[kaitai]

And jumping past your comments about anti-racist and anti-sexist policy and execution in STEM pedagogy, your anecdotes point out an actually effective intervention -- supporting the development of a teaching workforce that reflects the communities of students in the classroom! There is a significant difference in approach when someone sees their students as "theirs", a resource to be developed and nurtured, instead of "someone else's", an unruly crowd to be disciplined, as you mention in a later comment. Is the teacher teaching, or babysitting/policing? Too much of US education is the second, for children of any color.

Must you have the same skin color to teach rather than babysit/police? No. In the American context, though, it takes effort rather than inertia to accurately see and develop the potential of your black students -- because inertia gives white teachers in particular a relentlessly negative media stream about "thugs" instead of "future Nobel winner". Our segregated society gives white teachers an incorrect set of Bayesian priors on the meaning of acting out or difficulties in class. They don't have black friends whose kids are going through a rough patch but are still the same sweet kid they were at age six. I mean, I just talked with a high school teacher in a rural Midwestern district who said 'at least she didn't have to worry about kids doing cocaine in the closet at school like at an inner city school', and as a graduate of such an inner city school, my response was "honey we couldn't afford cocaine, that's a rich kid drug". This is a lovely lady, dedicated teacher, and that's her prior on "inner city kids" as of Dec 3, 2021.