Taking the form of three papers, this dissertation seeks to elaborate the role and experience of Black educators by shifting primary research perspective away from the classroom teacher to consider the systemic and organizational roles of racialized faculties. The first paper historicizes the 20th- and 21st-century stories of Michigan’s Black teaching corps. This corps emerged as a central feature of the state’s civil rights struggle and a critical point of sustaining consensus among the state’s ruling political coalition – only to stall and ultimately collapse by half in the decade after 2005. These declines were fueled in part by the substantial relocation of Black-student enrollments away from urban centers of traditional Black-teacher employment with only marginal expansion of Black-teacher employment in receiving districts. Suggestive evidence shows that new Black teachers may modally prefer the traditional contexts – including the presence of substantial extant Black faculties. Through the lens of comparative Black-student achievement outcomes, the second paper explores the tension of organization-level Black-faculty operations with those of classroom-level Black teachers. This is an extension of the teacher-student ethnic/racial match literature commencing with Dee (2004). I seek to more fully evaluate the conceptual and empirical simultaneity of teacher-student matching, faculty-student match, faculty-teacher matching, and the three-way phenomenon of intersected faculty race, teacher race, and student race as elements of the (even) broader context of school’s observable racial structure. I find that the school-level feature of Black-faculty proportion describes moderation effects of the underlying teacher-student match measure, but that more complex school racial features ultimately more robustly characterize comparative levels of Black-student achievement. The final empirical paper considers the relationship between comparative rates of Black-teacher postsecondary study of teaching and those students’ exposure to qualitatively distinct levels of Black K12 faculty. I find significant conditioned enhancements of Black-student teaching choice vs. non-Black same-school peers among the pool of students entering university study shortly after their high school graduation.
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