Black Teacher Collaborative (BTC)

In March 2022, BTC was one of more than 140 groups that received substantial grants from MacKenzie Scott, former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. ⁵

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Black Teacher Collaborative seeks to recruit majority-Black teacher corps for majority-Black schools. It deploys a learning method that “informs change across the entire education landscape” and a “Platform for Systemic Change that lifts up the voices, experiences, leadership and insight of Black teachers.” Its “Black Liberatory Pedagogy” is a “comprehensive set of mindsets, knowledge, instructional strategies, and classroom culture practices that intentionally cultivate a positive racial identity in Black students while deepening their academic knowledge and skills, ⁶ … grounded in the socio-political theory of Black Self-Determination.” ¹

BTC seeks Black teachers who agree with the following credo: “Given our existence in a racist society, I am subject to negative messages about Blackness. Given our existence in a racist society, my students are subject to negative messages about Blackness. Black Children and Black Teachers exist with wounds from oppression.” ³

The group wants to hire Black teachers who know there is “historical and contemporary data that highlights the long history of the United States creating and maintaining a narrative of Black intellectual inferiority,” which impacts “Black students’ and Black adults’ efficacy and mental psyche of receiving and internalizing messages of Black intellectual and social inferiority.” ³

Math

Black Teacher Collaborative asserts that “Mathematics as currently taught, relies on ill-fitted instructional practices that not only fail to support Black students’ learning and success; but often actively preclude Black students’ learning and success in mathematics.” Its solution is to “equip Black teachers to implement racially-affirming instructional practices anchored in BTC’s pedagogical framework to teach Algebra I. This framework, which is rooted in Black teaching traditions, will use real-world examples to teach concepts like operations of inequalities” and “build a positive racial math identity.” ⁷

State of Black Education Report

The Black Teacher Collaborative produces an annual report, The State of the Black Education. Author R. Davis Dixon wrote that “It is especially important to consider that the poison of racism in this country is ever prevalent.” ⁸ Dixon claims that “Black people’s relationship with America has been characterized largely by enslavement, state sanctioned violence, and disenfranchisement over the course of centuries.” ²

Dixon alleges that American schools have failed “to prioritize Black people’s experiences and promote their identity, values, and beliefs. The American education system has historically educated all students with White norms in the forefront.” ²

Hiewet Senghor

Senghor is the co-founder of the Black Teacher Collaborative and previously worked at Teach for America, the NAACP, and the Children’s Defense Fund. ⁹ She credits her passion for Black liberation to her parents, whom she describes as members of the “Black Nationalist movement in the 1970s called The Republic of New Africa.” ¹⁰ The RNA was a radical organization with ties to similar radicalized groups. ¹¹ Senghor lists amongst her influencers the radical Black separatist Stokely Carmichael and Kathleen Cleaver, spouse of Eldridge Cleaver, the former leader of the militant and communist Black Panther Party. Senghor has also cited former NAACP leader  Julian Bond as an influence, and Black women activists Fannie Lou Hammer and Ella Baker.”¹²

Senghor said the “seeds of BTC” were planted during the Rodney King trial, which Senghor claims forced Black Americans to “face the realities of the power and the pervasiveness of white supremacy.” ¹³ She has stated that “America continues to murder Black and brown children” ¹⁴ and that public education is “tied to issues of institutionalized racism and historic inequity.” ¹⁵