Teacher Quality Gaps by Disability and Socioeconomic Status: Evidence From Los Angeles

• In Event: Effectiveness and Equity in Education for Students With Disabilities

Abstract

Objectives/Significance
In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1 (2017), the US Supreme Court stressed the need to ensure equitable education outcomes for students with disabilities (SWD).
Teachers play the largest school-level role in moving student achievement (Rockoff, 2004), yet the distribution of effective teachers may not be evenly distributed within and/or across schools. Documenting where teacher quality gaps exist is an important first step towards better education outcomes for SWDs. We explore teacher quality gaps in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) across two characteristics: SWD status and school-level disadvantage. Given the special education teacher shortage and the higher costs and support needs associated with students with disabilities, it seems likely that quality gaps may exist between teachers who teach SWDs and those who teach non-SWDs. However, because SWDs are afforded more legal protections than their non-SWD peers, SWDs may potentially enjoy greater access to high quality teachers. Indeed, Gilmor and Henry (2018) find little evidence of teacher quality gaps for SWDs overall in North Carolina.
We contribute to the literature by answering the following questions about LAUSD:
Are there teacher quality gaps between SWD and their peers?
Do teacher quality gaps vary across schools with different degrees of disadvantage?
Do teacher quality gaps vary by specific disability type?
Data
Our study utilizes LAUSD administrative data from SY2014-2015 through SY2016-2017 and includes all kindergarten through 8th grade students attending mainstream public schools during these years. Our main analysis focuses on four aspects of teacher quality: novice (<2 years of experience), teacher evaluation scores, value-added measures, and hiring scores.
We extend the work of Goldhaber et al. (2015, 2018), by applying the same teacher quality gap methods to the SWD context. We use a simple bivariate regression of the following form:
(1) Y_ijsb= β_0+〖β_1 Disability〗_ijsb+ e_ijsb
where Yijsb represents the teacher quality measure of interest (i.e. <= 2 years of experience) for student i matched with teacher j at school s, and b represents the disadvantage bin (i.e. FRL < 70%, FRL 70-<95%). For our main results, Disabilityijsb is an indicator variable for students with disabilities. Standard errors are clustered at the school-level. The bivariate regression allows us to calculate student with disabilities’ exposure rates for teachers across different quality measures, as well as the exposure rates for their non-SWD peers, and to test if this difference (captured in β_1) is statistically significant.
Results
Preliminary results indicate that overall, SWDs in LA are significantly more likely to have low quality teachers as measured by teacher experience, evaluation scores, and value-added. Of these measures, access to experienced teachers for SWDs drops precipitously as free/reduced-price lunch rates rise or average math achievement falls relative to both non-SWDs in similar schools and SWDs in more advantaged schools. Results are more mixed for other teacher quality measures. VAM and novice teacher quality gaps are most pronounced for students with specific learning disabilities and autism, while we see no teacher quality gaps between students with Speech/Language Impairment and their non-SWD peers.

Authors

• Ijun Lai, Michigan State University

• Jesse Wood, Michigan State University

• Scott Imberman, Michigan State University

• Katharine Omenn Strunk, Michigan State University

• Nathan Jones, Boston University