It’s true – teachers are the most important single factor in a student’s education.
Study after study shows that having a high-quality teacher can increase academic performance, college enrollment and college persistence rates, and even lifetime income. A low-quality teacher can have the opposite effect, dragging down students’ scores and self-confidence, making them less likely to reach their potential.
The crucial role teachers play in preparing their students for the future is why the results of two studies released this week are so troubling.
The first, “Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations,” examined teachers expectations of their students future success. Interviewing 16,000 black and non-black teachers about their 10th-graders future educational attainment, the researchers found white teachers were 30 percent less likely than black teachers to predict that their minority students would earn a college degree. The results were even worse when the teachers were asked about black male students.
Let’s be clear – these findings aren’t the result of outright racism by teachers. They are, however, borne out of the implicit biases many teachers have regarding student achievement.
Unfortunately, these biases don’t just affect how teachers view their students academic success in the future – they affect students access to educational opportunities right now.
A second study, authored by economists David Card from the University of California – Berkeley and Laura Giuliano from from the University of Miami, examined the impact the decision by Florida’s Broward County school board to test all second grade students to see if they qualified for the district’s gifted and talented program had on low-income minority enrollment in those programs.
What they found is promising and deeply worrisome, at the same time. The intervention worked – 80 percent more black students and 130 percent more Hispanic students qualified for the gifted and talented program. But, the previous system, which relied on teacher recommendations and parent initiative, was rife with implicit bias and asymmetric information.
Data on gifted and talented enrollment before the universal test proves this point. Even though Broward County’s schools served mostly minority students, the composition of its gifted and talented program was overwhelmingly white. In fact, there were districts in the county where not one single minority student was identified as gifted – a statistical impossibility.
Combined with the fact that minority parents were less likely to know about the program and push it for their children, it’s no surprise that minority students were less likely to be enrolled.
Thankfully, legislators – like Senator Andy Manar – have already taken steps to incentivize districts to properly identify and enroll intellectually curious minority students in gifted and talented programs. In fact, the last version of the education funding reform bill – Senate Bill 1 – included a weight that would give districts more money the more gifted and talented students they have.
Many question whether legislation to address this inequity should be tied to such a controversial initiative like Senate Bill 1, but what we do know is there is growing unity that it does need to be addressed. One Chance Illinois believes that teachers are the most important factor in student success, and these two studies about their perception of minority students’ abilities to qualify for gifted and talented or academically succeed in the future, should give any person concerned with education equity pause.
Certain steps can be taken to help teachers recognize and deal with the implicit biases they may have – high-quality professional development programs have been created to deal with precisely those issues.
But, perhaps it’s also time for defenders of the education status quo to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves whether they too are part of the problem.
Their common refrain that low-income, minority students don’t achieve because they are poor may itself be generating a vicious cycle, where teachers implicit biases prevent those same exact students from having educational opportunities that make future success possible.
Joshua Dwyer
Policy Director
