In the Black community, from the time of enslaved ancestors to the founding of HBCUs, it’s a truism: Black teachers have been beacons of education, hope, and freedom.
Yet Black educators as a whole make up just 7% of the nation’s teaching workforce, with Black men taking up fewer than 2% of the space.
To address the lack of diversity among teachers — and fulfill the legacy of Black educators — Blake Nathan, a former teacher, created the ME Foundation, a nonprofit set up specifically to train, support, and increase the number of Black teachers in classrooms.
Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Educate Me is helping to create educational equity through removing financial barriers for prospective Black educators. It helps them pay for college through scholarships, gives entry-level teachers assistance with housing, and provides classroom grants to help teachers pay for materials, and more.
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Nathan, the organization’s CEO, was inspired by his own lived experience. When he started out in 2013 as a middle school teacher in the Midwest, he was the only Black male teacher in his entire school for almost two years. During that time, Nathan said he realized he was paying “the invisible Black teacher tax” — witnessing Black students get funneled into special education and the lack of representation for the students he was teaching.
Someone, the Georgia native believed, needed to create a system to address these shortcomings. So he decided to do it himself.
“Educate ME was birthed in 2014, during my second year in the classroom, because I was kind of eager to figure out a solution to not only recruit more Black talent, but to retain and potentially develop Black talent,” Nathan says.
Nathan knew it would be many years before the students he was teaching at the time would be off to college, so Educate ME was created as a means to help Black teachers who’d already begun their service get the help they needed.
Supporting Teachers Outside the Classroom
A crucial part of the foundation is the Black Residency Program, described as a pathway for aspiring teachers to receive 1-on-1 mentorship, peer support, and financial assistance. In partnership with Marian University’s Klipsch Educators College in Indianapolis, Educate ME candidates have the opportunity to earn a Master of Art in Teaching degree while working full-time at a K-12 partner school.
Now in their second year of the residency program, there are 25 residents, who will receive free counseling sessions with local community partners under Educate ME’s Black Teacher Fund Initiative.
There are 100 teachers enrolled overall in the Educate ME organization, taking advantage of different parts of the foundation. In addition to the residency program, teachers also have the opportunity to receive assistance on the cost of teacher licensing, test prep, child care, and housing, all through the funding initiative.
“If I’m a part of an organization, like Educate ME, or the Center for Black Teacher Development, I’m now in an ecosystem of Black educators. So now we can kind of talk through what are you experiencing? What are you going through? What do you need to overcome?” Nathan tells Word In Black. “We’re supporting 25 teachers with housing support, and then we’re supporting 31 parents total with child care tuition assistance. This year, we’re going to support another 120 teachers for test prep.”
Last year, they supported over 55 teachers in getting their licenses to become fully licensed in the state of Indiana, and this year’s goal is the same.