Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for Education Next, Anna J. Egalite discusses a new report by Seth Gershenson about matching teachers and students based on demographic characteristics.

· Why is it important for teachers to reflect the student population that they serves? How do teacher demographics affect student performance? What other research is to come in this field?

· Check out this article to learn more about teacher demographics and student representation.

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.

Read the full article about teacher-student race matching by Anna J. Egalite at Education Next.