding the pay discourages men who want to support a family. Jackson said when he was a teacher, he worked several odd jobs after school and through the summers to supplement his income.

Stereotypes are also a deterrent.

"It's historically been, at the early-child and elementary level, it's been a female-dominated profession," Jones said. "It's not glorious to want to be a third-grade teacher if you're male."