Inequity in America for Latina Teachers By: Damaris Caraballo For many years I have suppressed the reality that I have faced as a Latina teacher in the American classroom. I realized, just this year, that I had never wanted to voice the marginalization, barriers, and the ill-treatment that I have received as a result of my race, for fear of seeming weak in the eyes of my superiors. I would hear myself thinking of voicing these thoughts and bring myself back to a time when I would hear my mother in the 80's come home complaining about her corporate banking job on Wall Street and all the harassment and discrimination she would suffer at work because she was Latina. I judged my mother, in those moments, because she was pulling the race card and that to me, ignorantly enough, was a sign of weakness. I vowed that I would never do that. Fast forward here we are in 2021, and I am a teaching professional in the critical shortage area of Special Education fully bilingual and know my race sets me apart from achieving the best results in my career. The inequity brown teachers face in the classrooms is shameful. In a country where the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing race, only 2% of Certified Special Education teachers speak Spanish.
I will assure you that teaching the special population is an extreme challenge. The biggest challenge I have faced was the mountain of barriers we face to apply for Special Education jobs, fight for fair compensation, and maintenance of executing and keeping our licenses. It is a nightmare to say the very least. I always knew teaching was a pink-collar profession. However, it is the one pink-collar profession in the United States where we do not see race equity and probably will not see it for an exceptionally long time.
The National Center of Education Statistics reports, in 2016, that 83% of the teachers in the United States were white. They also note that there was a 3% increase, in that year, in the hiring of white staff and yet we only see a 1% increase in hiring rates among the other minority teacher segments. Today, we see 49% of the students in our classrooms are minorities. The fact remains evident that the population of teachers of color has not caught up. David Figlio in his article, "The importance of a Diverse teaching workforce”, notes that minority students who are taught