She Did It on Purpose: Teacher Education Students' Interpersonal Attributions of Black Girls' Behavior and Classroom Disciplinary Decisions

Disturbingly, research indicates that regardless of their race, gender, or language(s) spoken, teachers possess a racial bias against Black students that is on par with the general public (Starck et al., 2020). [...]less qualified teachers are systematically funneled into school districts within communities of lower socioeconomic status, which are already lacking critical resources (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2019; Wilson, 2015). To compound existing issues in these communities, Black children are more likely than White children to receive inadequate instruction from inexperienced and perfunctorily trained teachers who are predisposed to project their biases surrounding "race, class, gender, and family backgrounds" onto their students (Cooper, 2003, p. 102). Urban schools notoriously have the highest rates of such teachers (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2019) and studies have found that "the difference in teacher quality may represent the single most important school resource differential between minority and White children [that] ... explains at least as much of the variance in student achievement as socioeconomic status" (Cooper, 2003, p. 105).