Do High School Students With Same-Race Teachers Attend School More Frequently?

• In Event: Chronic Absenteeism: Measuring Impact, Owning the Problem, Improving Policies, and Seeing Change

Abstract

For decades, there have been calls for a more diverse teacher workforce, and the evidence for doing so is quite clear. Research has found that teachers of color increase the performance of students of color. There are two primary mechanisms underlying these relationships: students with same-race teachers have stronger connections with these teachers, and teachers of same-race students tend to have higher expectations of their students. Underlying these mechanisms (connections, expectations) is the idea of being more motivated to attend school with a same-race teacher. That is, regardless of whether connection or expectation drives the outcomes, students of color nonetheless may be more motivated to attend school more often with a same-race teacher.

Yet, little work has examined school-attendance behavior when it comes to same-race matching of students and teacher. The work is limited in that it has only examined elementary school attendance. This is problematic because K-5 is certainly an age during which parents are strongly influential in their children’s attendance. This is also problematic because K-5 is a time period, developmentally, when children have not yet fully built their own understandings of racial identity, or the various roles teachers may help in developing this. To address these issues, this study aims to identify whether or not attendance in high school is also linked to the assignment of a same-race teacher.

Our study used administrative data provided by a small, urban California high school district for the school years 2014-2018. This district is predominately White and Latinx students, as well as White and Latinx teachers. Specifically, the district provided student demographic information, student transcript data, teacher demographics, and attendance logs. A key contribution of this study, we explore student absenteeism at the day and period-levels, exploiting variation in attendance patterns among student-teacher demographic matches while controlling for unobserved day-to-day variation. Using this rich, longitudinal dataset, we employed grade, school, course, student, and day fixed effects models to examine the association between teacher-student demographic match and student absenteeism.

Results suggest that demographic matches associated with declines in unexcused absences for Latinx students. The results also indicate that associations are strongest for Latinx students in 11th and 12th grades – the age group that has the most individual agency when it comes to getting themselves to school. We find no positive or negative relationship between teacher-student demographic match and absenteeism for non-Latinx students. Furthermore, we found no evidence of declines in excused absences, which reflect health. Rather, we only find evidence of declines in unexcused absences, which reflect school engagement and truancy.

Because this study found that students of color have less unexcused absences when they have a same-race teacher, this may suggest that students of color are more motivated to attend school when they are assigned same-race teachers who are more relatable and serve as mentors or role models rather than just teachers. And for students of color who may not have adults within their homes or communities of which they can confide in, same-race teachers oftentimes fill that void.

Authors

• Michael A. Gottfried, University of Pennsylvania

• Jacob Kirksey, Texas Tech University

• Tina L. Fletcher, University of Pennsylvania