These results come from a longitudinal study that tracked 100,000 black students who entered 3rd grade in North Carolina public schools between 2001 and 2005 all the way up through 12th grade.
Researchers later replicated their findings in Tennessee, by looking at black students who entered kindergarten in the late 1980s through a class-size-reduction program. Those students who had at least one black teacher in kindergarten through 3rd grades were 15 percent less likely to drop out, and 10 percent more likely to take a college entrance exam.
The paper was published by the Institute of Labor Economics in March. Co-author Nicholas Papageorge, an assistant economics professor at JHU’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, told Education Week Teacher that while he wasn’t sure why there was a link between teachers’ race and positive outcomes for black students, he had some ideas.
First, it could be that some of the black teachers in the study were just better teachers. Another option is that this is an example of the role-model effect.
“We think that students, especially poor black boys, might not identify with higher levels of education; they might not see people with high levels of education that look like them,” he said. “If that’s the case, they might not be making investments in their own education … because they just [don’t] identify with being an educated professional.”
Another possibility is that black teachers, Papageorge said, tend to have higher expectations of future educational attainment for black students than white teachers do. Those high expectations matter, he said, pointing to a study he published last year, which found that compared to black teachers, white teachers are 40 percent less likely to expect that their black students will graduate high school.
Only 7 percent of public school teachers are black. Research has found that black teachers are less likely to suspend, expel, or give detention to black students, who are disproportionately given exclusionary discipline.
“We want to make sure that every black student has classroom time with a black teacher because of this effect,” he said.
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