Exploration of Public School Teachers' Risk for Stress: Does Racial/Ethnic Congruence Matter?

• In Event: 66.083 - Researching Stress and Developing Interventions That Promote Wellness in Educational Settings

Abstract

Objectives
This study explores patterns of teacher-student racial/ethnic congruence and teachers’ risk for stress, thereby serving as a foundational step in unpacking the intersections of race/ethnicity, workplace, and stress among U.S. classroom teachers.
Theoretical Framework
Not all are teachers are equally vulnerable to stress – some thrive, while in the classroom next door, others experience burnout symptoms. According to transactional theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), stress results from the overall appraisal by a teacher that their classroom resources are insufficient vis–à–vis their classroom demands; in other words, there is an imbalance of perceived demands in relation to perceived resources. The Classroom Appraisal of Resources and Demands (CARD; AUTHORS, 2009) measures stress risk from through a transactional framework. The CARD difference score between teachers’ ratings of classroom demands and resources, labeled the Appraisal Index, permits the classification of teachers into three groups according to their risk for stress (AUTHORS, 2016): teachers perceiving classroom resources as greater than demands (“Resourced”); resources as equal to demands (“Balanced”); c) and classroom demands as greater than resources (“Demands”). The Demands group is theorized to be most vulnerable to stress (AUTHORS, 2014). Teachers’ scores on the CARD have been linked to numerous indicators of occupational health, including job satisfaction, burnout symptoms, and occupational mobility (AUTHORS, 2016).
Recently, racial/ethnic congruence -- a racial/ethnic match between a teacher and the student body -- has emerged as a potential factor in occupational health outcomes. While existing findings are inconclusive, congruent pairings tend to be linked to positive outcomes, whereas racial/ethnic incongruence has been tied to decreased job satisfaction and increased incidences of student discipline (Grissom & Keiser, 2011; Mueller et al., 1999; Renzulli et al., 2011). The current study examines the role of racial/ethnic congruence in teachers’ risk for stress.
Methods: Data Source and Participants
The primary dataset of interest was the 2011-12 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which we merged with the 2011-12 Common Core of Data (CCD). The SASS provided information on teacher race/ethnicity, school structural characteristics, and teacher perceptions of workplace climate (through which we examined risk for stress). To capture the racial demography of schools, we merged the SASS teacher-level racial/ethnic demographic data with CCD school-level racial/ethnic demographic data from the 2011-12 CCD. After selecting for public and full-time public school teachers, the final sample consisted of 29,340 participants.
Results
Factorial ANOVA (teacher racial/ethnic group by school racial/ethnic group) analyses revealed significant differences in risk for stress by school, but no interaction or main effect was found for teacher race/ethnicity. However, chi-square tests revealed that when teachers were categorized according to risk for stress, proportional differences were identified across each of the school concentrations by racial/ethnic identification.
Scholarly Significance
Results indicate that there is substantial variation in how teachers appraise workplace conditions according to the racial/ethnic majority of the school’s student body.

Authors

• Jendayi Dillard, University of Texas at Austin

• Lauren Helena Boyle, The University of Texas at Austin

• Christopher J. Mccarthy, The University of Texas at Austin