Teachers, Race and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment. NBER Working Paper Series

Recommendations for the aggressive recruitment of minority teachers are based on hypothesized role model effects for minority students as well as evidence of racial bias among non-minority teachers. However, prior empirical studies have found little or no association between exposure to an "own-race" teacher and level of student achievement. This paper presents new evidence on this question by evaluating the test score data from the Tennessee's Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) class size experiment, which randomly matched students and teachers within participating schools. Empirical results based on these data confirm that the racial pairings of students and teachers in this experiment were independently given. Models of student achievement indicate that a 1-year assignment to an own-race teacher increased the math and reading achievement of both black and white students by roughly 3 to 4 percentile points. Notably, the estimated achievement gains associated with a same-race teacher exist for nearly all groups defined by race and gender. (Contains 11 tables and 28 references.) (SM)