Giving Compass' Take:

• Education Dive reports on a study that found that the odds of college enrollment for Black students who had a Black teacher increased by 13% when compared with peers who didn't.

• How can funders support more teacher training among minorities? In what ways can school districts create more opportunities for Black educators?

• Here are five ways that Black teachers benefit Black students.

A working paper based on an experiment with students in Tennessee, and recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), indicates that black students in grades K-3 who have a teacher of the same race are 7% more likely to graduate high school and 13% more likely to enroll in college than peers who did not have black teacher. Researchers replicated these findings in North Carolina in a study showing that providing black students with at least one black teacher at a young age can reduce the dropout rate by one-third, Inside Higher Ed reports.

These findings suggest that colleges can increase black enrollment by producing more black teachers to educate more black students in elementary schools. But producing enough black teachers to teach the 15.4% of students in the nation who are black would mean roughly doubling the number of black teachers by adding 256,000 more to the workforce.

However, diverting black college students from other more lucrative fields may have unintended consequences for the students and the economy because the median earnings for black college graduates who are not teachers is roughly $49,000 while the median earnings for black teachers is $45,000, the article states.

Read the full article about the importance of racial diversity among teachers by Amelia Harper at Education Dive.