Contextualized Effects of Racial/Ethnic Matching Between Students and Teachers in Urban, Suburban, and Rural High Schools

Background/Context Policy makers and scholars have long called for the large-scale recruitment of teachers of color, partly based on evidence highlighting the positive effects of racial/ethnic matching between students and teachers of color on various student experiences and achievements. A more nuanced understanding of racial/ethnic matching effects moderated by contextual factors may help policy makers’ and administrators’ assignment decisions on how to consider student and teacher race/ethnicity. Purpose/Objective/Research Question This study examined the contextualized effects of racial/ethnic matching between high school students and teachers, focusing on the urbanicity of schools in the United States, by asking two main research questions: (1) What are the associations between the racial/ethnic matching of students and teachers, and students’ math achievement and self-efficacy in the United States overall? (2) What are the associations among racial/ethnic matching, math achievement, and math self-efficacy in urban schools, and do these patterns differ for suburban and rural schools? Research Design This study used restricted-use national longitudinal data provided by the NCES High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. A strategy of disaggregating data by schools’ urbanicity and three separate analyses with fixed-effect models for each urbanicity (urban, suburban, and rural) was followed to capture the variations across different schools’ urbanicity and to obtain unbiased estimates of racial/ethnic matching effects. Findings/Results Relatively lower percentages of Black, Hispanic, and Asian students were matched with their same-race/ethnicity math teachers compared with White students in all communities. This study found no supporting evidence for positive associations between racial/ethnic matching and math achievement scores and self-efficacy without considering urbanicity. Within the context of urbanicity, positive associations for math achievement were mainly found in the racial/ethnic matching of Black and Asian students taught by same-race/ethnicity teachers in suburban schools. Conversely, the racial/ethnic matching among Asian students and teachers in rural schools was significantly and negatively associated with both math achievement and self-efficacy. Conclusions/Recommendations By focusing specifically on schools’ urbanicity contexts, policy makers and education leaders should consider the relatively lower percentage of racial/ethnic matching