Elementary teacher occupational health outcomes across schools with varying resources and demographics

Equity for students includes access to a healthy teacher workforce across all school settings. This study sought to disentangle the role of racial/ethnic (in)congruence in teacher stress from school resources by using propensity score analysis to match Black, Hispanic, and White elementary teachers on individual, classroom, and school characteristics, and examining whether these matched teachers reported differences in stress outcomes when working in schools where the predominant student demography was either congruent or incongruent with their own. Data from the 2015−2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey was used to find propensity score matches among 7540 Black, Hispanic, and White elementary teachers. Black, Hispanic, and White teachers all reported stronger occupational health outcomes in higher‐resourced, majority‐White schools. Black and Hispanic teachers reported higher levels of occupational health outcomes than White teachers when teaching in under‐resourced, majority−minority schools. These findings suggest important implications for teacher training and support, such as considering increased training and reflection opportunities on culturally responsive teaching, broadening policies that homogeneously categorize and aim to uniformly support “teachers of color,” and examining the ways in which teacher identity uniquely informs their workplace experiences and may necessitate differentiated resources. Practitioner points (1) Black, Hispanic, and White teachers all reported stronger occupational health in well‐resourced schools serving a majority White student population. (2) In under‐resourced schools serving a majority of Black and Brown students, Black and Hispanic teachers reported stronger occupational health than White teachers. (3) The reported occupational health differences between Black and Hispanic teachers and White teachers in under‐resourced schools suggests teacher identity uniquely informs workplace experiences and may necessitate differentiated resources for teachers to thrive across a variety of settings.