The Distribution of Teacher Effectiveness: Economic and Race/Ethnic Disparities in Opportunities to Learn

• In Event: 246 - Regular Session. Schools, Social Mobility, and the Reproduction of Inequality

Abstract

Opportunities to learn are the “lynchpin” how formal schooling contributes to educational inequality but challenging to operationalize in practice (Grodsky, Warren, and Felts 2008). Drawing on the literature on teacher effects, this paper considers assignment to an effective teacher as an indicator of one important dimension of the opportunities to learn that students experience. I estimate value-added measures of teacher effectiveness for North Carolina teachers in grades 3-8 between 2007 and 2013 and assess to what extent students from advantaged social background are assigned more effective teachers. I find detectable disparities in teacher effectiveness for poor, American Indian, African American, and Hispanic students, driven by greater exposure to especially ineffective teachers. However, the magnitude of these differences is substantively small, smaller than those implied by traditional measures of teacher quality such as experience. Thus, the relatively small differences in this important domain of learning opportunities may explain some of the apparent equalizing effects of schooling (Downey, von Hippel, and Broh 2004).

Author

• Paul Hanselman, University of California-Irvine