Brian Kisida and Anna Egalite, in Real Clear Education, write about the potential positive effects on increasing teacher diversity that they discovered through recent research. An excerpt from their post appears below:
It’s long been touted that for students, having teachers that look like them leads to higher test scores. But that’s not the whole story.
Teachers of color are sorely underrepresented in America’s public schools (USED, 2016). Despite the fact that a majority of students now belong to a minority group, only 7 percent of America’s teachers are African American, and only 8 percent of teachers are Hispanic. A vast majority — 82 percent — are white. As a result, students of color are far less likely to encounter teachers who share similar backgrounds.
In our new working paper, we use Tripod surveys and other recently collected data from the Measures of Effective Teaching project to examine the effects of demographically similar teachers on a broad range of students’ academic perceptions and attitudes related to their teachers. Because each teacher in our data is rated by multiple students, we can pinpoint differences in students’ responses that are explained by race and gender interactions between students and teachers.
Our results are striking. Across a number of different specifications, students who share racial and/or gender characteristics with their teachers tend to report higher levels of personal effort, feeling cared for, student-teacher communication, academic engagement, and college aspirations. We observe the largest and most consistent effects when examining female students paired with female teachers, with particularly strong effects for black female students paired with black female teachers. We also find large effects for black male students assigned to black male teachers.
For black female students paired with black female teachers, we find significant benefits on eight of the 10 outcome scales we examine. These scales include items that measure whether students feel cared for, student’s effort and aspirations, and teacher-student communication. We also find that black male students seem to particularly appreciate the classroom management techniques of male teachers.
The effect sizes we find are considerably larger than previous studies have found when examining test-score effects. Student achievement as measured through test scores is likely too narrow to sufficiently evaluate the dynamics of race/ethnicity and gender interactions between teachers and students.
A growing literature (Blazar & Kraft, 2015) demonstrates that there are numerous teacher characteristics beyond achievement on standardized tests that contribute to student success. Our findings suggest that despite the difficult challenges of policies (Ingersoll & May, 2011) to recruit and retain minority teachers, increased teacher diversity could have sizeable benefits for minority students across a broad set of important academic outcomes other than test scores.
For more commentary, see http://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2016/06/21/increasing_teacher_diversity_could_be_a_game-changer_1293.html
To read the paper, see https://ced.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Egalite-Kisida-Teacher-Match-Working-Paper-June-2016.pdf
