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Representation in the classroom: The effect of own-race teachers on student achievement
... Theoretically, exposure to teachers of the same race or ethnicity should provide Black and Hispanic students with teachers who have higher educational expectations (Fox, 2016;Gershenson et al., 2016) and who are better able to serve as role models, mentors, and cultural translators (Egalite et al., 2015;Goldhaber et al., 2015). Student-teacher racial or ethnic matching should result in greater cultural understanding and referents that lead to increased instructional effectiveness by teachers, more positive student-teacher relationships, greater student engagement and responsiveness, lower stereotype threat, and greater teacher advocacy Redding, 2019). ...
... Academically struggling as well as academically talented students are thought to especially benefit from being taught by teachers of the same race or ethnicity (Dee, 2004;Egalite et al., 2015;. Being taught by teachers of the same race or ethnicity may result in disadvantaged Black or Hispanic students holding more positive beliefs about their educational or societal possibilities (Dee, 2004). ...
... Yet the extent to which student-teacher racial or ethnic matching should be the focus of school-based policies designed to address achievement gaps or other educational disparities in U.S. elementary schools is currently unclear (Driessen, 2015;Redding, 2019). Positive effects, when observed, are often quite small (Egalite et al., 2015;Harbatkin, 2021;Joshi et al., 2018;Redding, 2019). For example, analyses of data from 3 rd -5 th grade students attending schools in Florida indicated that racial and ethnic matching resulted in statistically significant effects of 0.004 and 0.01 SD on measures of reading and mathematics achievement in analyses adjusting for student and course fixed effects and additional statistical controls (Egalite et al., 2015). ...
We used student fixed effects and statistical controls to investigate whether U.S. elementary students ( N = 18,170) displayed greater academic achievement, social-emotional behavior, or executive functioning and were more likely to receive gifted or special education services when taught by teachers of the same race or ethnicity. We observed mostly null effects for student-teacher racial or ethnic matching across the study’s 12 dependent measures in analyses adjusting for Type 1 error. Matching resulted in lower science achievement (effect size [ES] = -.03 SD ) for the full sample. Matching resulted in fewer internalizing problem behaviors (ES = 0.18 SD ) for Black students. We observed null effects for Hispanic students. Robustness checks including those stratified by race or ethnicity and biological sex or by prior levels of low or high level of achievement, behavior, or executive functioning largely supported the study’s null findings. Exceptions were that matching resulted in fewer externalizing problem behaviors (ES = 0.22 SD ) for Black girls and lower academic achievement (ES range = - 0.04 to -0.14 SD ) and fewer externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors (ES range = 0.24 to 0.33 SD ) for students who had previously displayed low levels of academic, behavioral, or executive functioning. Collectively, the analyses provide limited support for student-teacher racial or ethnic matching as a school-based policy to address educational disparities in U.S. elementary schools.
... Moreover, teachers are expected to improve their competencies related to different aspects of their job, such as interaction with students, teaching methods, assessment and evaluation, and use of relevant technologies. Relevant studies have shown a International Journal on Social and Education Sciences (IJonSES) 339 clear relationship between student success and teacher competence (Bellibaş & Gümüş, 2016;Egalite et al., 2015;Goldhaber, 2002). As stated by Barber and Mourshed (2007), "the quality of education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers" (p. ...
... These themes ensure multi-dimensional measurement, as stated by Guskey (2000). It was argued in different studies in the literature that in the provision of effective professional development to both early career and experienced teachers, it is important to offer teachers support (Spencer et al., 2018), improve teachers' pedagogical and field knowledge (Desimone, 2011;Fairman et al., 2020;Guskey, 2003), provide teachers with knowledge and skills that they can actively use in the classroom (Fairman et al., 2020), improve student learning outcomes along with teacher competencies (Bellibaş & Gümüş, 2016;Egalite et al., 2015;Goldhaber, 2002;West, 2002), conduct such training programs in a timely and organized manner (Desimone, 2011;Guskey, 2000Guskey, , 2003, and ensure that such trainings contribute to teachers' careers (Desimone, 2011;Fairman et al., 2020). Parallelism can be observed between the factors identified in this study and the findings of other studies in the literature. ...
Professional development programs (PDs) for in-service teachers are usually structured to deliver standardized content. However, considering the differences in the teaching practices utilized by teachers of different subjects, their needs and expectations may vary. Thus, this study develops an instrument to determine in-service teachers’ expectations regarding PDs. Themes regarding the PD expectations of teachers were created based on a detailed literature review and authors’ field experiences. In line with these themes, an item pool comprising 51 items was created. The developed instrument was applied online to 322 teachers from different provinces of Turkey and teaching different subjects. Exploratory factor analysis was performed on the dataset to ascertain the construct validity of the instrument. As a result of the analyses, the finalized instrument comprised 49 items and 6 dimensions; support, practice, learning, student success, organization, and career. The Cronbach’s alpha internal reliability coefficient of all items in the finalized instrument was .94. These findings show that the instrument is a valid and reliable data collection tool for determining teacher expectations of PDs for identified themes. This instrument will be particularly useful in exploring the expectations of teachers while designing PDs and determining the extent to which current PDs meet teachers’ expectations.
... How can we fulfill the promise that research has overwhelmingly underscored-that teachers of color make a profoundly positive difference in the lives of children of color (Carver-Thomas, 2018;Egalite et al., 2015;Phillips, 2014;Redding, 2019). Undoubtedly, there has been concerted effort since the 1990s on drawing teachers of color into the profession-we can take some satisfaction in progress made. ...
Thirty years ago, “Problems, process, and promise: Reflections on a collaborative approach to the solution of the minority teacher shortage” (Goodwin, 1991) offered a perspective on an approach to the minority teacher shortage. That piece represented the start of the author’s life-long work on teacher preparation, with a particular focus on the recruitment and retention of teachers of color in response to growing numbers of students of color juxtaposed against a predominantly white teaching force. Now, several decades later, this article is her opportunity to reflect on those early thoughts, framed by the question: What progress have we made (or not) as a profession, and a society, in addressing this imperative? In pondering this question, this piece returns to the focus of the original article to think anew about problems, process, and promise as conceptual lenses for assessing how far we have come and where we now need to go.
... The phenomenon of teaching teachers of one sector in schools of the other sector is common in different countries in the world, particularly in countries which comprise large minorities or immigrant populations, such as Australia, Germany, Britain and USA (Easton-Brooks et al., 2010;Green & Martin, 2018;Ingersoll & May, 2011;Paul-Binyamin & Potchter, 2020), and in countries with conflicts between different ethnic groups, e.g., Northern Ireland and Cyprus (Milliken et al., 2020;UNESCO, 2015). The scholarship concentrates on motivations for integration (Cunningham & Hargreaves, 2007;Ingersoll & May, 2011); teachers' influence on their students (Easton-Brooks et al., 2010;Egalite et al., 2015); interrelations between teachers and students; and difficulties coped by these teachers during their training and integration into the schools (Lengyel & Rosen, 2015;Miller & Travers, 2005;Smith et al., 2019). This scholarship mainly explores the experiences of teachers from the minority group who teach at the majority's schools. ...
One of the methods of multicultural societies for advancing a shared society is cross-cultural teaching. Commonly, teachers from the majority group apply to teaching at the majority’s schools through the acculturation process. The current study, however, illuminates the understudied situation, in which teachers of the Jewish majority group in Israel teach at the Arab minority’s schools. Our findings indicate that these Jewish teachers are mostly motivated by their
ideology and moral values, mainly a yearning to bridge between two hostile societies. These teachers’ integration into the minority’s schools is challenging due to cultural differences, lack of familiarity with Arabic, and difficulties introducing informal pedagogy, that is not common in Arab schools, discipline problems among students, and a challenging national-political discourse.
... The phenomenon of race matching has been studied and discussed in various disciplines over several decades, including race matching between teachers and students (Egalite et al. 2015), therapists and patients (Sterling et al. 1998), adoption families and children (Quiroz 2008), and mentors and mentees (Blake-Beard et al. 2011). Across disciplines, researchers assert that race matching could lead to more positive interactions and outcomes. ...
In this forum, I discuss themes and significant events included in Lisa Marco-Bujosa's study Soul searching in teaching science for social justice: an exploration of critical events through the lens of intersectionality. The sole participant's critical events as a novice science teacher highlight the importance of examining the role of multiple teacher identities and the intersections of those identities in the application of teaching science. I explore Faith's journey as a function of not only significant events but also significant people supporting her identity as a new teacher in an urban school.
... Research related to the influence of role models on perception of self and future achievement suggest positive effects particularly when the role model has navigated a comparable path whether it be race, gender, intellectual disability, etc. (e.g., Egalite et al., 2015) as the more a person can see success reflected in others who have faced similar challenges, the more positively they will view their own potential. Perhaps of greatest importance, through their interaction with these everyday leaders, they learn that every leader faces challenges, and it is not only how they bounce back from those challenges that defines their success, but also how they perceive themselves as well as how others perceive themanother fundamental component to developing resilience. ...
... Since Duckworth's early research, other researchers from across the world have investigated grit and reported several useful applications, including in an educational context. Research shows the central role of grit in determining which students will excel in their academic studies and identified grit as a significant predictor of academic achievement at all levels (Wolters and Hussain, 2014;Egalite et al., 2015;Rimfeld et al., 2016). Moreover, grittier students were shown to spend more time studying (Cross, 2013), exemplify increased academic motivation (Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2014) and expressed a higher sense of self-efficacy (Oriol et al., 2017). ...
In this chapter the authors start by providing an overview of the concept of resilience and then examine its relevance for the field of education, mainly in the University sector. They review the linked concept of grit and its relevance for education. They describe three studies they conducted on grit. Although these studies show the importance of the concept of grit for university students, the authors claim that in order to thrive at university, students need other attributes. In their “thriving versus languishing” model, they highlight the importance of strengths use, persistence in the face of difficulty, resilience, a growth mindset, self-control and mental wellbeing. They conclude by describing a measure that combines these attributes into a single scale.
... First, by nature of being underrepresented in the STEM fields, first-generation and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students have less exposure to mentors and role models with similar backgrounds to themselves in these fields, as compared with their continuing-generation and majority peers. The peer-modeled mindset intervention may have been effective for underrepresented students, in part, because it provided them exposure to successful upper-division students from similar backgrounds (for related research on same-race teachers and mentors, see Egalite et al., 2015;Gershenson, 2016). On the other hand, the intervention may have been effective because it included stories not only from former students from underrepresented groups, but also majority students. ...
Mindset interventions, which shift students' beliefs about classroom experiences, have shown promise for promoting diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Psychologists have emphasized the importance of customizing these interventions to specific courses, but there is not yet a protocol for doing so. We developed a protocol for creating customized "peer-modeled" mindset interventions that elicit advice from former students in videotaped interviews. In intervention activities, clips from these interviews, in which the former students' stories model the changes in thinking about challenge and struggle that helped them succeed in a specific course, are provided to incoming life sciences students. Using this protocol, we developed a customized intervention for three sections of Introductory Biology I at a large university and tested it in a randomized controlled trial (N = 917). The intervention shifted students' attributions for struggle in the class away from a lack of potential to succeed and toward the need to develop a better approach to studying. The intervention also improved students' approaches to studying and sense of belonging and had promising effects on performance and persistence in biology. Effects were pronounced among first-generation college students and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students, who have been historically underrepresented in the STEM fields.
... Research examining school settings where congruence exists between minoritized students and teachers has found positive outcomes for students in the areas of achievement, attendance, and self-reported satisfaction of minority students (Gershenson et al., 2016;Grissom et al., 2015). Conversely, racial/ethnic incongruence has been linked to many potential sources of demand associated with teaching, such as student discipline (Blake et al., 2016), learning outcomes (Dee, 2005;Egalite et al., 2015), engagement in conversations about race (Leonardo & Gamez-Djokic, 2019), and relationships with colleagues (Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016). ...
Equity for students includes access to a healthy teacher workforce across all school settings. This study sought to disentangle the role of racial/ethnic (in)congruence in teacher stress from school resources by using propensity score analysis to match Black, Hispanic, and White elementary teachers on individual, classroom, and school characteristics, and examining whether these matched teachers reported differences in stress outcomes when working in schools where the predominant student demography was either congruent or incongruent with their own. Data from the 2015−2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey was used to find propensity score matches among 7540 Black, Hispanic, and White elementary teachers. Black, Hispanic, and White teachers all reported stronger occupational health outcomes in higher‐resourced, majority‐White schools. Black and Hispanic teachers reported higher levels of occupational health outcomes than White teachers when teaching in under‐resourced, majority−minority schools. These findings suggest important implications for teacher training and support, such as considering increased training and reflection opportunities on culturally responsive teaching, broadening policies that homogeneously categorize and aim to uniformly support “teachers of color,” and examining the ways in which teacher identity uniquely informs their workplace experiences and may necessitate differentiated resources. (1) Black, Hispanic, and White teachers all reported stronger occupational health in well‐resourced schools serving a majority White student population. (2) In under‐resourced schools serving a majority of Black and Brown students, Black and Hispanic teachers reported stronger occupational health than White teachers. (3) The reported occupational health differences between Black and Hispanic teachers and White teachers in under‐resourced schools suggests teacher identity uniquely informs workplace experiences and may necessitate differentiated resources for teachers to thrive across a variety of settings. Black, Hispanic, and White teachers all reported stronger occupational health in well‐resourced schools serving a majority White student population. In under‐resourced schools serving a majority of Black and Brown students, Black and Hispanic teachers reported stronger occupational health than White teachers. The reported occupational health differences between Black and Hispanic teachers and White teachers in under‐resourced schools suggests teacher identity uniquely informs workplace experiences and may necessitate differentiated resources for teachers to thrive across a variety of settings.
... Using data where students were randomly assigned to teachers in the US, for example, Dee (2004) found that being taught by a Black teacher significantly improved Black students' test scores, and Gershenson et al., (2018) found that these positive effects persisted into adulthood. Similarly, Egalite et al., (2015) investigate changes in teacher assignment in the US using a large administrative dataset find small, but statistically significant, positive effects of matches by race or ethnicity. ...
Using the latest data from the School Workforce Census (SWC) we analyse the trends in the diversity of the school workforce in state funded schools in England since the 2010 public sector pay freeze. We find that the number of male teachers has fallen, and that 24.1 percent of schools do not have a male classroom teacher. Furthermore, 46.5 percent of schools do not have a male senior leader. The number of teachers from an ethnic minority background has increased year on year but the rate of change is slow and further work needs to be done before the school workforce is representative of the pupils they teach. 60 percent of schools do not have a teacher from an ethnic minority background while 87.8 percent do not have an ethic minority senior leader.
... A growing number of studies show that having a teacher of the same race/ethnicity as the student has a positive effect on student achievement, teachers' behavioral assessments, graduation rates, and college enrollment (Bates & Glick, 2013;Dee, 2005;Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015;Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016). Research indicates that assignment to same-race/ethnicity teacher significantly increased the math and reading achievement of both Black and White students (Dee, 2005). ...
... 10 Prior research has found that same-race teachers are associated with significantly higher achievement, persistence, aspirations, and expectations, although effects are sometimes small (Atkins, Fertig, and Wilkins 2014;Egalite, Kisida, and Winters 2015;Gershenson et al. 2017;Harbatkin 2021;Price 2010). In sensitivity analyses testing for teacher-student race match effects (available from author upon request), Hispanic girls' greater likelihood of having Hispanic teachers is associated with higher mathematics self-competence in third grade. ...
Black and Hispanic students have lower achievement than White students due to segregation, discrimination, and poverty. If these disadvantages also lead to negative academic attitudes, Black and Hispanic students may disengage from school, compounding the effects of low achievement and limited opportunities. Therefore, my dissertation is organized around two questions: (1) Do racial/ethnic differences in academic attitudes develop in response to educational inequalities? (2) If so, do differences in attitudes translate into differences in educational behavior and decision-making? I answer these questions using elementary and middle school data on mathematics attitudes from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). Because STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professions are the highest paying, racial/ethnic inequalities in mathematics education are particularly consequential for the reproduction of racial/ethnic income inequality. My dissertation has two main contributions. First, I show that Black and Hispanic students’ mathematics self-competence, or self-assessed mathematics ability, declines as they internalize the limitations placed on their achievement by structural racism. In third grade, Black and Hispanic students have high mathematics self-competence relative to White students with similar achievement because they are segregated into underperforming schools. They compare themselves favorably to their low-achieving peers. However, as they get older, Black and Hispanic students’ self-competence falls. By eighth grade, racial/ethnic differences among students with comparable test scores are largely insignificant. Because Black and Hispanic students have lower test scores, on average, this leaves them with lower self-competence overall. These results extend theories on the classic big-fish-little-pond effect by showing that the effect diminishes with age. Second, I demonstrate that, compared to mathematics self-competence, mathematics interest is less dependent on school quality but also less consequential for persistence in STEM. In the second chapter, I find that disadvantaged families are able to buttress their children’s mathematics interest. As a result, Black and Hispanic students end middle school with high mathematics interest relative to their low self-competence. In the third chapter, I show that high self-competence is associated with enrollment in upper-level mathematics courses, whereas high interest motivates more frequent homework completion. Combined, these two chapters demonstrate that mathematics interest is limited as a source of resilience for Black and Hispanic children. Although interest boosts studiousness, the returns to studiousness are lower in the absence of the self-competence to enroll in advanced mathematics courses. Overall, this research advances sociological theory on racial/ethnic differences in academic attitudes. Sociologists of education have disproven the claim that Black and Hispanic communities possess an “oppositional culture” that discourages scholastic achievement as a form of “acting White.” However, these scholars have not posited an alternate theory on the relationship between racial/ethnic educational inequality and academic attitudes. This dissertation shows that Black and Hispanic students’ low achievement leads to negative academic attitudes, not the other way around. Black and Hispanic children enter school with equally positive academic attitudes as White children. Educational disadvantages produce low achievement, which Black and Hispanic students gradually internalize as low self-competence. This low self-competence discourages children from pursuing ambitious academic paths, thereby maintaining racial/ethnic educational inequality.
... Likewise, Black cadets at the West Point Military Academy were more likely to emulate their tactical officer's career trajectory when training under a Black rather than White officer [8]. Further, for Black elementary and middle school students, having Black teachers, compared to White teachers, improved performance in reading and math [10]. Exposure to similar role models that defy stereotypes of racialized leadership hierarchies enhances achievement and influences aspirations, particularly among individuals who have been underrepresented in these positions of power. ...
... The human resources that have an impact on students' performance include the number of teachers and management personnel at the school level (student-teacher ratio, part-time or full-time teacher), the quality (education background [8][9][10], title), the structure (gender [11,12], nation identity [13], teaching age [14], regular staff or not [15], age [16], and the major, subject). At the student level, students' gender [17,18], nation identity [19][20][21], only child or not [22] and learning factors such as self-education expectation [23], learning attitude, extracurricular reading and extracurricular learning [24], parents' educational background [25], educational expectations for their children [26], economic status [25] and peer influence [27] will also affect students' performance. Considering the research purposes of this paper and that primary and secondary school administrators almost also undertake daily teaching but that there is a large difference in the number of teachers between Han and ethnic minorities, family resources and peer influence are included in this study as control variables, the impact of managers' and teachers' students' nationalities structure on students' performance is not considered separately. ...
Based on the data from the China Education Panel Survey 2013–2014, this study uses a two-level hierarchical linear model to explore the impact of student factors, teacher factors, and facility conditions on students’ cognitive scores and the model’s heterogeneity. Additionally, under the Owen value method, the contribution of teacher and student factors to students’ cognitive scores is much greater than that of facility conditions, and teacher-related factors contribute more to scores than student-related ones. Therefore, teacher and student resources should be given priority in allocating resources to rural education systems, and high-quality teachers, who can have positive impacts on students’ cognitive scores, should be prioritized.
... For example, future exploration might consider the influence of race and ethnicity congruence among teachers and students in teacher placement and retention. Prior research shows that minority teachers are likely to stay in high-need schools (Podolsky et al., 2019) and minority students benefit from having a teacher of their own race and ethnicity (Clotfelter et al., 2007;Egalite et al., 2015). In light of available literature identifying the benefits of Noyce financial support (Evans et al., 2019;Scott et al., 2006;Ticknor et al., 2017), such targeted efforts may also induce additional financial benefits-namely aiding in the reduction of college affordability-related disparities experienced by students of color in the teacher pipeline. ...
We investigated how participating in a STEM teacher recruitment program impacted undergraduate students’ decisions to pursue teaching and their self-reported preparation for teaching. We collected and analyzed survey and interview data from current and former participants of a University of California system-wide STEM teacher recruitment program called CalTeach. We found a significant relationship between undergraduates’ decision to pursue a career in teaching and the number of undergraduate education courses they completed. We also found that undergraduates who decided to pursue a career in teaching reported various ways that CalTeach influenced their decision. Undergraduates reported that participating in CalTeach reinforced or strengthened their decision to pursue teaching and that the classroom-based field experiences were especially helpful in shaping their decision. Indeed, the field experience component of CalTeach provided participants with opportunities to gain experience working with students in a variety of grade levels and classroom contexts, gain a teacher’s perspective of classrooms, and gain opportunities to practice teaching or to apply theory and methods. Further, we found that undergraduates who decided not to pursue a teaching career also reported ways that CalTeach influenced their decision. For many in this latter group, CalTeach helped them realize that a career in teaching was not aligned with their strengths or interests. Finally, we found that CalTeach participants reported gaining more knowledge of current science and mathematics standards and a greater appreciation of teachers. However, fewer participants reported gaining an understanding of teaching multilingual learners. Our findings strengthen the argument for the implementation of STEM teacher recruitment programs and suggest ways to improve these programs. Recruitment programs should attend to the types of field experiences offered and how field experiences and coursework can deepen prospective teachers’ understanding of reform-based instruction for linguistically diverse students.
... Although a growing number of studies (e.g., Cherng & Halpin, 2016;Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016) have focused on the problems of racial mismatch between teachers and students, and the positive academic and social outcomes that race matching can bring about, the issues continue to be under examined. In existing literature, researchers either compare the quantitative academic and social outcomes of minority students with white teachers and those with minority teachers or ask students to evaluate their minority teachers and white teachers (e.g., Bates & Glick, 2013;Downer, Goble, Myers, & Pianta, 2016;Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015;Peterson, Rubie-Davies, Osborne, & Sibley, 2016;Timmermans, de Boer, & van der Werf, 2016). These studies often underscore the importance of minority teacher recruitment and retention. ...
... Children of color with white teachers are more likely to experience disproportionate assignment to special education status, suspensions and expulsions, exclusion from gifted and talented programs, and low academic and behavioral expectations (Losen & Orfield, 2002;United States Government Accountability Office, 2018;Grissom & Redding, 2016;Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016). At the same time, when students of color have a teacher that matches their race/ethnicity, they are more likely to experience better math, reading, and non-academic outcomes (attendance and college aspirations) (Gershenson, Hart, Lindsay & Papageorge, 2017;Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015;Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016). Black and Latino students also perceive teachers of color more favorably than white teachers (Cherng & Halpin, 2016). ...
... There are renewed calls for increases in preparation, recruitment, and mentoring of non-white teachers, citing research that shows students of color benefit when they have role models who are teachers of color (Carver-Thomas, 2018). Teachers of color can increase student achievement gains (Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015), student perceptions of their classroom experience (Cherng & Halpin, 2016), and even enrollment rates in gifted and talented programming for students of color (Wright, Gottfried, & Le, 2017). Student-teacher racial congruence is also associated with a lower likelihood of dropping out of high school (Gershenson, Hart, Lindsay, & Papageorge, 2017). ...
... Dealing with such a complex reality, the presence of minority teachers in classrooms has been identified in several studies as a potential solution (Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015). Atkins, Fertig, and Wilkins (2014) for example examined the educational outcomes that such presence had on minority students. ...
... In this study, both Latinx and Black teachers were more likely to be concentrated in high-poverty schools that serve predominantly Latinx students. Prior research on teacher-student racial/ethnic matching shows that students of color are more academically successful when paired with a teacher that matches their demographics (Egalite et al., 2015, Lindsay & Hart, 2017and Wright et al., 2017. The findings in this paper suggest that student-teacher matching may also be beneficial for teachers, provided the increased retention for Latinx teachers serving Latinx students. ...
... A wave of recent literature attests to the unique educational contributions extended to students when assigned to a teacher of one's own race or ethnicity. Being assigned to a samerace teacher is linked with more positive teacher perceptions of students (Dee, 2005;Fox, 2016;Gershenson, Hart, & Papageorge, 2016;McGrady & Reynolds, 2013;Ouazad, 2014) as well as student outcomes as varied as attendance (Holt & Gershenson, 2015), disciplinary infractions , assignment to gifted and talented programs (Grissom & Redding, 2016), and student achievement (Dee, 2004;Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015;Joshi, Doan, & Springer, 2018;Yarnell & Bohrnstedt, 2018). The benefits of racial congruence are particularly pronounced for Black students (e.g. ...
... Relatedness does not demand literal relation between teachers and students, but rather proposes their mutual identification along salient identity lines of culture, geography, race, gender, and more. I argue this facet of relationality by drawing on empirical work around the academic benefits of race matching amongst teachers and students (Egalite 2015, Dee 2004. My extension of this work proposes that culture in schools and student life outcomes would improve were relationality as relatedness to be used in school surveillance. ...
... It can be combined with other value-added modeling variations, such as measuring school effects (Reardon and Raudenbush 2009), and additional weighting schemas (Karl, Yang, and Lohr 2013;Isenberg and Walsh 2014) and integrate common IRT considerations such as score equating (Cook and Eignor 1991), or item parameter drift (Bock, Murakl, and Pfeiffenberger 1988), both of which have suggestive parallels in the value-added context. Some concepts already have analogues in both fields: for example, multidimensional effects in VAMs (Broatch and Lohr 2012;Jackson 2018;Mulhern 2020) and multidimensional ability in IRT (Béguin and Glas 2001); and student-teacher matching in VAMs (Lockwood and McCaffrey 2009;Bates and Glick 2013;Egalite, Kisida, and Winters 2015) and differential item and test functioning in IRT (Roju, Van der Linden, and Fleer 1995;Zumbo 1999). ...
This study introduces the signal weighted teacher value-added model (SW VAM), a value-added model that weights student-level observations based on each student’s capacity to signal their assigned teacher’s quality. Specifically, the model leverages the repeated appearance of a given student to estimate student reliability and sensitivity parameters, whereas traditional VAMs represent a special case where all students exhibit identical parameters. Simulation study results indicate that SW VAMs outperform traditional VAMs at recovering true teacher quality when the assumption of student parameter invariance is met but have mixed performance under alternative assumptions of the true data generating process depending on data availability and the choice of priors. Evidence using an empirical data set suggests that SW VAM and traditional VAM results may disagree meaningfully in practice. These findings suggest that SW VAMs have promising potential to recover true teacher value-added in practical applications and, as a version of value-added models that attends to student differences, can be used to test the validity of traditional VAM assumptions in empirical contexts.
This article provides an ethnographic accounting of one teacher of color’s experience of moral injury by exploring the question: what morally injurious events does Nancy experience, and what are the costs of those injuries? This project used participant observations and interviews to explore the moral injuries encountered. Moral injuries occurred due to a lack of just systems, racial representation, trust, student supports, trauma training, and holistic approaches. Eventually Nancy left the school as a principled leaver.
Research has shown that Black teachers are instrumental in improved Black student achievement and assist immensely in mitigating the rising exclusionary tendencies Black students find themselves in in public schools. Yet, the percentage of Black teachers in public schools is either not improving or remains stagnant at about 7%. The purpose of this study therefore was to find out why we have a very low percentage of Black teachers in public K-12 school environments and what can be done to increase the percentage of Black teachers in public K-12 environments. Forty-six pre-service teachers completed questions related to the three areas. The study found that issues of teacher salaries, Black students not completing college, and poor working conditions were some of the reasons for the low percentage of Black teachers in public education. As policy makers explore strategies to bringing more minority individuals into teaching, this research offers some insights on what needs to be done to increase the numbers.
Many economically disadvantaged and minority students are in low performing or failing schools. These poor and failing conditions has undermined the goal of ensuring equal education opportunity for all learners, a hallmark of the educational system. This chapter considered several research questions related to student performance and school suspensions. Several data sources, including data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the North Carolina Department of Instructions Schools Report Card, were used in the study. Data showed that two minority groups, Black and Hispanic, are not performing as high as the White and Asian race/ethnicity in the areas of English and Mathematics in Grade 8, that a disproportionate percentage of students who are Black received out of school suspensions, and low percentages of Black and Hispanic students were enrolled in academically gifted and talented programs when compared to White and Asian students. Based on these findings, suggestions were made to improve the situation and to improve access and educational equity.
When considering the many cases brought before the Supreme Court of the United States, one that had the greatest impact on the field of education when it came to diversity, equity, and inclusion was Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The outcome of Brown (1954) did bring changes in the operations of public schools with the concept of “separate but equal” no longer being the standard. The ruling, which was not always received with open arms, brought student diversity into schools across the country. This chapter will present the concept of hiring practices for teachers from underrepresented backgrounds by looking at several areas such as hiring for diversity, recruitment, interviews, and retention. Each of these areas must be considered if the current hiring practices for underrepresented populations are to be impacted. Scholars studying staffing in education consider human capital management to be strategic when it involves recruiting, developing, and retaining effective teachers who make a positive contribution to student learning.
Research shows that infants and preschoolers can learn novel words equally well through addressed speech as through overhearing two adults. However, most of this research draws from samples of ethnic majority children. The current study compares word learning in preschoolers (M age = 5;6) with an ethnic minority and an ethnic majority background (N = 132). An experimenter of the majority group (representative for most teachers in Flemish education) told a story in three different interaction situations: Addressed Speech, Overhearing Classroom and Overhearing Two Adults. Results show that children of both ethnic groups learn novel words in Addressed Speech and in Overhearing Classroom equally well. However, minority children learned significantly fewer words in Overhearing Two Adults. This study suggests important differences in how ethnic majority and minority children learn through indirect speech in educational (monolingual) settings. In addition, the study scrutinizes the potential role of social identification in overhearing mechanisms.
This article is in direct response to Garwood’s call to action about burnout and the special education teacher workforce. While Garwood’s call to action is critically needed, we contend that the call is incomplete as it lacks emphasis on factors linking sociocultural identity and burnout. Therefore, in this article, we discuss the significance of elevating sociocultural identity, specifically race and ethnicity, into research about special education teacher burnout. We argue that any research on special education teacher burnout that does not include race and ethnicity is overlooking the racialization of special education teachers’ working conditions, and ultimately is incapable of addressing one of the most pressing issues in the special education field—retaining teachers of color. Recommendations for researchers to address sociocultural identities (i.e., race and ethnicity) in their research, specifically about special education teachers of color teaching students with emotional and behavioral disorders, are addressed.
Bringing together research from several lines of inquiry in psychology and education, this paper proposes a conceptual model for understanding how entrenched inequalities embedded within ecological macrosystems play out in the classroom to affect student learning. We consider how implicit teacher beliefs and belief expression affect teacher-student interactions and relationships, student learning-related processes, and student learning outcomes. First, we review the literature on how teacher beliefs relate to student learning outcomes. Second, we discuss how teacher beliefs may shape critical classroom-level and individual-level teacher-student interactions, and how these interactions can affect student factors critical to learning. The Teacher Beliefs and Interactions Model, a conceptual model that brings together related bodies of work that have traditionally been separate, proposes teacher beliefs as an important area of inquiry for future empirical research in education and human development.
This article presents a mixed method study utilizing teacher and student demographic and student attendance data from seven hundred and two public schools in central Texas along with follow-up qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews conducted with the top 1% of principals identified as having the most diverse group of faculty within this region. For the quantitative methodology, OLS regression analyses were employed to measure the relative effect of teacher-student race congruence on student attendance. The results of these analyses indicate that teacher-student race congruence made a statistically significant independent contribution to the variance in student attendance. For the qualitative interview data, a constructivist approach was used to identify common themes for how principals recruit and retain a diverse faculty. Three themes emerged from these interviews: recruitment of diverse faculty is deliberate; a climate of teacher support is fostered; and cultural congruence is paramount.
This study is Part 2 of a project on diversity in the teacher pipeline. Part 1's research is entitled “An Analysis of Motivating Factors for Black Men as Aspirant Educators” in the Journal of Equity in Behavioral Health Therapy. There were four motivational factors identified in Part 1 of the project: communication, exposure, resources (testing), and student teaching. Implementation of the motivating factors was Part 2 and funded by the Center for Educational Opportunity. Part 2 explains the significance of the study as the efficacy of children having a teacher with whom they share ethnicity, color, and/or gender. The EPP in the study is harvesting nearly 20% males of color teachers into the pipeline. The four factors were found to be effective. Leaders will appreciate the concise presentation of standards that will work for all new teachers. The current statistics show that males of color constitute only 4.6% of the total teaching force. This study focuses on the solution to address this underrepresentation in the form of four standards ready for implementation by leaders.
Background
Although large-scale research over the last 15 years demonstrates the positive effects of Black teachers for Black students on various student outcomes, these studies focus on average effects. This leaves space to examine classroom practices to detail how the positive effects may be realized through the everyday interactions between Black teachers and their Black students, specifically in mathematics. To conceptualize the mathematics classroom we draw on hooks’s (2001) concept of “Homeplace” as a site where one is humanized in resistance to broader contexts of power, as a “haven” free from negative dominant discourses.
Focus of Study
This research documents the classroom practices of successful Black mathematics teachers who are affirming students’ identities through their classroom practices: How do successful Black mathematics teachers enact affirming mathematics classrooms with their Black students?
Setting
This research was a secondary analysis of videos collected as part of the Gates-funded Understanding Teaching Quality (UTQ) project. All of the schools in the UTQ study were located in one metropolitan area.
Case Study Selection
The study used MANOVA to quantitatively select teachers based on mathematics achievement and quality of relational interactions. Two teachers were selected and, although not part of the selection criteria, both mathematics teachers identified as Black.
Research Design
The study used a case study design to describe the mathematics practices of two Black teachers.
Data Collection and Analysis
The dataset included four lessons per teacher with two cameras for each lesson. Open coding was used to identify the practices used by teachers drawing on Homeplace as an orienting concept.
Findings
The classrooms enacted Homeplace through affirming students’ humanity and communicating a sense of belonging in three ways: building collective responsibility for the mathematics, framing students as mathematically capable, and relating to students’ lives. In addition to the themes, undercurrents of care, humor, praise, and the use of Black Language were clearly visible.
Conclusions
Although the classrooms did not display the sociopolitical consciousness foundational to culturally relevant pedagogy, the Black teachers did create an environment consistent with Homeplace. Through cultivating a classroom that affirmed Black students’ humanity and dignity and communicated to them a sense of belonging, they resisted negative racialized narratives and increased students’ mathematics achievement.
The Tri-Fold Multicultural Model, a cultural immersion model, emerged in 2011 after identifying a need to provide culturally responsive experiences for future teachers in higher education institutions. A preliminary survey was conducted at a predominately white institution (PWI) located in the eastern region of the United States of America that prepared future teachers in a college of education.
Hispanic/Latine dual language learners (DLLs) - Hispanic/Latine children who speak languages besides English at home - compose 20% of the U.S. young child population. Yet this large and growing group of children remains minoritized along both linguistic and ethnic lines, resulting in intersecting opportunity gaps that stem in part from a mismatch between their developmental needs and what schools provide: this includes a lack of access to teachers who share their backgrounds, broadly referred to as teacher-child demographic match. This study is the first to examine teacher-child match for Hispanic/Latine DLLs, concentrating on their intersecting demographic characteristics: Spanish bilingualism and Hispanic/Latine ethnicity. Data are drawn from an ongoing study, focusing on Spanish-speaking, Hispanic/Latine DLLs from economically-disadvantaged families in early elementary school. In this context, the current study explores associations between having a Spanish-speaking teacher, as well as whether that teacher is Hispanic/Latine, during the first two years of elementary school (grades 1-2), and children's academic skills and executive functions at the start of third grade. Controlling for children's baseline skills, school fixed effects, and a host of family and child characteristics, results indicate that having had a linguistically-matched teacher earlier in elementary school was associated with greater third-grade English literacy, attention, and memory skills. Findings highlight the potential role of teacher-child demographic match in closing opportunity gaps and enhancing school success for Hispanic/Latine DLLs.
Die Übereinstimmung von Lehrer*innen- und Schüler*innenmerkmalen (demografischer Match) wird häufig als potenzielle Ressource diskutiert, die Benachteiligungen im Bildungssystem entgegenwirken könnte. Demnach würden Schüler*innen davon profitieren, von Lehrkräften unterrichtet zu werden, die in zentralen demografischen Merkmalen wie Geschlecht, Migrationshintergrund oder sozialer Herkunft mit ihnen übereinstimmen. Sie sollten dabei sowohl hinsichtlich der Leistung als auch der Interaktion im Klassenraum profitieren. Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet den aktuellen Forschungsstand dazu, ob Schüler*innen von einem demografischen Match bezüglich des Geschlechts, Migrationshintergrunds und der sozialen Herkunft profitieren. Hinsichtlich des Migrationshintergrunds liegt solide Evidenz für eine solche positive Wirkung zumindest für einige Gruppen vor. Die Forschungslage zu Geschlecht und sozialer Herkunft ist hingegen weniger eindeutig und basiert zudem auf weniger Studien, wobei die vorhandenen Befunde hier gegen eine starke Auswirkung des Matches sprechen. Die Konsequenzen und Forschungslücken werden diskutiert.
Research suggests students of color benefit from having a teacher of the same race or ethnicity. However, despite literature on the benefits of matching with same race or ethnicity teachers, little attention has been paid to who has access to these demographic matches, and no work has yet to identify who receives a match at the start of formal schooling – namely, kindergarten. Furthermore, little research has examined this for students with disabilities. To address these gaps in identifying disparities in access, we examined a nationally representative sample of kindergarten students with (N = 12,510) and without disabilities (N = 3050), where students of racial or ethnic minority groups are 18% Black, 24% Hispanic, and 9% Asian American. We found that across all models, students of color, especially Black students, were less likely than White students to have a teacher of the same race or ethnicity. Black students with disabilities were the least likely of any racial or ethnic demographic group to have a teacher of the same race or ethnicity. Implications are discussed.
Background:
Student retention is the most critical challenge facing most traditional 4- and 2-year institutions. Challenges related to student belonging and retention are among many that colleges must contend with daily. Once students arrive, they are met with an academic environment that may greatly differ from their high school and home experiences.
Discussion:
There is evidence that classroom success is influenced by faculty tone setting and the overall campus climate. Other studies have shown that creating a sense of belonging on college campuses is essential. Classroom success can be moderated by relationships with faculty, especially with faculty of color and other minoritized groups.
Aims:
Given the predicted shortages of minority dental healthcare providers in the United States and the expanding diversity of the general population, it is important to recruit and retain an ethnically and culturally diverse allied dental workforce.
Conclusions:
The objectives of this research were to identify strategies to recruit underrepresented (underrepresented minority [URM]) students into health professions, understand the significance of underrepresented (URM) faculty's influence on the number of URM student recruitment, retention, and graduation rates, and how to implement best practices for overall minority student success.
A core motivation for the widespread teacher evaluation reforms of the past decade was the belief that these new systems would promote teacher development through high-quality feedback. We examine this theory by studying teachers’ perceptions of evaluation feedback in Boston Public Schools and evaluating the district's efforts to improve feedback through an administrator training program. Teachers generally reported that evaluators were trustworthy, fair, and accurate but that they struggled to provide high-quality feedback. We find little evidence that the training program improved perceived feedback quality, classroom instruction, teacher self-efficacy, or student achievement. Our results illustrate the challenges of using evaluation systems as engines for professional growth when administrators lack the time and skill necessary to provide frequent, high-quality feedback.
Collaboration among teachers is an important vehicle for teacher development, shared leadership, improving student achievement, building school culture, and attracting and retaining effective teachers. However, if professional collaborative environments are not truly diverse and inclusive or marginalize individual teachers or groups of teachers based on their identities, the professional communities are less effective and efforts to increase teacher diversity and student achievement by attracting and retaining teachers of color will be thwarted. We investigate whether a sustained commitment to anti-racism and/or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through districtwide teacher training efforts contributes to more inclusive professional learning communities within schools and whether these efforts, in creating more inclusive professional learning communities (PLCs), increase recruitment and retention of teachers of color. We investigate trends in two selected case study districts that implemented districtwide training for all teachers on anti-racism and/or DEI, using comparative interrupted time series and synthetic control methods. We find mixed and mainly null findings on teacher reports of inclusive PLCs following DEI initiatives, but the efforts do lead to small and not significant positive effects on teacher diversity.
This chapter further elaborates the content presented in Chapter 8 by expanding the description of co-teaching as seen in inclusion classroom and describes co-teaching in year-long residency models. Students pulled from general education classes and taught in resource settings exclusively often do not benefit from the instruction of content area teachers when they are out of those classrooms. Thus, co-teaching became one of many collaborative strategies that schools considered to meet the needs of all students within the educational framework. State departments also began considering strategies for TPPs and school districts to work together to provide a rich clinical experience for preservice teachers. This chapter explores both co-teaching collaborative approaches for improved student outcomes in an inclusive classroom and how beneficial co-teaching is to year-long residents.
This research was carried out to examine the cultural literacy of preschool teachers who have students from different cultures in their classrooms. In the present study, a qualitative research method was used to examine teachers' cultural literacy in detail. The participants of the study are preschool teachers who work with children from different cultures. A semi-structured interview form for teachers was used as a data collection tool. Research findings show that preschool teachers have insufficient knowledge about the culture of their students from different cultures and they have prejudices against the culture. As a result, teachers' getting to know different cultures and not interacting with families from these cultures affected their creation of a culture-sensitive educational environment in their classrooms. Similarly, it is observed that teachers keep their educational expectations and goals regarding children from different cultures low on the basis of their prejudices.
Using nationally representative data, this study empirically grounds the debate over minority teacher shortages by examining trends in recruitment, employment and retention of minority teachers. The study’s findings reveal that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in U.S. schools, but contrary to widespread belief this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. The data show that efforts over recent decades to recruit more minority teachers, and place them in disadvantaged schools, have been very successful. But, these efforts have also been undermined because minority teachers have lower retention — largely because of poor working conditions in their schools.
The research presented in this report was co-sponsored by CPRE and the Center for Educational Research in the Interest of Underserved Students at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
This article presents findings from an ongoing study of urban teachers' efforts to embrace mathematics reform with student populations that are culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse (CLSD). We investigate the teacher's role in providing accessible and valuable mathematical learning opportunities to diverse students. Through narrative vignettes of practice and analyses of the personal and intellectual resources teachers draw on in CLSD contexts, we examine the challenges and possibilities two third-grade teachers face as they attempt such reform. One teacher's strengths were in making cultural connections with her students; the other's strengths were in pursuing complex and meaningful mathematics with her students. Building on our analysis, we offer a framework for examining the work of attending to mathematical and cultural issues simultaneously. Our findings suggest that such work is complex; however, teachers are seldom supported in their efforts to integrate these two perspectives. Our aim is to examine the dimensions of culturally relevant mathematics teaching and explore where the fields of mathematics and bilingual-bicultural education need to speak to one another.
Research on representative bureaucracy has failed to deal with whether or not representative bureaucracies produce minority gains at the expense of nonminorities. Using a pooled time-series analysis of 350 school districts over six years, this study examines the relationship between representative bureaucracy and organizational outputs for minorities and nonminorities. Far from finding that representative bureaucracy produces minority gains at the expense of nonminorities, this study finds both minority and nonminority students perform better in the presence of a representative bureaucracy. This finding suggests an alternative hypothesis to guide research: that representative bureaucracies are more effective than their nonrepresentative counterparts.
This article explores how teachers perceived and interacted with white students in a predominately racial/ethnic minority school in Texas. On the basis of ethnographic data, the author found that different teachers expressed different views of the family and class backgrounds of white students in this setting, which ranged from “middle class” to “trailer trash.” These views of social class stemmed from how teachers interpreted the whiteness of students in this predominately minority context and influenced how they reacted to these students academically. An interesting finding was that the black teachers and the white teachers had different perceptions of these white students. The black teachers typically saw the white students as middle class and good students, whereas the white teachers tended to view the students as low income and unremarkable students. The results of this study clarify the processes of teachers' perceptions and white advantage.
This article examines minority teacher recruitment policies and programs of the past two decades and explores their influence on the racial/ethnic makeup of the teaching force in elementary and secondary public schools. The results show that while important progress has been made toward increasing the overall number and proportion of minority teachers in the public schools, those gains have been eclipsed by the rapid growth of the minority student population. As a result, the racial/ethnic gap between students of color and their teachers has actually increased over the years. The authors provide an overview of current minority teacher recruitment state policies and introduce the Teacher-Student Parity Index, a new metric for comparing the proportions of teachers and students from different racial/ethnic groups to gain a more textured understanding of the demographic reality of today's schools than is presently found in the literature. The authors conclude with recommendations for policy and research.
Scholars have documented that Black students enter kindergarten with weaker reading skills than their White counterparts and that this disparity sometimes persists through secondary school. This Black-White performance gap is even more evident when comparing students whose parents have equal years of schooling. This article evaluates how schools can positively affect this disparity by examining two potential sources for this difference: teachers and students. It provides evidence for the proposition that teachers' perceptions, expectations, and behaviors interact with students' beliefs, behaviors, and work habits in ways that help to perpetuate the Black-White test score gap.
Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including verbal ability and race, influenced “synthetic gain scores” of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined.We find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic grain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers as it did for white teachers. Finally, holding teacher characteristics other than race constant, in some specifications black teachers were associated with higher gain scores for black high school students, but lower gain scores for white elementary and secondary students. Because these findings are for American schools in the mid-1960s, they do not directly apply to our contemporary experience. However, they do raise issues that should be addressed in discussions of hiring policies in American education.
Stereotype threat is being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group. Studies 1 and 2 varied the stereotype vulnerability of Black participants taking a difficult verbal test by varying whether or not their performance was ostensibly diagnostic of ability, and thus, whether or not they were at risk of fulfilling the racial stereotype about their intellectual ability. Reflecting the pressure of this vulnerability, Blacks underperformed in relation to Whites in the ability-diagnostic condition but not in the nondiagnostic condition (with Scholastic Aptitude Tests controlled). Study 3 validated that ability-diagnosticity cognitively activated the racial stereotype in these participants and motivated them not to conform to it, or to be judged by it. Study 4 showed that mere salience of the stereotype could impair Blacks' performance even when the test was not ability diagnostic. The role of stereotype vulnerability in the standardized test performance of ability-stigmatized groups is discussed.
To test for the presence of role model effects of female high school faculty and professional staff on young women in high school, we estimate several models of educational attainment for young women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Exposure to female high school faculty and professional staff has a positive impact on the educational attainment of young women. This result, combined with our finding that female faculty and professional staff have no significant impact on the educational attainment of young men, supports a female role model hypothesis.
One potential method to increase the success of female graduate students in economics may be to encourage mentoring relationships between these students and female faculty members. Increased hiring of female faculty is viewed as one way to promote such mentoring relationships, perhaps because of role-model effects. A more direct method of promoting such relationships may be for female graduate students to have female faculty serve as dissertation chairs. The evidence in this paper addresses the question of whether either of these strategies results in more successful outcomes for female graduate students. The evidence is based on survey information on female graduate students and faculties of Ph.D.-producing economics departments, covering the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. With respect to characteristics of the institutions at which students are first placed when leaving graduate school, the empirical evidence provides no support for the hypothesis that outcomes for female graduate students are improved by adding female faculty members, or by having a female dissertation chair. However, with respect to time to complete graduate school, and the completion rate, there is some limited evidence of beneficial effects of female faculty members.
Education researchers and policy makers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data set from North Carolina to explore a range of questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new - and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the "education production function" - the availability of data on all teachers and students in North Carolina over a ten-year period allows us to explore them in more detail and with far more confidence than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economics characteristics of students, as measured, for example, by the education level of their parents.
Although women have matched or surpassed men in many educational outcomes, female students remain much less likely to major in quantitative, technical, and science-related fields. This under-representation may have serious implications for women's returns to education, occupational segregation, and earnings inequality. To address this problem, some suggest increasing mentoring opportunities for female students by hiring more women faculty members. This paper examines whether the presence of same-gender faculty members affects student interest in a subject using a comprehensive, longitudinal dataset of nearly 54,000 students. To address selection issues, we employ an instrumental variables strategy. The results suggest that female instructors do positively influence course selection and major choice in some disciplines thus supporting a possible role model effect. The findings provide insight into the potential impacts of policies designed to increase female representation on college faculties.
The limited presence of talented African Americans in the teaching profession has been and continues to be a serious problem confronting the education profession and the African-American community in the United States. This review summarizes what is known from the research literature. It explores the reasons that African-American teachers are important as well as overall demographic, entry, and retention trends and the distinctive factors that influence the limited presence of African-American teachers. Finally, a suggested research agenda is presented.
A general theory of domain identification is used to describe achievement barriers still faced by women in advanced quantitative areas and by African Americans in school. The theory assumes that sustained school success requires identification with school and its subdomains; that societal pressures on these groups (e.g., economic disadvantage, gender roles) can frustrate this identification; and that in school domains where these groups are negatively stereotyped, those who have become domain identified face the further barrier of stereotype threat, the threat that others' judgments or their own actions will negatively stereotype them in the domain. Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups (offering a new interpretation of group differences in standardized test performance), that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.
The empirical evidence that links racial/cultural similarity between teacher and student to educational outcomes is scanty. The present investigation found that black teachers of undereducated black adults were more successful in preventing dropouts and maintaining high attendance than were white teachers. Black teachers, however, placed much greater emphasis on such functional subject matter as consumer and health education. To test the hypothesis that teaching behavior was at least partly responsible for differences in holding power, an index of non-traditional subject emphasis was constructed and introduced into the analysis. Results indicated that teachers who scored high on the index were more successful in holding black students. However, high scoring black teachers were more effective than high scoring whites. It is suggested that socio-cultural factors in the classroom environment, particularly relating to communication, underlie differential effectiveness.
This article examines common teacher practices and black elementary-age students' responses to these practices in considering processes of social reproduction in schools. In an ethnographic study of two all-black schools, the author found that both schools expressed a strong commitment to creating a positive and self-affirming learning environment for black students, with an explicit emphasis on building self-esteem as a means of enhancing academic performance. However, both schools also unwittingly undermined that commitment by suppressing what were deemed inappropriate behaviors and conveying messages of black cultural deviance to students in the interest of discipline and conformity to particular "mainstream" cultural norms.
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (value-added) a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in VA using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental design based on changes in teaching staff. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that VA models which control for a student's prior test scores provide unbiased forecasts of teachers' impacts on student achievement.
Previous research demonstrates that students taught by teachers of the same race and ethnicity receive more positive behavioral evaluations than students taught by teachers of a different race/ethnicity. Many researchers view these findings as evidence that teachers, mainly white teachers, are racially biased due to preferences stemming from racial stereotypes that depict some groups as more academically oriented than others. Most of this research has been based on comparisons of only black and white students and teachers and does not directly test if other nonwhite students fare better when taught by nonwhite teachers. Analyses of Asian, black, Hispanic, and white 10th graders in the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study confirm that the effects of mismatch often depend on the racial/ethnic statuses of both the teacher and the student, controlling for a variety of school and student characteristics. Among students with white teachers, Asian students are usually viewed more positively than white students, while black students are perceived more negatively. White teachers’ perceptions of Hispanic students do not typically differ from those of white students. Postestimation comparisons of slopes indicate that Asian students benefit (perceptionwise) from having white teachers, but they reveal surprisingly few instances when black students would benefit (again, perceptionwise) from having more nonwhite teachers.
This study examined the effects of single-sex and coeducational schooling on the gender gap in educational achievement to age 25. Data were drawn from the Christchurch Health and Development Study, a longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1265 individuals born in 1977 in Christchurch, New Zealand. After adjustment for a series of covariates related to school choice, there were significant differences between single-sex and coeducational schools in the size and direction of the gender gap. At coeducational schools, there was a statistically significant gap favouring females, while at single-sex schools there was a non-significant gap favour- ing males. This pattern was apparent for educational achievement both at high school and in tertiary education. These results indicate that single-sex schooling may mitigate male disadvantages in educational achievement.
By examining a gifted magnet of an urban California high school as a racial project, this study contributes to our understanding of racial formation. The study analyzes the organizational and representational practices of this voluntary desegregation tool—a partial-site magnet program for “gifted” students—and its impact on students inside and outside the program. In doing so, the study reveals how, in contrast to its stated mission, this form of voluntary desegregation actually constitutes a form of resegregation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research reveals a series of practices that have produced exclusionary access to the gifted program, limited the interaction between magnet and non-magnet students, and instituted an apparently color-blind discourse of the gifted as in need of protection, all contributing to a widespread though complex and contradictory notion of whiteness as giftedness. Such notions run counter to the original intent of the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Revealing the processes by which a desegregation instrument facilitates such contradictory outcomes provides critical insights into the dynamic nature of racial formation.
The treatment of African American students and Caucasian American students in middle schools by Caucasian American female teachers during 32 hr of instruction in integrated classrooms was investigated. Data revealed that African American students as a group were not treated as favorably by their teachers as were Caucasian American students. Teachers interacted more positively with American Caucasian students according to nearly all 16 dependent variables of a modified version of the Brophy-Good Dyadic Coding System. Caucasian American boys, relative to all other students, received the most favorable treatment and initiated the most student-teacher contact. Conversely, African American boys, among all the groups studied, received the least favorable treatment from their teachers.
Stages of ethnic identity development were assessed through in-depth interviews with 91 Asian-American, Black, Hispanic, and White tenth-grade students, all American born, from integrated urban high schools. Subjects were also given questionnaire measures of ego identity and psychological adjustment. On the basis of the interviews, minority subjects were coded as being in one of three identity stages; White subjects could not be reliably coded. Among the minorities, about one-half of the subjects had not explored their ethnicity (diffusion/foreclosure); about one-quarter were involved in exploration (moratorium); and about one-quarter had explored and were committed to an ethnic identity (ethnic identity achieved). Ethnic-identity-achieved subjects had the highest scores on an independent measure of ego identity and on psychological adjustment. The process of identity development was similar across the three minority groups, but the particular issues faced by each group were different.
In this article, we present for the first rime systematic evidence that the percentage of minority faculty has a significant positive relationship with overall college matriculation rates in urban school districts across the nation. Although there is little discussion in the education literature of how minority teachers might influence achievement by students of all races, there is a widespread assumption that minority teachers improve the performance of minority students. Our data support this assumption, but they also suggest an important caveat. We will explain why this finding could mean that systemic school district behaviors cause the higher rates of college attendance, while the ethnic makeup of faculty acts as a proxy for these behaviors. This finding has important policy implications, as focusing only on the role-modeling hypothesis might lead to incomplete or incorrect reform remedies for urban school districts.
Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers' subjective evaluations of their students. For example, test scores of white female students in mathematics and science did not increase more rapidly when the teacher was a white woman than when the teacher was a white man, but white female teachers evaluated their white female students more highly than did white male teachers.
The priority attached to inner city student desegregation has often become diminished with the onset of mandatory faculty desegregation. Consequently, students tend to be substantially more segregated than teachers in urban schools. Moreover, faculties in predominately minority schools typically have higher turnover and less experience than faculties in other schools. In the largest district initially placed under court-ordered faculty desegregation, we examined how these circumstances may have influenced academic attainment among elementary students. Achievement among black students was negatively related to the extent to which their teachers were racially isolated. Also, achievement was lower for black students assigned teachers who were involuntarily transferred for faculty desegregation purposes. The achievement of black, Hispanic, and white students was positively associated with teaching experience and negatively related to faculty turnover. These findings suggest that poorly planned desegregation policies can have undesirable consequences.
Teacher supply and demand issues are of critical importance as our society enters the 21st century. Over the next decade, there will be an increasing demand for new teachers––about two million––due in part to a dramatic increase in enrollments and high attrition rates as an aging teacher workforce becomes eligible for retirement. Where these teachers will come from and where they will teach is important to understand as our society faces increasing racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Amid this diversity is a continuing concern that some racial-ethnic groups are disproportionately placed at risk. Thus, this article focuses on the supply and demand patterns of minority teachers, with special attention to teachers of students in high-risk districts. We analyze data on teachers from Texas between 1979 and 1996. We provide a variety of descriptive results––both univariate and multivariate––showing that while Texas has been successful in attracting minority teachers, it has a long way to go in attaining the goal of the Texas State Board of Education: to have a teacher workforce that reflects the racial-ethnic composition of the state.
The limited presence of talented African Americans in the teaching profession has been and continues to be a serious problem confronting the education profession and the African-American community in the United States. This review summarizes what is known from the research literature. It explores the reasons that African-American teachers are important as well as overall demographic, entry, and retention trends and the distinctive factors that influence the limited presence of African-American teachers. Finally, a suggested research agenda is presented.
Demographic changes in the United States have led to challenges for public organizations that are tasked to serve shifting target populations. Many arguments exist for including greater numbers of ethnic minorities among an organization's personnel, under the guise that greater ethnic representation will result in greater competitiveness in the market or effectiveness in governance. This article tests this proposition empirically, using data from the public education policy setting. Results show that representativeness along ethnic lines leads to gains for the organization as a whole, but some segments of the target population appear to respond more positively to representativeness than others.
Many states have implemented high-stakes testing since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Yet the question remains whether high-stakes tests effectively measure student proficiency. This report describes a study that compared results on high-stakes tests with results on other standardized tests not used for accountability purposes and thus considered low-stakes tests. Data for the comparisons were gathered from test scores from 5,587 schools in 9 school systems in 8 states. Scores were compared on each test given in the same subject in the same school year. When possible, the results of high-stakes and low-stakes tests given at the same grade levels were also compared. For all the school systems examined in the study, high correlations between score levels on high-stakes and low-stakes tests were found. Also found were some high correlations for year-to-year gains in scores on high-stakes and low-stakes tests. But the correlations of score gains were not as consistently high, and in some places were quite low. The report concludes that stakes of the tests do not distort information about the general level at which students are performing. (Contains 10 tables and 23 references.) (WFA)
This paper tests a cultural resources/social interaction model of gatekeeping by school teachers using data for seventh- and eighth-grade students in a city school district. Where previous investigations of "cultural capital" have focused on the rewards accruing to highbrow music and arts activities, we examine the informal academic standards by which teachers reward more general skills, habits, and styles. The result is a recursive causal model including the following blocks of variables: (a) student and teacher background characteristics, (b) student basic skills, absenteeism, and teacher judgments of student work habits, disruptiveness, and appearance; (c) coursework mastery; and (d) course grades. This model fits the data quite well, and almost completely accounts for the course-grade differentials observed for gender, ethnicity, and poverty groups. The most important predictor variable is the teacher's judgment of student work habits, followed by cognitive performance on both basic skills and coursework mastery. The results suggest that the standard (Wisconsin) status attainment model be modified to include cultural/social-interactional-based measures of individual and gatekeeper behaviors and perceptions.
One potential method to increase the success of female graduate students in economics is to encourage mentoring relationships between these students and female faculty members, via increased hiring of female faculty, or having female faculty serve as dissertation chairs for female students. This paper examines whether either of these strategies results in more successful outcomes for female graduate students, using survey information on female graduate students and faculties of Ph.D.-producing economics departments. The empirical evidence provides virtually no support for the hypothesis that initial job placements for female graduate students are improved by adding female faculty members, or by having a female dissertation chair. However, female faculty members appear to reduce time spent in graduate school by female students.
Recommendations for the aggressive recruitment of minority teachers are based on hypothesized role-model effects for minority students as well as evidence of racial biases among nonminority teachers. However, prior empirical studies have found little or no association between exposure to an own-race teacher and student achievement. This paper presents new evidence on this question by examining the test score data from Tennessee's Project STAR class-size experiment, which randomly matched students and teachers within participating schools. Specification checks confirm that the racial pairings of students and teachers in this experiment were unrelated to other student traits. Models of student achievement indicate that assignment to an own-race teacher significantly increased the math and reading achievement of both black and white students. Copyright (c) 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Within the education literature, a controversy exists with respect to the issue of matching student and teacher race in an effort to improve student performance. Ehrenberg et al. (1995) finds very little support for this issue, while more recently Dee (2004) finds that there are significant educational gains when students are assigned to an own-race teacher. Dee's result is found after confirming that there was no association between assignment of an own-race teacher and student characteristics, i.e., sorting of students did not transpire. We extend Dee's work by including the effects of student innate ability and teacher gender on student achievement. Our findings indicate that once these two variables are taken into consideration, sorting of students does transpire, and matching students and teachers of similar race has no statistically significant affect on student achievement.
We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates we considered were significant predictors of student achievement under random assignment, those that controlled for prior student test scores yielded unbiased predictions and those that further controlled for mean classroom characteristics yielded the best prediction accuracy. In both the experimental and non-experimental data, we found that teacher effects faded out by roughly 50 percent per year in the two years following teacher assignment.
A general theory of domain identification is used to describe achievement barriers still faced by women in advanced quantitative areas and by African Americans in school. The theory assumes that sustained school success requires identification with school and its subdomains; that societal pressures on these groups (e.g., economic disadvantage, gender roles) can frustrate this identification; and that in school domains where these groups are negatively stereotyped, those who have become domain identified face the further barrier of stereotype threat, the threat that others' judgments or their own actions will negatively stereotype them in the domain. Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups (offering a new interpretation of group differences in standardized test performance), that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.
Recent research consistently reports that persistent poverty has more detrimental effects on IQ, school achievement, and socioemotional functioning than transitory poverty, with children experiencing both types of poverty generally doing less well than never-poor children. Higher rates of perinatal complications, reduced access to resources that buffer the negative effects of perinatal complications, increased exposure to lead, and less home-based cognitive stimulation partly account for diminished cognitive functioning in poor children. These factors, along with lower teacher expectancies and poorer academic-readiness skills, also appear to contribute to lower levels of school achievement among poor children. The link between socioeconomic disadvantage and children's socioemotional functioning appears to be mediated partly by harsh, inconsistent parenting and elevated exposure to acute and chronic stressors. The implications of research findings for practice and policy are considered.
We study dominant strategy implementation in a variant of the canonical public good provision model, as proposed by Borgers and Postl (2009). In this set up, we fully characterize the set of budget-balanced dominant strategy deterministric mechanisms, which are simple threshold rules. For probabilistic mechanisms that are continuously differentiable we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for dominant strategy implementation. When allowing for discontinuities in the mechanism, our necessary condition remains valid, but additional requirements must be met in order to ensure sufficiency.
Desegregation: The illusion of black progress Mapping state proficiency standards onto the NAEP Scales: Variation and change in state standards for reading and mathematics
- A V Adair
- Bandeira
- V Mello
Adair, A. V. (1984). Desegregation: The illusion of black progress. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bandeira de Mello, V. (2011). Mapping state proficiency standards onto the NAEP Scales: Variation and change in state standards for reading and mathematics, 2005–2009 (NCES 2011-458). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington DC: Government Printing Office.
Social class, race, and teacher expectations
- R M Baron
- D Tom
- H M Cooper
Baron, R. M., Tom, D., & Cooper, H. M. (1985). Social class, race, and teacher
expectations. In J. Dusek (Ed.), Teacher expectancies (pp. 251-270). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.