Race and Student Achievement

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http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=9698|Teachers Race May Play a Role in Student Achievement>

BY MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 25, 2005

Matching students with teachers based on race may improve pupils' academic achievement, according to a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The paper, titled "The Market for Teacher Quality," uses statistical and economic analysis to investigate differences in teacher quality and what accounts for them. The bureau, based in Cambridge, Mass., is a nonprofit, nonpartisan economic research organization.

It won notoriety recently as the place where Harvard University's president, Lawrence Summers, made now-infamous remarks on women in the sciences. Elements of the race study likewise touch on politically sensitive subjects, some education researchers said yesterday.

The study, which was first made available last Friday, was written by a Hoover Institution fellow, Eric Hanushek; a professor at Amherst College, Steven Rivkin, and the University of Texas at Dallas's Daniel O'Brien and John Kain.

Evaluating the caliber of teachers based on student achievement in grades five through eight in a large urban school district in Texas, the researchers found that while "good teachers seem to be good teachers for everyone, regardless of whether they've got good or bad kids," pairing students with teachers of the same race seemed to improve student performance, Mr. Hanushek said.

For example, the researchers concluded that on average black students with black teachers "would be boosted 2-4 percentile points," Mr. Hanushek said in an e-mail.

"What we concluded, holding constant the overall quality of the teachers, was that it did make a difference that black kids have a black teacher, and white kids have a white teacher," he said in a telephone in terview yesterday.

"What policy should come from that," he added, "is not obvious."

Despite the measured advantages of pairing students with teachers based on race, Mr. Hanushek said, "We do not think this should take us back to more segregation."

The benefits of integration for African-American students, he said, outweighed the possible benefits of grouping students based on race to match them with teachers of their own ethnicity. We found systematically that if there were higher concentrations of black kids in classrooms, that tended to hurt the black kids," he said, adding that white students' achievement did not appear to be affected by integration.

The usefulness of policy proposals at this point based on the findings was "pretty speculative," Mr. Hanushek said, adding that the subject was one "we're just starting to think about and explore."

One possibility, he said, was assigning new African-American teachers to African-American students in their first teaching jobs.

First-time teachers, he said, "tend systematically to be assigned to schools with more disadvantaged and minority kids, and that's a problem because rookie teachers are not as good in their first year as they will be later on." He said: "It takes a while to learn what you're doing in the classroom."

To mitigate some of the disadvantage that minority students suffer by being taught by a stream of rookie instructors, "If you're assigning a bunch of new teachers to a school, you might make sure black kids got black teachers," he said.

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