Identity Intersections in the Classroom: The Impact of Teacher Identity on Student Experience and Achievement

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

The 2014/15 school year marks a turning point in the demography of American education. For the first time, non-White students will constitute the majority of public school enrollment (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2014). This milestone follows a decades long trend that shows no signs of slowing: By 2022, the Department of Education projects a further 21% increase in non-White students, accompanied by a 6% decline in White students (NCES, 2014).

While America’s students have grown increasingly diverse, its teaching force has remained predominantly White. In 2011/12, White teachers constituted 82.7% of the teaching force, slightly down from 87.6% in 1988 (NCES, 2013; Ingersoll and May, 2011).

This gap between students and teachers has long been a cause for concern within the education policy community. Since the mid-1980s, there have been several public and private initiatives to recruit more teachers of color (Villegas, Strom and Lucas, 2012). Underlying these efforts is a widely held assumption that Black and Hispanic teachers are differentially effective in teaching Black and Hispanic students. Surprisingly, however, the quantitative evidence behind this assumption is largely incomplete, indirect or outdated.

My project uses data from Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study to provide new evidence on the differential benefits of Black and Hispanic teachers. In particular, I take advantage of two unique features of the MET data to significantly advance our current state of knowledge. First, I use the random assignment of over 1,500 teachers to estimate causal impacts on student achievement. Second, I use over 60,000 student surveys to assess the mechanisms underlying any achievement effects.

Study design and methods

My study focuses on two student-level outcomes: achievement and experience. Student achievement is measured using state-administered end of year exams in Math and English Language Arts (ELA) in grades four through eight. Student experience is measured using the MET student perception survey, which contained about 70 questions on the teacher’s effectiveness, classroom environment, and student motivation. While other major studies of education (e.g., ELS:2002) have included extensive student surveys, the MET survey differs in at least two crucial regards. First, the survey captures the student’s perception of individual teachers and not school more generally. Second, the survey was administered to entire classrooms of students (not randomly selected individuals), allowing for large scale within-classroom comparisons.

Author

• Joel Mittleman, Princeton University