Having a teacher of the same race not only gives African-American students a powerful role model, new research suggests. It can also be a ticket to a different kind of education altogether.
A new study shows that African-American public school students, who are 54% less likely than their white peers to be identified as eligible for gifted-education services, get a clear boost if their teacher is African-American as well. The research finds that such a student is three times more likely to be placed in a gifted program than if he or she has a white teacher.
Researchers at the Indiana University and Vanderbilt University found that this one factor dramatically increases the likelihood that an African-American student will be placed in a gifted program.
Previous research has noted the benefits to African-American students when their school has more teachers who share their race. The new research drills down further, using student-level data from a federal database to trace the probability that a specific elementary school student will be referred to a gifted program.
The results suggest one reason for the difference: African-American teachers tend to offer a more positive of African-American students’ abilities, self-control and other indicators of “giftedness.” They're more likely to give these students "higher subjective assessments of their ability,” said researcher Sean Nicholson-Crotty. That’s key as gifted programs move away from simple standardized tests as gatekeepers, he said.
The researchers analyzed data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks students from kindergarten through middle school. They actually found that an increased presence of African-American teachers in a school overall had little effect on individual students’ gifted-education assignments if students weren’t actually assigned to these teachers. The key, Nicholson-Crotty said, was that African-American students had these folks as teachers.
In an interview, Nicholson-Crotty said the results actually point to a somewhat “thorny” policy proposition: matching students to teachers of their race. He wouldn’t recommend that. Instead, he said, schools should simply push to increase the overall number of African-American teachers on staff.
“Then you’re increasing the likelihood that students will have this in-class race match, so you’ll get these positive benefits without having to undertake this specifically and potentially erroneous policy choice,” he said.
The study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo
