“Previous research has revealed different forms of racial inequality within the US schooling system, including that youth of color tend to be taught by less experienced and credentialed teachers, but virtually no work has examined inequalities in the primary responsibility of teachers: how teachers actually teach,” says lead author Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, associate professor of international education at New York University Steinhardt.

“Our results uncovered a bias that aligns with work on racial biases, and particularly anti-Blackness, that is pervasive in US education and society, and underscores the importance of better teacher training.”

For the study, which appears in the American Journal of Education, researchers analyzed data collected during academic years 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 from the Measures of Effective Teaching database to determine the extent to which differences in teaching quality are primarily due to differences among teachers (e.g., credentials) or within teachers (e.g., bias).

The study focuses on English language arts (ELA) and mathematics teachers in grades four through nine.

Researchers measured teaching quality using two in-classroom observational ratings (the Framework for Teaching and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System), and students’ increases in standardized scores.

They found that roughly half of the differences in classroom teaching quality was driven by differences among teachers like their credentials, while the other half can be attributed to factors like biases within teachers.

Between the ELA and mathematics courses, the relationship between teaching quality and classroom demographics was stronger in mathematics classes. The authors suggest that this result could be caused by the perception of math as a natural ability and a greater bias among mathematics instructors found in previous research.

Read the full article about racial biases in teachers by Jade McClain at Futurity.