Beyond Cultural Competence: The New Breed of Principal is Culturally Engaged

High school principals today face a dramatic and ever-changing challenge through their daily endeavors to serve the communities and student populations that have been entrusted to their oversight. To illustrate the demographic and cultural challenge I selected one Houston school district. I extracted the following data from the Texas Education Agency website to show the dramatic demographic shift that has occurred during the past ten years. Consider one high school in Aldine Independent School District, a school district adjacent to Houston Intercontinental Airport:

Aldine High School is one of several high schools that has seen similar demographic shifts. There has been a ten year increase of 34% in Hispanic students, a decrease of 8.6 % in African American students, and a decrease of 21.5 % among white students. In 2005-2006 there were 63.3 per cent of the student body that was Hispanic, 26.5 per cent African American or Black, and 6.2 per cent of the students were white. Conversely only 8.3 per cent of the teachers were Hispanic, 23.3 per cent were African American or Black, and 63.3% were white or Anglo. This is a completely opposite demographic pattern.

The largest proportion of teachers who(63.3 per cent) work with this 89.9 per cent minority population of students are Anglo, white, or Caucasian as many prefer to address them. I have not conducted research to verify whether this is true of Aldine High School but interviews with many inner city high school teachers and administrators reveal that many throughout the Houston area commute significant distances each day. Many live , many driving to their teaching campus from more affluent suburbs in Katy, Cypress-Fairbanks, Klein, or Fort Bend County.

The problem faced by many teachers and administrators is one of connectedness to the communities of their student populations. White administrators and teachers within inner city schools might find that community leaders might actually actually be the OG's (old gansters)rather than business executives and church leaders. Finding ways to connect with the Hispanic and African American students to make learning relevant and attractive to them may lie beyond the experiences and mental models of these suburban white teachers.

The challenge is one of leadership. What kind of school leader needs to emerge? How would such a leader persuade their teachers to reinvent themselves as participants in the communities that they serve? The challenge for those who credential and teach future educators and educational leaders is to provide experiences that will open their minds to the imperative nature of this challenge. To fail to reach our minority students is to fail tomorrow's America.

These questions are some that I hope to address in this blog and through a grant I recently received from the Texas Education Agency and other unnamed benefactors.