School Leadership Matters for Retaining Black Women Teachers

• In Event: Well-Being as Foundational to Women of Color Efforts for Equity and Social Justice Leadership

Abstract

Black women teachers (BWTs) leave their schools/the profession at a rate that is significantly higher than that of non-Black women teachers. Their decades-long pattern of attrition is associated with specific organizational factors and conditions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand how these factors and conditions configured to create tipping points whereby BWTs choose to leave their schools/ the profession and how school leaders can disrupt these configurations, as processes, to retain BWTs. Preliminary findings suggest that the school leader plays a primary role in processes associated with BWT attrition and also a critical role in the creation of conditions likely to retain them.

Author

• Regina Lynn Seabrook, University of Minnesota