Bill Cooper wants to reach into middle schools to recruit the next generation of black teachers.

Cooper had few black colleagues during a 34-year teaching career at Carrick High School in the Pittsburgh Public Schools and saw few black teachers-in-training when he joined the education department at California University of Pennsylvania four years ago.

Concerned about a void that could be hurting students, the adjunct professor of secondary education developed a pilot project to mentor black eighth-graders who have expressed an interest in teaching and have shown the study skills and test scores needed to break into the profession.

Cooper this school year is providing mentors to his first proteges, 16 pupils at the Reizenstein and Milliones middle schools in Pittsburgh. He's also working with four 10th- and 11th-graders at Pittsburgh's Allderdice High School, saying this "control group" will help him test the notion that younger pupils can be guided more easily into the profession.

National education experts said he wasn't the first to work with middle-school pupils. But the program comes at a time when a consortium of some of the nation's leading educational groups is calling for increased recruitment of minority teachers, saying faculty diversity is a "critical factor" in closing the achievement gap between students of different racial and economic groups.

"We cannot continue to wait as more children of color fail to reach their potential and as fewer teachers of color join and remain in the education community," the National Collaborative on Diversity in the Teaching Force said in a report issued in October.

During the 2001-02 school year, 60 percent of the nation's public school pupils were white, 17 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic and the balance members of other groups. Yet 90 percent of the teachers were white and 6 percent black, while 40 percent of schools had no minority teachers, said the collaborative, comprising groups such as the National Education Association, Recruiting New Teachers Inc. and the American Council on Education.

The collaborative cited a need for role models for minority pupils and research showing minority pupils perform better when taught by members of their minority groups. While the number of minority pupils is expected to increase in coming years, the group said, the number of minority teachers will not without stepped-up recruitment.

Over the years, Cooper said, he worked with only a handful of minority faculty in a school with a black population of 30 percent. He said he tried to compensate by inviting black pupils to meetings with black professionals who talked about their lives.

At Cal U., he had two black teachers-in-training the past four years. "So we're not putting out any minority teachers," Cooper said.

In launching the recruitment program, he asked counselors in the Pittsburgh schools to select pupils who showed an interest in teaching and had strong attendance records and other signs of potential.

One of them, Brandi McNeill, an eighth-grader at Reizenstein, said she enjoyed playing school when she was younger and had been known to study during the summer break. She said she was attracted to teaching, in part, because of the influence teachers have had on her.

"If I could have the same impact on other kids, that would be fun," McNeill, 14, said.

Cooper said he was targeting middle-school pupils because they're more open to possibility than older pupils and have more time to develop the study and test-taking skills that are gateways to the profession. In Pennsylvania, he noted, a teacher must have a college record of 3.0 or better and pass a standardized certification exam.

Also, he said, he wants to set pupils on a course before high school so they're not as easily influenced by older kids and other distractions of adolescence.

"It's like, by starting with middle-school students, you're showing them what the target is and what they need to do to reach that goal," Cooper said.

To encourage McNeill and her peers, Cooper developed a pen-pal program. Each pupil in the recruitment project will receive a weekly letter from one of Cooper's student teachers at Cal U.

The aspiring teachers, who graduate in the spring, are to explain what attracted them to the profession and detail classroom life from their side of the desk. In return, the teen-agers can offer the adults advice on such matters as how to hold a class' attention.

Jill Page, 25, a Canon-McMillan High School graduate who's now a student teacher there, said the contact could inspire inner-city children who don't have others to encourage them.

Page, who had few experiences with minority teachers in public school or college, said faculty diversity was a plus for everyone. "I think anybody from a different culture has a bit of their culture to share with us."

Teachers at Milliones, Reizenstein and Allderdice will review the pupils' grades and offer support. Cooper, who received a $6,250 "social equity grant" from the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, is using some of the money to pay stipends to the teachers.

He also set up 20 bank accounts, one per pupil, and deposited $100 into each for college tuition. "At least it's a start," he said, noting students must be shown the financial aspect of preparing for college.

The recruitment alarm raised in October by the National Collaborative on Diversity in the Teaching Force actually was a new call to action.

With tens of millions of dollars from the Ford, Wallace and Rockefeller foundations, attempts to woo minority pupils for teaching began 20 years ago, said Mildred Hudson, chief executive officer of Recruiting New Teachers Inc., a nonprofit group in Belmont, Mass.

Some states have "teacher cadet" programs allowing students to explore the profession as classroom helpers. Hudson said she had heard of initiatives targeting pupils as early as middle school; Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future in Washington, D.C., said working with students that young was unusual but smart.

Carroll said the recruitment process sometimes is called "growing your own," a recognition that the next generation of teachers already is in the classroom. But the programs haven't closed the disparity between the numbers of minority pupils and educators.

Hudson said Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools, had the unintended effect of decimating the ranks of black teachers. The profession, she said, hasn't recovered.

She and Carroll offered other reasons for the disparity. Often, Carroll said, minority pupils attend schools with inexperienced teachers, high faculty turnover and other problems that hinder performance.

In that environment, Carroll said, pupils don't think about college or don't have the grades to get there. He said that problem explains the shortage of minorities in a variety of professions.

For Cooper, who's had other teachers in his family, education is a "legacy occupation." He said he hadn't noticed the same background in minority pupils, but hoped his program could act as a surrogate.