America’s schools are staffed disproportionally by white (and mostly female) teachers. Increasing attention has been paid to the underrepresentation of teachers of color in American classrooms, with research examining its impact on expectations for students, referral rates for gifted programs, and even student achievement. This paper by American University’s Stephen Holt and Seth Gershenson adds valuable evidence to the discussion by measuring the impact of “student-teacher demographic mismatch”—being taught by a teacher of a different race—on student absences and suspensions.
The study uses student-level longitudinal data for over one million North Carolina students from kindergarten through fifth grade between the years 2006 and 2010. The researchers simultaneously controlled for student characteristics (e.g., gender, prior achievement) and classroom variables (e.g., teacher’s experience, class size, enrollment, etc.), noting that certain types of regression analysis are “very likely biased by unobserved factors that jointly determine assignment to an other-race teacher.” For example, parental motivation probably influences both student attendance and classroom assignments. The researchers conducted a variety of statistical sorting tests and concluded that there was no evidence of sorting on the variables they could observe, and likely none occurring on unobservable dimensions either. All of which is to say that students’ assignment to teachers was likely truly random, thus enabling researchers to apply a causal interpretation to the findings.
The results for suspensions were stark: Having a teacher of a different race upped the likelihood of suspension by 20 percent, with the results for non-white male students assigned to white teachers accounting for much of the disparity. Having an “other-race” teacher increased the likelihood of chronic absenteeism (eighteen or more days missed) by 3 percent, with non-white males assigned to white teachers most likely to be chronically absent. (The study did not break out teacher data by gender. Nor did it control for student income levels.) Interestingly, there was no relationship between student-teacher racial mismatch and excused absences, but a small and statistically significant impact on unexcused absences, lending evidence to researchers’ hypothesis that absenteeism is caused (at least in part) by “parental and student discomfort with other-race teachers through symbolic effects of demographic representation.”
Suspensions, which reflect the quality of student-teacher relationships as well as the discretion exercised by teachers when determining consequences, might understandably be influenced by subconscious teacher bias. However, given that teachers generally don’t set school discipline policies, it seems worth examining the impact of racial mismatch between students and school leaders (or the staff most closely involved with discipline matters). Finally, the fact that being taught by an other-race teacher also impacts absenteeism is somewhat surprising, lending credibility to the paper’s assertion that “absences reflect parental assessments of their child’s school, classroom, and teacher.”
The study reminds us that teacher race matters, especially for male, non-white students who are disproportionately suspended (and, to a lesser extent, chronically absent). While it’s clear from this study and others that students might be inadvertently harmed by lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, it’s less clear what schools should do about it—especially our poorest and most low-achieving schools that may struggle to recruit and retain high-quality teachers of any race. Even so, for anyone concerned about the achievement and wellbeing of minority students, it’s a topic that demands our attention—and our action.
SOURCE: Stephen Holt and Seth Gershenson, “The Impact of Teacher Demographic Representation on Student Attendance and Suspensions,” Institute for the Study of Labor (Germany) (December 2015).