Black Teachers Don’t Seem to Have Much Effect on the Success of Black Schoolchildren

Jesse Singal pointed me today to a new study of children who participated in the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment back in the 80s and 90s. I thought that STAR had already been mined for just about everything it could be, but it turns out a team of researchers has come up with something new. The STAR program was originally designed to test the effect of small class sizes, but the random assignment of children to classrooms meant they were also randomly assigned to different teachers. Does that make a difference? In particular, if black kids are assigned to black teachers, do they do better later in life? The researchers say yes:

Leveraging random student-teacher pairings in the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment, we find that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are […] 4 percentage points (13%) more likely to enroll in college than their peers in the same school who are not assigned a black teacher.

That sounds modest but promising. Unfortunately, Table 5 in the report tells us about more than just enrollment:

This is not so great. First, the effect was limited almost entirely to enrollment in community college. Second, although black children with black teachers were, overall, 4 percent more likely to enroll in college, they were only 2.7 percent more likely to stay past their first year—and this result was only marginally significant. Third, they were only 0.5 percent more likely to earn a degree. The authors confirm this in the text—”We find a near-zero, statistically insignificant effect on degree receipt”—but also offer up some gobbledegook to suggest this is no big deal: “However, given the very low rates of degree completion among non-matched students (8.5%), we cannot rule out degree receipt effects on the order of 1 or 2 percentage points. Effects in that range would suggest the marginal matched student induced into college persisting to degree receipt at around the same rate as the inframarginal, non-matched student.”

If I’m reading that correctly, it means the effect on earning a degree is about zero no matter what. That’s too bad, since this is really the only thing that matters. In fact, enrolling in college and not getting a degree probably does the kids no good and just leaves them with a bunch of student loans to pay off.

The authors spend a lot of time offering possible explanations for why having a same-race teacher in primary grades might help black kids, but I’m not sure this is worth speculating about unless there’s a larger, more convincing impact in the first place. For now, it looks to me like same-race teachers in primary grades have, at most, a tiny impact on children later in life, and most likely no real impact at all.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate