The students ask him about college all the time — what it’s like, and how to get there. Vang said he thinks his race has something to do with the questions.
“The teacher in the classroom is positioned as someone who is competent, someone who knows a lot, someone who is professional,” he said. “There’s an implicit message that we are sending to our students, that there’s a certain racial makeup we consider competent and professional.”
Vang said he thinks there are so few minority students in UW’s teacher training programs in part because of a stigma that the teaching profession is not of high prestige, or pay.
“A lot of students of color usually come from backgrounds (where) there’s more of an emphasis on the financial aspect,” he said. “They look at college as an investment.”
LaRuth Gray, scholar-in-residence at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools at New York University, also said for black students, one reason could be that there are more decent-paying, respected professions open to black Americans than there used to be.
“Historically it was the route into the middle class — it was simply the way in,” she said of teaching.