The post What We Know About Teacher Race and Student Outcomes appeared first on Education Next.

A new report by Seth Gershenson sparks fresh ideas about new directions for the literature on student-teacher matching along demographic characteristics. While previous work has shown teacher-student race/ethnicity matching has a detectable impact on test scores, academic perceptions and attitudes, attendance and suspensions, gifted and talented referrals, and educational attainment, this new work offers a fresh perspective by examining differences in exposure and impact associated with assignment to same race/ethnicity teachers between the traditional public school and public charter sectors.

Here’s what he finds: The North Carolina educator workforce in both school sectors—charter schools and traditional public schools—is dramatically unrepresentative of the student body it serves, which is 54 percent white, 26 percent Black, 13 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent other races. The report focuses on black teachers only, noting that charter schools fare slightly better than the state’s traditional public schools as they have more black teachers (about 3.5 percentage points’ difference).

The report then compares the magnitude of matching effects by school sector. Teacher-student race/ethnicity matching has no effect on student achievement in English language arts and a small, positive effect on math scores of 0.018 of a standard deviation (SD). Further examining the math effect by sector, we see a larger effect of race/ethnicity matching in charter schools (0.029 SD) compared to traditional public schools (0.016 SD). What should we make of all this? I see three key takeaways.

First, we need to be pushing harder on the question of what is different about the charter school environment that seems to magnify the potential benefits of race-matching. Gershenson proposes a couple of ideas that at least explain why minority teacher representation is higher in the charter sector, such as North Carolina’s approach to teacher certification in the charter sector: “North Carolina requires that only half the teachers in charter schools be certified,” the report explains. “Given racial gaps in passage rates on teacher certification tests, this relaxed rule might contribute to sector differences in the racial representation of the teaching force.” But we’ve only scratched the surface of potential explanations for why the race/ethnicity matching impact is larger in the charter sector. It will take further research to test plausible hypotheses. Perhaps greater principal autonomy in hiring the teachers they are most excited about plays a role. Perhaps flexibility over curriculum choices, textbooks, and scheduling is important (a longer school day would create more opportunities for teachers and students to form a bond, after all). Perhaps it’s not a race/ethnicity matching effect at all, but a culture match resulting from charter schools finding it easier to hire uncertified teachers to work in the neighborhoods they call home. In a nutshell, what are the structural barriers keeping traditional public schools from diversifying their teacher workforce, and how might they learn from the charter sector?

Second, we should be paying greater attention to the intersection between the race/ethnicity matching literature and school choice research, more broadly. The charter effects presented here are tantalizing, raising questions about how this phenomenon also plays out in the context of private school choice, where schools have even greater autonomy, often a religious orientation, and very different organizational structures. Students arriving with a state-sponsored voucher or tax credit scholarship may be positively impacted by the presence of teachers of color in their private school of choice. Are the race/ethnicity matching effects even larger there? If so, why?

Third, and finally, when sample sizes are reasonably large, I would love to see greater attention to the Hispanic population in studies of this nature. I found it insightful and helpful that the report describes the disparity between the percentage of black teachers (14 percent of all charter school teachers are black) and black students (27 percent of all charter school students are black) before introducing the impact estimates. Understandably, there might be concerns about highlighting potentially underpowered impact estimates for Hispanic teacher/student matching (the appendix reports there are null race-matching effects for this group), but let’s at least examine the descriptive statistics for this group so we can get a sense of how often Hispanic students—which make up 5 percent of all charter school students—encounter a teacher that looks like them.

Reflecting on this report also got me thinking hard about the state of the race-matching literature. The sector differences uncovered here are small but meaningful, and they should prompt us to think about where this research should go next. What outcomes should be examined, for whom, and during what time periods?

When choosing which outcomes to examine, let’s pay more attention to differences in the magnitude of race-matching impacts across the various outcomes that have been examined to date. Numerous theoretical frameworks have been proposed in the race-matching literature, none of which make the case for effects showing up most strongly in students’ academic achievement. Indeed, the test score impacts observed here and elsewhere are relatively small, so let’s return to the theories about why this potentially matters before choosing which outcomes future research should examine. In my own work with Brian Kisida, we have found that students assigned to a demographically similar teacher report feeling more cared for, more motivated to do their best work in class, and experience higher quality student-teacher communication. Related work has found that teachers’ expectations play a role in future success. These findings paint a picture of the mechanisms involved and suggest that demographically similar teachers are not merely playing a passive symbolic role for students. They are actively forging improved relationships, setting higher expectations, and potentially serving as cultural translators.

When choosing which student subgroups to examine, let’s do our best to understand impacts for subgroups like Hispanics, which represent a small (10 percent) but rapidly growing segment of North Carolina’s population. This report finds null impacts for this group. Is that because the analysis was underpowered or because no such effect exists? It’s hard to tell but important to think about moving forward. We can think of race/ethnicity matching as providing social-emotional support, comfort, and reassurance to students of color, especially during stressful times, but these effects might play out differently for different student groups. In general, a more diverse educator workforce perhaps reinforces a positive self-identity for students of color, temporarily relieving the pressure to code-switch, and allowing them to let down their guard. Furthermore, a more diverse faculty allows students of color to feel seen and understood, knowing the adults in their lives share common experiences with them. But the potentially varying experiences of different student subgroups deserve our attention, especially if the effects are not consistent across outcomes.

Returning to the underlying theory also gives us more insight into the time periods we should be examining. For example, research could test if race/ethnicity matching has differential impacts during key transition periods, such as the first weeks of a new school year, particularly if a student is new to that school, or during structural transitions, such as the jump from middle to high school.

The state of educator diversity research can be pushed forward by thoughtful work like this, but let’s not lose sight of the underlying theories as we develop the next generation of research questions.

Anna J. Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University.

This post originally appeared in Flypaper.

The post Teacher-Student Race Matching: Where The Research Is Heading appeared first on Education Next.

It’s back-to-school time and education reporters are highlighting stories about how school leaders are “leaning on data” to promote student learning, making administrative decisions that are “supported by a data-driven process,” and drawing on their experience in “data-driven instruction.” This all sounds great and it’s clear that school systems—both public and private—are collecting more and better information about students, teachers, and schools. But are school leaders adequately prepared and empowered to interpret and act on these data, or is the biggest change simply a shift from cardboard to cloud-based file storage boxes?

In the spirit of self-reflection, I’ve come up with five big questions about data use for school leaders.

1. You probably know how well the average student in your school is performing on standardized tests, but are your overall scores masking serious subgroup disparities? Thanks to federal accountability policy, school systems have traditionally broken out scores by gender, race/ethnicity, English language learner, and special education status, but if you have a sufficiently large sample size, why not get creative in how you think about categorizing students for analysis? Consider comparing the students of novice versus veteran teachers, comparing recently arrived immigrants to those who’ve been in the country for at least one year already, comparing outcomes for emotionally disturbed students to other categories of special education students, or comparing students across the different categories of English Language learners. Which specific subgroups make sense to examine is going to vary depending on your population, but that’s the point. Your student body is unique and your data analysis should reflect that.

2. Is there a healthy amount of diversity in the types of data you’re analyzing? Everyone agrees that test-score data are easy to analyze, but they paint an incomplete picture. An effective leader is cognizant of who is chronically absent and when; who’s being disciplined in their school, how harshly, and how frequently; and which students are repeatedly overlooked for special programs, such as gifted and talented opportunities. If you’re not monitoring trends in these data, you could be selling your students short, without even realizing it. Okonofua and Eberhardt offer a simple yet powerful demonstration of educators’ potential blind spots in this regard, using experimental evidence to show that teachers interpret repeated discipline infractions as more severe when they are associated with a black student, as opposed to a white student, even though the description of the misbehavior is identical except for which student name was used (Darnell or Deshawn versus Greg or Jake).

3. How has the demographic composition of your student body changed over time and how have you embraced the various cultures students bring to your school community? Thoughtful school leaders can make both short- and long-term plans to celebrate students’ backgrounds, such as embracing efforts to build a representative faculty to support students of color by targeting teacher hiring efforts with diversity in mind and offering targeted professional development for existing teachers that encourages an empathic mindset.

4. How do you use data to empower parents? We already know that great principals spend a lot of time pouring over spreadsheets to gain a richer understanding of how students are progressing and to better manage teachers and resources to support learning, but have you thought about how your school system is using data to empower parents? As statewide school choice programs grow in size and scope and we try to make sense of mixed findings of their impact, parents need help making good school choices. States might lead the effort, but principals should be part of the conversations about how to refine school report cards so that families have good information at their fingertips when the time comes to choose a school, regardless of whether that’s a traditional public, charter, or private school.

5. Who are your most impactful teachers and what are you doing to support them? Your teachers are the most valuable resource in your organization. Students assigned to high value-added teachers are more likely to attend college, less likely to have children while still a teenager themselves, and enjoy higher incomes in adulthood. It’s hard to provide workplace support and take efforts to improve their retention if you haven’t even identified the most effective teachers in your school.

Principals, if you can’t answer these questions, you’ve got a data problem. Perhaps your master’s in school administration or education leadership certification program did not offer or require rigorous statistical training, but that’s a weak excuse given the plethora of free professional development and online learning opportunities available to you today. Remember, being “data-driven” doesn’t mean you never rely on anecdote or intuition. If you’ve got a gut feeling about something that’s going on in your school, try investigating the patterns in your data with simple visualizations that summarize vast datasets into simple tables and graphs. This school year, take charge of your data.

— Anna Egalite

Anna J. Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The post Five Questions About Data Use for School Leaders appeared first on Education Next.

The 2018-19 school year is off to a rough start in Oklahoma, where a persistent teacher shortage has left state education officials scrambling to fill almost 500 teaching vacancies. While some vacancies are subject-matter specific, many are created because of teacher turnover—whether they’re moving to another school or out of the profession altogether.

Teacher turnover is a persistent problem in U.S. education, leading to undesirable consequences for students and wasted district resources. For instance, data from Charlotte Mecklenburg reveals that there’s a negative impact on student math achievement in grades that lose an effective teacher. Even students who never interacted with a departing teacher can experience performance declines because of disruptions to teacher peer learning when an effective colleague leaves. These negative impacts are particularly concerning when minority teachers depart, given their chronic underrepresentation in public schools.

There are lots of benefits for minority students assigned to minority teachers. For example, when students of color are assigned to teachers who look like them, they are more likely to report exerting higher levels of personal effort and feeling happy in class; more likely to receive referrals to gifted programs; less likely to experience exclusionary discipline; and more likely to complete high school and enroll in college. As a result, we’ve seen a recent expansion of efforts to increase the degree to which teachers reflect the student population as a whole.

Strategies to diversify the teacher workforce typically focus on improving recruitment: attending out-of-state teacher hiring fairs; recruiting from colleges of education that are doing a particularly good job of graduating students of color; and advocating for summer teaching fellowships and scholarships to offset the tuition costs for minority students interesting in pursuing a career in teaching. But recruitment efforts like these can be expensive. It’s high time we paid better attention to the retention of teachers of color and the important role school leaders can play in those efforts.

Evidence from North Carolina and New York City reveals that workplace support from school administration is critically important for reducing turnover. Teacher ratings of the school environment change depending on which principal is leading the school, an effect that is independent of other factors that might influence their perceptions of the school environment, such as school resources or the composition of the student body. In fact, support from school administrators is one of the most important factors in predicting which teachers stay, and it’s especially important for minority teachers in schools that have few teachers of color to begin with. A particularly interesting finding is that minority teachers have higher levels of job satisfaction and lower turnover rates if their principal is also a minority.

Given their influential role in reducing turnover, what specific strategies are available to school leaders to improve retention among teachers of color? Principals can consult with minority teachers to learn what administrative practices foster a supportive work environment. This might include efforts to promote inclusivity, building a culture that doesn’t tolerate race-based stereotypes, and promoting passive representation by diversifying the school leadership team to better reflect the racial composition of the entire community. At a minimum, this sends a signal to families about how much the education system values inclusiveness and how power is distributed among the various racial groups represented in a school.

Furthermore, teachers of color need viable pathways that allow them to enter leadership positions fully prepared. Research has shown that teachers of color (and, in particular, male teachers of color) risk being pigeonholed into certain types of leadership positions that offer no career advancement in the long run. Existing school leaders must provide appropriate opportunities for advancement across all staff, and not depend on teachers of color to serve primarily as “deans of culture” or language translators.

Teacher turnover and shortages are challenges that the entire education field faces, but these challenges are especially acute for teachers of color. School leaders can be the missing critical link to creating the working conditions that attract, retain, and develop teachers of color. Policymakers should examine the conditions under which school leaders can create these environments.

— Anna Egalite and Constance Lindsay

Anna J. Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University. Constance A. Lindsay is a research associate at the Urban Institute, where she studies K–12 education policies.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The post School Leaders Can Help Reduce Minority Teacher Turnover appeared first on Education Next.

A commonly cited statistic in education leadership circles is that 25 percent of a school’s impact on student achievement can be explained by the principal, which is encouraging for those of us who work in principal preparation, and intuitive to the many educators who’ve experienced the power of an effective leader. It lacks nuance, however, and has gotten us thinking about the state of education-leadership research—what do we know with confidence, what do we have good intuitions (but insufficient evidence) about, and what are we completely in the dark on? With this in mind, we’ve brainstormed three big questions about school leaders. The research in this area is incomplete, but a recent development makes us hopeful that better data are on the horizon.

1. Do principals impact student performance?

Quantifying a school leader’s impact is analytically challenging. How should principal effects be separated from teacher effects, for instance? Some teachers are high-performing, regardless of who leads their school, but effective principals hire the right people into the right grade levels and offer them the right supports to propel them to success.

Another issue relates to timing: Is the impact of great principals observed right away, or does it take several years for principals to grapple with the legacy they’ve inherited—the teaching faculty, the school facilities, the curriculum and textbooks, historical budget priorities, and so on. Furthermore, what’s the right comparison group to determine a principal’s unique impact? It seems crucial to account for differences in school and neighborhood environments—such as by comparing different principals who led the same school at different time points—but if there hasn’t been principal turnover in a long time, and there aren’t similar schools against which to make a comparison, this approach hits a wall.

Grissom, Kalogrides, and Loeb carefully document the trade-offs inherent in the many approaches to calculating a principal’s impact, concluding that the window of potential effect sizes ranges from .03 to .18 standard deviations. That work mirrors the conclusions of Branch, Hanushek, and Rivkin, who estimate that principal impacts range from .05 to .21 standard deviations (in other words, four to 16 percentile points in student achievement).

Our best estimates of principal impacts, therefore, are either really small or really large, depending on the model chosen. The takeaway? Yes, principals matter—but we still have a long way to go to before we can confidently quantify just how much.

2. What skills are needed to ensure success as a modern school leader?

The fundamentals haven’t changed, as a quick read of Dale Carnegie’s classic text will reveal—smile; don’t criticize, condemn, or complain; show appreciation. Specific applications to the field of education administration are obvious: Be a good manager, be organized, and follow the policies you set. These are concrete skills that can be taught in a preparation program and their value has been quantified. See, for instance, Grissom and Loeb, who point to the importance of practical managerial skills; Hess and Kelly, who write about the principal’s role in supporting curriculum and instruction; and Grissom, Loeb, and Master, who demonstrate the value of teacher coaching.

But there are also intangible skills that cannot be easily taught—being visionary and motivating, showing compassion, being a force for good, keeping children at the center of the work, and being cognizant of whether civil rights are being advanced or inhibited by the culture you build. This latter list highlights the skills that principal candidates need to bring to the table before their preparation program even begins, and it’s this latter list that matters the most in our current context.

3. What are the characteristics of high-quality principal preparation programs?

Principal preparation programs have two primary responsibilities: Identify and admit the most promising candidates, then provide them with concrete skills that will equip them to be successful upon graduation. Studying exemplary programs offers a roadmap for how to do this well, but data limitations restrict how closely we can actually monitor their success in meeting these responsibilities.

We can show that there is sufficient systematic variation between programs in terms of test-score growth, for instance, that allows us to sort them into high, medium, and low performance categories. But we know too little about differences in the actual training received across programs. Administrative datasets rarely allow us to link principals to the specific program from which they graduated. Most programs can’t even self-evaluate because they don’t have data systems to track their graduates.

So what are we doing about all this?

With support from the Wallace Foundation’s $47 million initiative to improve the quality of principal preparation, NC State has been engaged in redesigning our program to train principals who are ready to meet the demands of a constantly changing job. We joined forces with local school leaders to identify the skills and attributes of effective school leaders. We then developed our program selection criteria, curricula, assessments, and internship to align with this framework. We’re now partnering with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and SAS to develop a leadership-development dashboard that tracks the career pathway and performance of our graduates, with a vision of scaling the system state-wide to include all North Carolina-based principal preparation programs and school districts.

The data don’t exist yet to answer the most pressing questions about the relationship between principal preparation and leadership effectiveness. It’s our hope that’s about to change.

— Anna Egalite and Tim Drake

Anna J. Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University. Tim Drake is an Assistant Professor of Education Leadership and Policy at North Carolina State University.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The post Three Questions About Education Leadership Research appeared first on Education Next.

I have concerns with the latter half of the report, which focuses on two empirical studies that use student-level data to ascertain the impact of voucher programs on school integration in Louisiana and Milwaukee. As the lead author of the 2017 Louisiana study referenced in this report, I must address Potter’s misrepresentation of our research.

The bottom line take-away from our analysis is that 82% of student transfers made possible by the Louisiana Scholarship Program reduced racial stratification in the voucher students’ former public schools, a clear win for desegregation efforts in the state of Louisiana. For context, the reader should note that at the time we conducted this analysis, 34 public school districts in the Pelican State were still under desegregation orders from the federal government, with no indication of when they might finally achieve “unitary” status. Desegregation of its public schools is a problem that Louisiana has struggled to solve for decades. Our analysis provides evidence that this education policy actually reduced racial stratification in the public schools. (For an excellent summary of our findings, see Hayley Glatter’s Feb 2017 article in The Atlantic).

Throughout the peer-reviewed article, however, we also highlight that only 45% of transfers reduced racial stratification in the private schools they attended, a disappointing finding but one that we hope will lead to productive policy conversations.

Potter cannot refute our findings, so she seeks to obfuscate them by carefully merging categories so as to define a “tie” as a loss. This allows her to say that “two-thirds of school transfers in the Louisiana Scholarship Program […] increased segregation in private schools, public schools, or both sectors.” To be clear, a mixed finding is one in which segregation might have been increased in one sector but decreased in another. Reasonable people will disagree about whether to classify a mixed finding like this as a net win or net loss. For instance, it is equally true and consistent with Potter’s re-categorization of our findings to say that “The vast majority (91%) of school transfers in the Louisiana Scholarship Program improved integration in one or both sectors.” Even Potter’s clever wordsmithing can’t hide the fact that only 9 percent of transfers reduced integration in both sectors.

Covering Potter’s analysis of our study earlier this month, Aria Bendix reports, “After crunching the numbers herself, using metropolitan demographics as a benchmark for integration, Potter’s results were quite different.” It’s unclear to me what original number crunching Potter has conducted. Yes, the statistics Potter presents do use metropolitan demographics as a benchmark, but my colleagues and I were the ones to conduct these analyses. Potter’s numbers are taken straight from our study’s appendix, which we provided to ensure complete transparency. Potter provides no new analysis, merely a tactical reorganization of findings that were already available in the published article.

In general, Potter criticizes our decision to present the effects of voucher transfers on public and private schools separately, characterizing this decision as “misleading.” In reality, this was the most transparent and informative way to present the findings. Take for example, the case of a single student transfer in which a student leaves a public school in which their race is over-represented (thus reducing public-school segregation), and arrives in a private school in which their race is also over-represented (thus increasing private-school segregation). Is this a win or a loss? We don’t impose a value judgment on that situation, but leave it to the reader to determine.

How did the Louisiana Scholarship Program affect integration? If I were to take the same liberties as Potter, I could tell you that 91 percent of all voucher transfers reduced segregation in one or both sectors. This is a true statement, but it would be irresponsible to follow Potter’s lead and so bluntly summarize a nuanced set of results, so let me summarize it this way: A third of all voucher transfers resulted in more integrated public and private schools, an additional 57 percent of transfers had mixed effects (positive effects in one sector, negative effects in another), and just 9 percent of transfers had negative effects. The public deserves an accurate, thorough, and transparent reporting of the facts, not careful wordsmithing and clever reorganization of categories to suit an agenda.

— Anna J. Egalite

Anna Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University.

The post The Effect of Louisiana’s Voucher Program on School Integration: A Response to The Century Foundation appeared first on Education Next.

By using their celebrity status to promote social change, these star athletes stood as influential role models for millions of Americans, including the children who idolize them. But students of color shouldn’t need to rely on star athletes to find positive role models to emulate. In schools across the country, teachers of color serve that role every day, inspiring students to work hard and aim high. Although these slogans might seem a little saccharine, the hopes and expectations that teachers hold for their students matter. Those authentic sentiments of a reassuring mentor are the armor a young person uses to fight off moments of self-doubt and perceived inadequacy as they venture out into the world.

Three Theories

At least three distinct theories have been proposed about how moving away from a majority-white teacher workforce would be beneficial for students of color (a detailed accounting of the relevant references can be found in this recent policy brief).

The first is the role-modeling hypothesis just described—minority students might benefit from seeing adults with a similar racial/ethnic background in a position of authority. Such representation could increase the cultural value students place on academic success and perhaps reduce the stigma of “acting white.”

The second theory relates to teachers’ expectations for their students. If teachers of color hold higher expectations for minority students—stemming from their perceptions about student ability, effort, and behavior—they might be more likely to push students to work hard and to insist on their best effort in all assignments.

The third theory relates to teachers’ cultural understanding of their students, which can lead to a deep and meaningful interpersonal connection. Racially diverse teachers might be more culturally sensitive and less likely to subscribe to biased stereotypes about their students. Diverse teachers might also influence instructional context, such as through the development of culturally relevant curricula and pedagogy and by introducing a topic from a perspective that students can relate to.

New Research Evidence

Because of data availability, empirical research to date on this subject has largely focused on the first two theories, looking for changes in academic outcomes for evidence to support the “role modeling” or the “high expectations” hypotheses.[1] In a new working paper, we too find evidence supporting both of these theories, but are particularly excited about the evidence we uncover to support the third theory.

Let’s briefly talk about the first two theories. Related to the first theory of “high expectations,” we find students assigned to a teacher who shares their race and gender are more likely to say their teacher pushes them to work hard, requires them to explain their answers, not to give up when the work gets hard, and accepts nothing less than their full effort. These effects are most pronounced among black students linked with black teachers. Related to the second theory of “role modeling,” we find that black females assigned to black female teachers say they think more about going to college because of their teacher.

What we find especially compelling, however, is the evidence we uncover in support of the third theory, based on cultural understanding. This theory posits that teachers from a similar background as their students are uniquely positioned to explain new material in a culturally relevant way. Our findings support this concept. Specifically, students assigned to demographically similar teachers say their teachers notice if they don’t understand a topic and explain it another way. Also, difficult material is explained clearly and teachers take the time to provide feedback on students’ written work so they can understand how to do better in the future.

Further bolstering support for this third theory, the largest effect sizes we uncover demonstrate perceived differences in instructional techniques that are associated with teacher/student demographic similarity. Students are more likely to report that their teacher confers with them regularly, checking to see if they understand new material and inviting them to share their insights and ideas.

The “cultural understanding” theory also supports the idea that students of color assigned to diverse teachers might be more likely to feel cared for and happy in class as a result of feeling understood by a culturally sensitive teacher. Interestingly, the students in our data reveal a strong interpersonal connection with their teacher. Students are more likely to report feeling cared for, being captivated by their teachers’ instruction, and feeling generally happy in class when assigned to a teacher that looks like them. Finally, we find significant differences in black males’ perceptions of their teacher’s ability to control the classroom. They describe orderly and productive classrooms that are conducive to learning, with little time being wasted on disciplining students whose behavior is out of control. Again, these findings are in line with a theory of improved cultural understanding.

It’s important to acknowledge, of course, that possessing similar demographic characteristics doesn’t always translate to a shared cultural heritage. Nonetheless, large-scale diversification of the teacher workforce would greatly increase the potential for a common cultural understanding between minority students and their teachers to occur, relative to the odds of such an occurrence today.

The results of this new research demonstrate that the potential benefits of increased teacher diversity extend well beyond standardized test scores, raising important questions about lost opportunities caused by the underrepresentation of minority teachers in America today.

[1] Longitudinal student-level datasets have allowed researchers to uncover small but statistically significant benefits for students’ math and reading outcomes. More recent research has examined non-test score outcomes, uncovering differences by race/ethnicity in teacher expectations for students’ educational attainment and subjective evaluations of students’ academic ability.

— Anna J. Egalite and Brian Kisida

Anna Egalite (@annaegalite) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University.

Brian Kisida (@briankisida) is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Economics and the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri.

This first appeared on the Brown Center Chalkboard.

The post The Many Ways Teacher Diversity May Benefit Students appeared first on Education Next.

This article is part of a new Education Next series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman’s groundbreaking report, “Equality of Educational Opportunity.” The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.

On the weekend before the Fourth of July 1966, the U.S. Office of Education quietly released a 737-page report that summarized one of the most comprehensive studies of American education ever conducted. Encompassing some 3,000 schools, nearly 600,000 students, and thousands of teachers, and produced by a team led by Johns Hopkins University sociologist James S. Coleman, “Equality of Educational Opportunity” was met with a palpable silence. Indeed, the timing of the release relied on one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook—announcing unfavorable results on a major holiday, when neither the American public nor the news media are paying much attention.

To the dismay of federal officials, the Coleman Report had concluded that “schools are remarkably similar in the effect they have on the achievement of their pupils when the socio-economic background of the students is taken into account.” Or, as one sociologist supposedly put it to the scholar-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Have you heard what Coleman is finding? It’s all family.”

The Coleman Report’s conclusions concerning the influences of home and family were at odds with the paradigm of the day. The politically inconvenient conclusion that family background explained more about a child’s achievement than did school resources ran contrary to contemporary priorities, which were focused on improving educational inputs such as school expenditure levels, class size, and teacher quality. Indeed, less than a year before the Coleman Report’s release, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law, dedicating federal funds to disadvantaged students through a Title 1 program that still remains the single largest investment in K–12 education, currently reaching approximately 21 million students at an annual cost of about $14.4 billion.

So what exactly had Coleman uncovered? Differences among schools in their facilities and staffing “are so little related to achievement levels of students that, with few exceptions, their effect fails to appear even in a survey of this magnitude,” the authors concluded.

Zeroing In on Family Background

Coleman’s advisory panel refused to sign off on the report, citing “methodological concerns” that continue to reverberate. Subsequent research has corroborated the finding that family background is strongly correlated with student performance in school. A correlation between family background and educational and economic success, however, does not tell us whether the relationship between the two is independent of any school impacts. The associations between home life and school performance that Coleman documented may actually be driven by disparities in school or neighborhood quality rather than family influences. Often, families choose their children’s schools by selecting their community or neighborhood, and children whose parents select good schools may benefit as a consequence. In the elusive quest to uncover the determinants of students’ academic success, therefore, it is important to rely on experimental or quasi-experimental research that identifies effects of family background that operate separately and apart from any school effects.

In this essay I look at four family variables that may influence student achievement: family education, family income, parents’ criminal activity, and family structure. I then consider the ways in which schools can offset the effects of these factors.

Parental Education. Better-educated parents are more likely to consider the quality of the local schools when selecting a neighborhood in which to live. Once their children enter a school, educated parents are also more likely to pay attention to the quality of their children’s teachers and may attempt to ensure that their children are adequately served. By participating in parent-teacher conferences and volunteering at school, they may encourage staff to attend to their children’s individual needs.

In addition, highly educated parents are more likely than their less-educated counterparts to read to their children. Educated parents enhance their children’s development and human capital by drawing on their own advanced language skills in communicating with their children. They are more likely to pose questions instead of directives and employ a broader and more complex vocabulary. Estimates suggest that, by age 3, children whose parents receive public assistance hear less than a third of the words encountered by their higher-income peers. As a result, the children of highly educated parents are capable of more complex speech and have more extensive vocabularies before they even start school.

Highly educated parents can also use their social capital to promote their children’s development. A cohesive social network of well-educated individuals socializes children to expect that they too will attain high levels of academic success. It can also transmit cultural capital by teaching children the specific behaviors, patterns of speech, and cultural references that are valued by the educational and professional elite.

In most studies, parental education has been identified as the single strongest correlate of children’s success in school, the number of years they attend school, and their success later in life. Because parental education influences children’s learning both directly and through the choice of a school, we do not know how much of the correlation can be attributed to direct impact and how much to school-related factors. Teasing out the distinct causal impact of parental education is tricky, but given the strong association between parental education and student achievement in every industrialized society, the direct impact is undoubtedly substantial. Furthermore, quasi-experimental strategies have found positive effects of parental education on children’s outcomes. For instance, one study of Korean children adopted into American families shows that the adoptive mother’s education level is significantly associated with the child’s educational attainment.

Family Income. As with parental education, family income may have a direct impact on a child’s academic outcomes, or variations in achievement could simply be a function of the school the child attends: parents with greater financial resources can identify communities with higher-quality schools and choose more-expensive neighborhoods—the very places where good schools are likely to be. More-affluent parents can also use their resources to ensure that their children have access to a full range of extracurricular activities at school and in the community.

But it’s not hard to imagine direct effects of income on student achievement. Parents who are struggling economically simply don’t have the time or the wherewithal to check homework, drive children to summer camp, organize museum trips, or help their kids plan for college. Working multiple jobs or inconvenient shifts makes it hard to dedicate time for family dinners, enforce a consistent bedtime, read to infants and toddlers, or invest in music lessons or sports clubs. Even small differences in access to the activities and experiences that are known to promote brain development can accumulate, resulting in a sizable gap between two groups of children defined by family circumstances.

It is challenging to find rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental evidence to disentangle the direct effects of home life from the effects of the school a family selects. While Coleman claimed that family and peers had an effect on student achievement that was distinct from the influence of schools or neighborhoods, his research design was inadequate to support this conclusion. All he was able to show was that family characteristics had a strong correlation with student achievement.

Separating out the independent effects of family education and family income is also difficult. We do not know if low income and financial instability alone can adversely affect children’s behavior, emotional stability, and educational outcomes. Evidence from the negative-income-tax experiments carried out by the federal government between 1968 and 1982 showed only mixed effects of income on children’s outcomes, and subsequent work by the University of Chicago’s Susan Mayer cast doubt on any causal relationship between parental income and child well-being. However, a recent study by Gordon Dahl and Lance Lochner, exploiting quasi-experimental variation in the Earned Income Tax Credit, provides convincing evidence that increases in family income can lift the achievement levels of students raised in low-income working families, even holding other factors constant.

Parental Incarceration. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 2.3 percent of U.S. children have a parent in federal or state prison. Black children are 7.5 times more likely and Hispanic children 2.5 times more likely than white children to have an incarcerated parent. Incarceration removes a wage earner from the home, lowering household income. One estimate suggests that two-thirds of incarcerated fathers had provided the primary source of family income before their imprisonment. As a result, children with a parent in prison are at greater risk of homelessness, which in turn can have grave consequences: the receipt of social and medical services and assignment to a traditional public school all require a stable home address. The emotional strain of a parent’s incarceration can also take its toll on a child’s achievement in school.

Quantifying the causal effects of parental incarceration has proven challenging, however. While correlational research finds that the odds of finishing high school are 50 percent lower for children with an incarcerated parent, parents who are in prison may have less education, lower income, more limited access to quality schools, and other attributes that adversely affect their children’s success in school. A recent review of 22 studies of the effect of parental incarceration on child well-being concludes that, to date, no research in this area has been able to leverage a natural experiment to produce quasi-experimental estimates. Just how large a causal impact parental incarceration has on children remains an important but largely uncharted topic for future research.

Family Structure. While most American children still live with both of their biological or adoptive parents, family structures have become more diverse in recent years, and living arrangements have grown increasingly complex. In particular, the two-parent family is vanishing among the poor.

Approximately two-fifths of U.S. children experience dissolution in their parents’ union by age 15, and two-thirds of this group will see their mother form a new union within six years. Many parents today choose cohabitation over marriage, but the instability of such partnerships is even higher. In the case of nonmarital births, estimates say that 56 percent of fathers will be living away from their child by his or her third birthday. These patterns can have serious implications for a child’s well-being and school success (see Figure 1). Single parents have less time for the enriching activities that Robert Putnam, Harvard professor of public policy, has called “Goodnight Moon” time, after the celebrated bedtime storybook by Margaret Wise Brown. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 1- to 2-year-olds who live with two married parents are read to, on average, 8.5 times per week. The corresponding statistic for their peers living with a single parent is 5.7 times. And it’s likely that dual-parent families in general have many other attributes that affect their children’s educational attainment, mental health, labor market performance, and family formation. More-rigorous quasi-experimental evidence also documents significant negative effects of a father’s absence on children’s educational attainment and social and emotional development, leading to increases in antisocial behavior. These effects are largest for boys.

Recent research by MIT economist David Autor and colleagues generates quasi-experimental estimates of family background by simultaneously accounting for the impact of neighborhood environment and school quality to investigate why boys fare worse than girls in disadvantaged families. Comparing boys to their sisters in a data set that includes more than 1 million children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002, the authors demonstrate a persistent gender gap in graduation and truancy rates, incidence of behavioral and cognitive disabilities, and standardized test scores.

Policies to Counter Family Disadvantage

Policymakers who are weighing competing approaches to countering the influence of family disadvantage face a tough choice: Should they try to improve schools (to overcome the effects of family background) or directly address the effects of family background?

The question is critical. If family background is decisive regardless of the quality of the school, then the road to equal opportunity will be long and hard. Increasing the level of parental education is a multigenerational challenge, while reducing the rising disparities in family income would require massive changes in public policy, and reversing the growth in the prevalence of single-parent families would also prove challenging. And, while efforts to reduce incarceration rates are afoot, U.S. crime rates remain among the highest in the world. Given these obstacles, if schools themselves can offset differences in family background, the chances of achieving a more egalitarian society greatly improve.

For these reasons, scholars need to continue to tackle the causality question raised by Coleman’s pathbreaking study. Although the obstacles to causal inference are steep, education researchers should focus on quasi-experimental approaches relying on sibling comparisons, changes in state laws over time, or policy quirks—such as policy implementation timelines that vary across municipalities—that facilitate research opportunities.

Given what is currently known, a holistic approach that simultaneously attempts to strengthen both home and school influences in disadvantaged communities is worthy of further exploration. A number of contemporary and past initiatives point to the potential of this comprehensive approach.

Promise Neighborhoods

“Promise Neighborhoods,” which are funded by a grant program of the U.S. Department of Education, serve distressed communities by delivering a continuum of services through multiple government agencies, nonprofit organizations, churches, and agencies of civil society. These neighborhood initiatives use “wraparound” programs that take a holistic approach to improving the educational achievement of low-income students. The template for the approach is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a 97-block neighborhood in New York City that combines charter schooling with a full package of social, medical, and community support services. The programs and resources are available to the families at no cost.

Services available in the HCZ include a Baby College, where expectant parents can learn about child development and gain parenting skills; two charter schools and a college success office, which provides individualized counseling and guidance to graduates on university campuses across the country; free legal services, tax preparation, and financial counseling; employment workshops and job fairs; a 50,000-square-foot facility that offers recreational and nutrition classes; and a food services team that provides breakfast, lunch, and a snack every school day to more than 2,000 students.

Research by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer demonstrates that the impact of attending an HCZ charter middle school on students’ test scores is comparable to the impressive effects seen at  high-performing charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (known as KIPP schools). Students who win admission by lottery and attend an HCZ school also have higher on-time graduation rates than their peers and are less likely to become teen parents or land in prison. Although some community services are available to HCZ residents only, results show that students who live outside the HCZ experience similar benefits simply from attending the Promise Academy. That is, Dobbie and Fryer do not find any additional benefits associated with the resident-only supplementary services that distinguish the Promise Neighborhoods approach.   (In many instances, the mean scores for children who live within the zone are higher than those for nonresidents, but these differences are not statistically significant.)

There are two caveats to keep in mind in regard to this finding that support the case for continued experimentation with and evaluation of Promise Neighborhoods. First, many of the wraparound services offered in the HCZ are provided through the school and are thus available to HCZ residents and nonresidents alike. For instance, all Promise Academy students receive free nutritious meals; medical, dental, and mental health services; and food baskets for their parents. The services that nonresidents cannot access are things such as tax preparation and financial advising, parenting classes through the Baby College, and job fairs. It may be that both groups of students are accessing the most beneficial supplementary services.

The second caveat is that the HCZ is a “pipeline” model that aims to transform an entire community by targeting services across many different domains. Therefore, we may have to wait until a cohort of students has progressed through that pipeline before we can get a full picture of how these comprehensive services have benefited them. The first cohort to complete the entire HCZ program is expected to graduate from high school in 2020.

The main drawback of the Promise Neighborhoods model is its high cost. To cover the expenses of running the Promise Academy Charter School and the afterschool and wraparound programs, the HCZ spends about $19,272 per pupil. While this price tag is about $3,100 higher than the median per-pupil cost in New York State, it is still about $14,000 lower than what is spent by a district at the 95th percentile. If future research can demonstrate that the HCZ positively influences longer-term outcomes such as college graduation rates, income, and mortality, the model will hold tremendous potential that may well justify its costs.

Early Childhood Education

Early childhood programs can provide a source of enrichment for needy children, ensuring them a solid start in a world where those with inadequate education are increasingly marginalized. Neuroscientists estimate that about 90 percent of the brain develops between birth and age 5, supporting the case for expanded access to early childhood programs. While the United States spends abundantly on elementary and secondary schoolchildren ($12,401 per student per year in 2013–14 dollars), it devotes dramatically less than other wealthy countries to children in their first few years of life.

Four years before James Coleman released his report, a group of underprivileged, at-risk toddlers at the Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly selected for a preschool intervention that consisted of daily coaching from highly trained teachers as well as visits to their homes. After just one year, those in the experimental treatment group were registering IQ scores 10 points higher than their peers in the control group. The test-score effects had disappeared by age 10, but follow-up analyses of the Perry Preschool treatment group revealed impressive longer-term outcomes that included a significant increase in their high-school graduation rate and the probability of earning at least $20,000 a year as adults, as well as a 19 percent decrease in their probability of being arrested five or more times. Similar small-scale, “hothouse” preschool experiments in Chicago, upstate New York, and North Carolina have all shown comparable benefits.

Unfortunately, attempts to scale up such programs have proved challenging. Studies of the Head Start program, for instance, have uncovered mixed evidence of its effectiveness. Modest impacts on students’ cognitive skills mostly fade out by the end of 1st grade. Such results have led many to question whether quality can be consistently maintained when a program such as Head Start is implemented broadly. Indeed, recent research has revealed considerable differences in Head Start’s effectiveness from site to site. Variation in inputs and practices among Head Start centers explains about a third of these differences, a finding that may offer clues as to the contextual factors that influence the program’s varying levels of success.

Although the policymaker’s challenge is to figure out how to expand access to such programs  while preserving quality, evidence suggests that investment in early childhood education has the potential to significantly address disparities that arise from family disadvantage.

Small Schools of Choice 

Traditional public schools assign a child to a given school based exclusively on his family’s place of residence. As Coleman pointed out, residential assignment promotes stratification between schools by family background, because it creates incentives for families of means to move to the “good” school districts. Under this system, schools cannot serve as the equal-opportunity engines of our society. Instead, residential assignment often replicates within the school system the same family advantages and disadvantages that exist in the community.

The most promising social policy for combating the effects of family background, then, could well be the expansion of programs that  allow families to choose schools without regard to their neighborhood of residence.  An analysis of more than 100 small schools of choice in New York City between 2002 and 2008 revealed a 9.5 percent increase in the graduation rate of a group of educationally and economically disadvantaged students, at no extra cost to the city. Positive results have also been observed with respect to student test scores for charter schools in New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, and New Orleans.

Small schools of choice might also build the social capital that Coleman considered crucial for student success. First, small schools are well positioned to build a strong sense of community through the development of robust student-teacher, parent-teacher, and student-student relationships. Helping students to cultivate dense networks of social relationships better equips them to handle life’s challenges and is particularly vital given the disintegration of many social structures today. While schools may not be able to compensate fully for the disruptive effects of a dysfunctional or unstable family, a robust school culture can transform the “social ecology” of a disadvantaged child.

A small school of choice also engenders a voluntary community that comes together over strong ties and shared values. Typically, schools of choice feature a clearly defined mission and set of core values, which may derive from religious traditions and beliefs. The Notre Dame ACE Academy schools, for instance, strive for the twin goals of preparing students for college and for heaven. By explicitly defining their mission, schools can appeal to families who share their values and are eager to contribute to the growth of the community. A focused mission also helps school administrators attract like-minded teachers and thus promotes staff collegiality. A warm and cohesive teaching staff can be particularly beneficial for children from unstable homes, whose parents may not regularly express emotional closeness or who fail to communicate effectively. Exposure to well-functioning adult role models at school might compensate for such deficits, promoting well-being and positive emotional development.

Implications for Policy

Determining the causal relationships between family background and child well-being has posed a daunting challenge. Family characteristics are often tightly correlated with features of the neighborhood environment, making it difficult to determine the independent influences of each. But getting a solid understanding of causality is critical to the debate over whether to intervene inside or outside of school.

The results of quasi-experimental research, as well as common sense, tell us that children who grow up in stable, well-resourced families have significant advantages over their peers who do not—including access to better schools and other educational services. Policies that place schools at center stage have the potential to disrupt the cycle of economic disadvantage to ensure that children born into poverty aren’t excluded from the American dream.

In opening our eyes to the role of family background in the creation of inequality, Coleman wasn’t suggesting that we shrug our shoulders and learn to live with it. But in attacking the achievement gap, as his research would imply, we need to mobilize not only our schools but also other institutions. Promise Neighborhoods offer cradle-to-career supports to help children successfully navigate the challenges of growing up. Early childhood programs provide intervention at a critical time, when children’s brains take huge leaps in development. Finally, small schools of choice can help to build a strong sense of community, which could particularly benefit inner-city neighborhoods where traditional institutions have been disintegrating.

Schools alone can’t level the vast inequalities that students bring to the schoolhouse door, but a combination of school programs, social services, community organizations, and civil society could make a major difference. Ensuring that all kids, regardless of family background, have a decent chance of doing better than their parents is an important societal and policy goal. Innovative approaches such as those outlined here could help us achieve it.

Anna J. Egalite is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at the College of Education, North Carolina State University. 

The post How Family Background Influences Student Achievement appeared first on Education Next.

The most up-to-date data suggest that 2.5 million students attend public charter schools across the country. Without a doubt, a gold standard evaluation of each of the 6,440 charter schools these students attend would be nice, but it’s impossible to do a randomized experiment of a school that isn’t oversubscribed. No waiting list? No experimental evaluation. It’s a bit of a conundrum for policymakers, advocates, and researchers with an interest in evaluating all charters, not just the most popular ones.

Enter the Stanford-based based Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO). Led by Macke Raymond, this research organization regularly publishes national, state, and city evaluations of charter effectiveness. How much stock can we put in an observational model of charter effectiveness, such as that used by CREDO? The answer to this question matters greatly, both to supporters and opponents of charter schools. Voicing the uncertainty and confusion shared by many in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, Center for Education Reform Senior Fellow and President Emeritus Jeanne Allen asked, “Can we know without a doubt that [these CREDO studies] are valid?”

In a new working paper released today, we kick the tires on CREDO’s model— identifying four potential methodological weaknesses that could lead to bias, and conclude that none raise serious red flags:

1. A well-publicized critique of the CREDO approach relates to their use of “virtual control records” that are generated from the records of up to seven public school “virtual twins”, instead of one-to-one matching. We find this does not materially affect the results.

2. Patrick Wolf, John Witte, and David Fleming have previously noted that the private school sector in Milwaukee systematically under-classifies students for government programs such as the National School Lunch Program. We applied that same logic to the charter sector in Florida, testing to see if student participation in such programs is inconsistently measured across sectors. We find evidence that this is certainly the case but that CREDO’s approach to matching on these variables only modestly affects their estimates of charter effectiveness.

3. We test the internal validity of the CREDO model by comparing its estimates to those produced by an instrumental variables (IV) approach, finding that a rigorous IV method produces similar results to CREDO’s observational estimates

4. Finally, we test the wisdom of relying on an experimental evaluation of popular charter schools to make inferences about all other charter schools. We do this by comparing estimates of the relative effectiveness of oversubscribed and undersubscribed charter schools in Florida, showing that impact estimates differ for oversubscribed and undersubscribed charters. This helps to explain why lottery-based studies tend to find charter impacts that are much larger than those reported by CREDO.

The findings we’re releasing today are good news for the education research community because they demonstrate that CREDO’s synthetic matching approach offers a reasonable alternative when the gold standard is not feasible or possible. This approach appears to produce reliable estimates of charter effectiveness and does so in a manner that ensures high rates of coverage for many different types of charter schools in diverse locations across the country.

— Anna Egalite and Matthew Ackerman

Anna J. Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University. Matthew Ackerman graduated with an AB in Economics from Harvard in 2014 and is now a graduate student in Economics at the London School of Economics. 

The post Rethinking Charter School Evaluations When the Gold Standard Is Off the Table appeared first on Education Next.

Whether or not the “Obama effect” has significantly moved student test scores, there is little doubt that seeing a black man elected to the highest political office in the nation has encouraged black students to set their sights higher. We know that when a child is attempting to navigate the world, their aspirations are conditional on the set of options they encounter and what they believe is attainable. In many ways, the adult role models that students are exposed to shape the people they will become. This is partially why decades of social programs meant to break the cycle of poverty have fallen short. They have not effectively changed the cultural environments that reinforce class stratification. As Robert Putnam chronicles in his latest book, wealth increasingly produces more wealth, and poverty produces more poverty. And poverty, access to quality education, and race remain uncomfortably correlated.

In a similar vein, some have argued that minority teachers can serve as positive role models and mentors for minority students, capable of building a cultural bridge between home and school. While most students will spend very little time considering Obama’s life story, a typical student spends nearly 1,000 hours a year with their teachers.

Minority teachers, however, are noticeably underrepresented in American schools. Though minority students now make up a majority of public school enrollment, nearly 82% of public school teachers are white. As a result, Black and Hispanic students are two to three times more common than Black and Hispanic teachers. Moreover, this “diversity-gap” between students and teachers tends to be wider in areas where percentages of minority students are higher. In California, for example,  only 29 percent of teachers identify as ethnic minorities, while 73 percent of students are from a minority group.

Does the diversity gap affect student outcomes? A growing body of research suggests that it does. Using achievement data from the Tennessee Star Project, Thomas Dee finds that black students do slightly better with black teachers. Other studies have documented that having a demographically similar teacher positively influences teachers’ subjective evaluations of student performance and behavior.

In a recently published study in Economics of Education Review, we follow the trajectories of 2.9 million public school students in Florida over a seven-year time period and compare their standardized test scores in years when they had a teacher of the same ethnicity to school years when they did not.

By using student-level data for almost three million individuals, we can account for lots of student characteristics that might influence test scores—things like poverty status, English language proficiency, gender, average teacher quality, and prior year test scores. And, because we compare the students to themselves from year to year, we can also account for important but hard-to-measure factors like student ability, motivation, and personality characteristics.

We find that Black, white, and Asian students benefit from being assigned to a teacher that looks like them. Elementary-aged Black students and lower-performing students seem to particularly benefit from having a demographically-similar teacher.

Given these findings, it is certainly possible that the “diversity gap” between students and teachers is a contributing factor to the persistent achievement gap between minority and white students. And though the effects we measure are small, it is likely that these effects could compound over multiple years of experiencing a demographically-similar teacher. Moreover, it is likely that student achievement, though easily measured, is not where the bulk of the effects would be largest. Self-efficacy, educational aspirations, self-esteem, and attainment make much more sense as potential outcomes that would change as a result of demographically-similar role models. Small gains in student achievement may only be the tip of the iceberg.

As the diversity of students in our schools continues to grow, the arguments for policies meant to improve representation among teachers have more and more evidence to support them. You can read more about our work over at Real Clear Education.

—Brian Kisida and Anna Egalite

Brian Kisida (@briankisida) is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas

Anna Egalite (@annaegalite) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Education Policy and Governance in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The post Education without Representation appeared first on Education Next.