(A White Teacher calls a Black Student the "N" word.)
Free Republic, University of Chicago Press Journals, Chicago Journals----
The reshuffling of students due to the end of student busing in Charlotte‐Mecklenburg provides a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between changes in student attributes and changes in teacher quality that are not confounded with changes in school or neighborhood characteristics. Comparisons of ordinary least squares and instrumental variable results suggest that spatial correlation between teachers’ residences, students’ residences, and schools could lead to spurious correlation between student attributes and teacher characteristics. Schools that experienced a repatriation of black students experienced a decrease in various measures of teacher quality. I provide evidence that this was primarily due to changes in labor supply.C. Kirabo Jackson, Cornell University
A study forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics suggests that high-quality teachers tend to leave schools that experience inflows of black students. According to the study's author, C. Kirabo Jackson (Cornell University), this is the first study to show that a school's racial makeup may have a direct impact on the quality of its teachers.
"It's well established that schools with large minority populations tend to have lower quality teachers," Dr. Jackson said. "But it is unclear whether these schools are merely located in areas with a paucity of quality teachers, whether quality teachers avoid these schools because of the neighborhood or economic factors surrounding a school, or whether there is a direct relationship between student characteristics and teacher quality."
Dr. Jackson's findings suggest that it's not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it's the students—and it's directly related to their race.
"This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction," Jackson said. "This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools."
The study focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district in North Carolina. In 2002, the district ended its race-based busing program, which distributed the district's minority population across its schools. When the policy ended, some schools had a large and sudden inflow of black students. Since the racial makeup of the schools changed suddenly but the neighborhood and economic factors surrounding them stayed the same, Jackson could test the impact the student body itself had on teacher quality.
Using data supplied by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, Jackson found that schools that had an increase in black enrollment suffered a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores. Teacher effectiveness, as measured by teachers' previous ability to improve student test scores, decreased in the black inflow schools as well. The change in quality for each school generally occurred in the same year that the busing program ended, indicating that teachers moved in anticipation of more black students.
"This study implies teachers may prefer a student body that is more white and less black," Jackson says.
Black teachers were slightly more likely than white teachers to stay in the schools that experienced a black inflow, the study found. However, those black teachers who did leave black schools tended to be the highest qualified black teachers. So the decline in quality was somewhat more pronounced among black teachers than white teachers.
Just what it is about black students that pushes high-quality teachers away is hard to pin down, Dr. Jackson says. It could be that teachers are reacting to notions about black students' achievement or income levels.
U.S. News & World Report-----
Do Good Teachers Leave When Black Students Enroll?
A recently released study that looks at the effects of an influx of African-American students into various schools within an urban North Carolina school district is raising some interesting questions about patterns of teacher movement.
The study by C. Kirabo Jackson, an associate professor of labor economics at Cornell University, shows that the highest quality teachers in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district left their schools after a long-running busing policy to promote integration was ended. Jackson's study, published in the Journal of Labor Economics, tracked the changes that occurred before and after the busing policy ended between 2002 and 2003. Because the racial makeup of the schools changed suddenly but the neighborhood and economic factors overall stayed the same, the research was able to focus directly on the impact the student body itself had on teacher quality.
"This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower-quality instruction," says Jackson. "This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools."
Using data from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, Jackson found that schools that had an increase in black enrollment saw a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores. Teacher effectiveness, as measured by teachers' ability to improve student test scores, also went down in the schools with an inflow of black students. The change in teacher quality generally occurred when the busing program ended, indicating that teachers moved in anticipation of more black students.
It is unclear whether the teacher-movement patterns in the 137,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg district would be typical of other large, urban school systems. A growing body of research does show that schools in low-income areas with high concentrations of minority students tend to have teachers who are considered, on average, to be of a lower quality than those in more affluent areas. And plenty of studies document how common it is for teachers to move from shaky, high-needs schools to better-performing suburban schools.
But it is almost impossible to pin down the reasons why some teachers stay away from, or leave, struggling schools. Is it out of convenience to be closer to their own suburban homes? Better pay? A desire to teach students from a particular background or of a particular ethnicity? In an interview with Education Week, Jackson says his study might offer a handle on those questions.
"An important implication of these findings is that policymakers should be cautious when advocating policies such as vouchers, school choice, district consolidation, or school busing that require the reshuffling of students across schools," the study concludes, because shifts in student population might lead to shifts in teacher quality.
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Sources: Free Republic, University of Chicago Press Journals, Chicago Journals, Cornell University, U.S. News & World Report, Education Week, Managing Diversity, Media Counton2, Whitehouse.gov, Youtube, Useless Junk, Flickr, American Corner, Google Maps
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