I came across a fascinating paper: Role Models Revisited: HBCUs, Same-Race Teacher Effects, and Black Student Achievement. The author, Lavar Edmonds, also wrote a summary on Twitter:
There’s a lot to digest and I haven’t read the entire paper yet. It includes a concise history of HBCUs in the US with a particular emphasis on their role training K-12 teachers. For instance, Edmonds writes:
Throughout much of the 20th century, jobs in education were a cornerstone of the Black middle class (Thompson, 2021), driven partially by “separate-but-equal” laws that segregated students by race and propagated a labor market specifically for Black teachers needed for instruction in the all-Black K-12 schools. Remarkably, HBCUs’ contributions to the Black teacher supply continued even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s expansion of collegiate opportunities for Black students at non-HBCUs. Based on 2019-2020 degree conferral data from the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS), despite HBCUs producing only about 8% of Black college graduates, they graduated just over 20% of the Black college graduates with education degrees, suggesting HBCUs remain a pivotal destination for Black students interested in teaching. By no means was this year an aberration: previous estimates report HBCUs have produced roughly 50% of the current supply of Black teachers in the U.S. (National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, 2008).
I guess I hadn’t thought of the need to train teachers for segregated schools.