How does race impact education

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We need to call race by its name in teacher education The challenge of educating student teachers in taking an anti-racist stance is a constant one.

Blog post 6 Oct News 27 Sep Of these students, 94 percent were in classrooms with white teachers during their current academic year, while just 45 percent of black students had black teachers-an indication of the relative scarcity of black teachers among the participating schools.

The racial distributions varied dramatically among schools. For example, in the 16 participating city schools, 97 percent of the students and half of the teachers were black. By contrast, in the 7 urban schools outside of large cities and in the 38 rural schools, 93 percent of the students and 97 percent of the teachers were white.

The 18 suburban schools were more integrated, with African-Americans composing 38 percent of the students and 26 percent of the teachers. For example, roughly 10 percent of students moved between small and regular classes, largely because of parental complaints or behavioral problems. Furthermore, the study had fairly high rates of attrition, ranging from 20 to 30 percent of students per year.

When sending their child to a school, parents presumably had fairly sound expectations regarding the probability that their child would be assigned a teacher of the same race. And, since teachers and students would be reassigned in the next academic year, the racial pairings in a given year do not provide very strong incentives to leave the school.

By contrast, students assigned to large classes were expected to remain in large classes through the 3rd grade. For most of the analysis, I use a data set created by pooling the observations from all four years for a total of 23, observations with math scores and 23, with reading scores. Aggregating the data in this way is useful since it provides enough observations to look separately at students grouped by race and gender.

The larger sample also makes it possible to consider the cumulative effects of exposure over a number of years to an own-race teacher. If the matching of students and teachers were indeed random, we should find no within-school association between observed student traits and exposure to an own-race teacher. My research design effectively compared the performance of students assigned to teachers of the same race with the performance of students who were assigned to teachers of a different race but who were in the same grade and who entered the experiment in the same school and year.

Restricting the comparison to students who entered the experiment in the same school and year is essential because this was the level at which random assignment took place. Among black children, the results indicate that having a black teacher for a year was associated with a statistically significant 3 to 5 percentile-point increase in math scores.

On the reading test, the scores of black pupils with black teachers were 3 to 6 percentile points higher. Meanwhile, white pupils of both genders placed with a white teacher scored 4 to 5 percentile points higher in math.

In reading, white boys had scores 2 to 6 points higher when learning from a teacher of their own race, but for white girls, no significant differences could be detected. The chief obstacle to attributing these sizable differences to the race of the teacher is the possibility that they are instead a function of differences in teacher quality that could not be directly observed. For instance, the results for black students are consistent with the plausible alternative hypothesis that predominantly black schools tend to attract and retain high-quality black teachers but only low-quality white teachers.

Similarly, the results for white students could merely reflect the possibility that the black teachers in predominantly white schools tend to be of lower quality than the white teachers in those schools. Furthermore, given the severe segregation of students by race across most of these schools, it is also possible that both types of bias relatively low-quality white teachers in black schools and relatively low-quality black teachers in white schools occurred simultaneously.

Including these observed teacher traits in the analysis had no appreciable effect on the performance gains associated with assignment to a teacher of the same race. However, previous research has shown that these teacher traits are not always associated with significant gains in achievement.

An admittedly indirect way to evaluate the effects of these unobserved differences in teacher quality is to consider how the performance gain associated with having a teacher of the same race varies across different types of schools.

Schools with relatively few disadvantaged students are widely thought to be able to recruit teachers of higher and more uniform quality. While a teacher has to make every effort to teach historical facts with impartiality, it is not always easy to play to the role of objective observer and personal prejudices are hard to avoid.

The United States has a rich a colorful history of races coming together and yet unfortunately this has not always been a harmonious process. While it is tempting to teach future generations to not dwell on the injustices of the past, this can be unfair to different races. Depending on the age level of the children, it is best to deal with the unpleasant aspects of our national history also because otherwise children from racial minority families may well fret about the glossing over off reality.

Race and social class also affect education in other ways. Very often people from a racial minority group or a lower income family do not have a family history of higher education. We know what works to educate children — quality teachers, small classes, after-school programs.

But, do we understand the educational inequality permeating our poorer school districts due to embedded racial inequity and unequal access to education? Embedded racial inequities produce unequal opportunities for educational success. Systematic policies, practices and stereotypes work against children and youth of color to affect their opportunity for achieving educational success.