Community Highlights: Meet Dr. Diarese George of Tennessee Educators of Color Alliance

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Diarese George.

Hi Dr. George, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Currently, in the state of Tennessee, 40 percent of our one million students identify as people of color, compared to approximately 15 percent of teachers. Having spent my K-12 experience as one of a few students of color in all my classes, with no access to teachers of color, and later teaching as the only Black male educator at a school in the district that I grew up in for nearly five years, I know first-hand the impact that educators of color have in the profession. During my last year teaching in 2016, this is what led me to launch the Tennessee Educators of Color Alliance (TECA). I felt that it was important for educators of color to be retained in the profession and have access to the resources and training that would position them as change agents in their local communities across the state. I launched the TECA as a means to address the absence of the teachers of color that many students do not get the opportunity to experience.

TECA’s mission is to amplify the voice, presence, and support for educators of color while remaining student-centered and solutions-oriented. TECA’s vision is to develop, connect, and support educators of color with decision-making power to shape, create, and influence policy. In 2017, I left the classroom to work for the Nashville Teacher Residency (NTR) as their Director of Recruitment, with an emphasis on recruiting more people of color to be teachers for Metro-Nashville Public Schools and Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools. My goal was to recruit cohorts that were 70 percent people of color year over year to reflect the number of students of color in MNPS. I was wildly successful in exceeding this goal for the next years. While I worked at NTR, I simultaneously spent time building TECA organizationally. During those three years, TECA did not have any full-time employees; all of our work that we accomplished was led by a working board of directors. Finally, during the fall of 2019, TECA received a sizable grant from NewSchools Venture Fund that allowed me to transition from NTR in April 2020 to be the founding full-time executive director.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The lack of teachers of color in Tennessee’s educator workforce had been acknowledged, but there were never significant efforts to address it across the state. TECA, from my analysis, was the first organization committed to addressing racial equity in Tennessee’s educator workforce statewide. At the time when I began to enter this work, addressing issues rooted in systemic racism was not well received, nor did it seem like it was always supporting philanthropically if you were a leader of color (see links to reports below). During my first year launching TECA, I funded everything out of my own pocket on a teacher’s salary (roughly $50k at the time). Fortunately, I received a grant from the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC) for $35000 the year after I transitioned from the classroom, which was seed money to apply for our 501c3 and host our first statewide conference for educators of color, DiversifiED. TEEC supported us with an equity grant each year from 2017-2019 that ranged from $25000-$35000.

While we were humbled, grateful, and appreciative to receive support from TEEC, we needed more money in order to have the level of statewide impact that we intended. Unfortunately, I’ve always been conditioned to “do a lot with a little”. I did not know it at the time, but as I began to research philanthropy, I realized that nationally and locally, there were huge disparities in funding for leaders of color at nonprofits (especially if they were new organizations) and for organizations that focused on racial equity. Many local foundations in Tennessee, at the time, required organizations to have 501c3 status and 2-3 years worth of financials that exceeded $50000-$100000 per year. Even though I was a proven leader in the education space individually, TECA was not at the time, and we did not meet the requirements at many local foundations across the state to apply for funding. This was extremely hard because I would have to leverage my salary from NTR to support gaps that might have existed beyond the money that was provided from TEEC. Ultimately, this led me to apply for funding from foundations and organizations outside of Tennessee, which led to receiving the grant from NewSchools that allowed me to transition to TECA full time in the spring of 2020. Since 2020 and the many instances of racial injustice that occurred that year, it seemed that many philanthropic organizations began to see systemic racism as a public health crisis that needed to be address. And, they wanted to support and empower more leaders of color and organizations that were focused on racial equity across sectors i.e. healthcare, education, legal, etc. Since then, TECA has received an immense amount of support from foundations and organizations across Tennessee. While things are not perfect, I have witnessed much improvement over the last year or so.

Bridgespan report: https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/philanthropy/disparities-nonprofit-funding-for-leaders-of-color

https://givingcompass.org/article/the-importance-of-funding-leaders-of-color/

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Since its inception, TECA has been committed to addressing racial inequity in our educator workforce. We believe that people closest to the challenges should be centered in developing the solutions and driving the change. To that end, we have intentionally developed a board, leadership team, programming, and various councils reflective of the marginalized and underrepresented communities we serve. Since launching, TECA has convened hundreds of educators of color across the state for professional development, annual conferences, and educator fellowships rooted in policy and advocacy. Our Tennessee Educators of Color Fellowship is our flagship program. It is a year-long experience designed to develop, connect, and elevate educators of color in the areas of policy, advocacy, and leadership development. Fellows are positioned to be change agents in their local districts and communities and equipped to address a specific educational inequity impacting students or teachers of color in their local context (classroom, school building, or district) that is anchored in policy. We’ve scaled this program from a pilot in middle Tennessee with 12 Fellows during the 2020-2021 academic year to a statewide cohort with 30 Fellows this academic year. During the 2021-2022 academic year, we anticipate support 36 Fellows statewide. Applications will open in February 2022.

While many of our peer organizations are focused on innovative approaching to addressing diversity in education, TECA takes a solutions-oriented approach that is rooted in policy and advocacy. To that end, our three areas of focus are policy, preparation, and practice. Currently, we use data-informed, equity-centered advocacy to influence, create, and shift legislature and policy at state and local levels that support educator diversity. We recently helped draft and advocate for the unanimous adoption of Tennessee’s statewide Educator Diversity Policy by our State Board of Education in February 2021. The policy requires local school districts to set an educator diversity goal outline and implement the strategies it will use to attract and maintain a more diverse teaching force, while the State Department monitors and reports progress towards meeting the goals. We are now partnered with two of the largest school districts in the state to support them with establishing goals and developing and refining recruitment and retention strategies to increase educator diversity. We are looking to partner with more districts to support them in their compliance of the Educator Diversity Policy and to develop strategies for local recruitment and retention of teachers of color.

Any big plans?
We’re looking forward to expanding our team and launching new programs in 2022 and 2023. Last year we hired Rene Dillard as our Director of Leadership Development; she responsible for leading and scaling our Fellowship and soon to launch leadership programs. We’re looking to expand our time to add additional needed capacity to support new district partnerships and programs. We look forward to launching these new programs in the next two years:

1. The Ascension Project: This is a semester-long leadership development and high-quality mentorship program in partnership with TeachPlus to support candidates of color at educator preparation programs in Tennessee focused on retention. Candidates will receive programming on 1) racial identity development, 2) education policy, 3) advocacy strategies, 4) activism, 5) networking for career advancement, 6) support from a mentor teacher of color, and 7) a stipend.

2. The Fellowship for Aspiring Administrators of Color: A six months experience that provides educators of color that possess administrator licenses with additional programming and support that prepares them to interview for their first assistant principal role. This program provides support with resume development, interviewing skills, understanding student data, and translating it into strategic action, and completing a mock interview with current administrators of color.

3. The SUCCEED Coalition: The Statewide Unified Coalition for Championing Educator Equity and Diversity (SUCCEED) a coalition comprised of anyone in the state that values a racial and ethnically diverse educator workforce. Members of the coalition will have access to research, resources, advocacy training for coalition members to elevate their voices through engagement with policymakers, key stakeholders, written op-eds, and social media campaigns in favor of increasing educator diversity.

Recently, the Tennessee Department of Education became the first state to be approved by the U.S. Department of Labor to establish a permanent Grow Your Own model becoming the first registered apprenticeship program for teaching in the country. It will allow prospective candidates to become teachers for free. We want to explore ways to partner with the TDOE to support these efforts and leverage this opportunity to increase teacher diversity. Ultimately, we want to see our work close the parity gap between the 40 percent of students of color in the state and the 15 percent teachers of color serving them. Our hope is that we increase teachers of color in the state to 25 percent by 2025.

Contact Info:

• Email: info@tneca.org
• Website: www.tneca.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tnedcoloralliance/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TennesseeEducatorsofColor/
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/TNEdColorAllies
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPw482lNzcD-78PQIzQhKXw