Minority Students Often Placed With Worst Teachers

B. A. Birch reports on the Education News website about the results of an Education-Trust West study that shows that low-income, minority children are likely to be placed with the worst performing teachers in a school.  The findings come after another 18-month long study that found that having good minority teachers for three or more years is quite helpful in helping Hispanic and black students to improve to a level that is comparable to their white and Asian peers.

Researchers in this study found the following:

• Students who had the worst ranked teachers were stuck below grade level.
• Seniority-based layoffs often meant that schools had more ineffective senior teachers in low performing schools.  When budget cuts had to be made, more lower-paid teachers had to be let go while the higher paid yet ineffective senior teachers remained.

The study researchers recommend the following:

• Better professional development for teachers
• Evaluation methods and incentives that help retain top teachers in high-poverty schools
• Reform to state laws that mandate seniority-based layoffs
• Increased oversight to ensure that top teachers are spread equitably among schools

 

High-Quality Teachers May Shun Schools With Large Minority Populations

C. Kirabo Jackson, Ph. D.

In a Science Daily article “Teachers Choose Schools According to Student Race, According to Study,” C. Kirabo Jackson, author of “the first study to show that a school’s racial makeup may be a direct impact on the quality of its teachers,”  reported that high-quality teachers avoid teaching in schools with large minority populations or with an inflow of minority students.

By reviewing data from the North Carolina Education Research Center, Dr. Jackson determined that in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district, “schools that had an increase in black enrollment suffered a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores.”  Notably, teachers who had been effective previously often saw their ability to improve test scores diminish with the inflow of black students.  This change in quality typically happened “in the same year that the busing program ended.”  Jackson found that teachers moved when they anticipated that they would have more black students.  Even though black teachers were more inclined to remain in the school, if they did leave, they “tended to be the highest qualified black teachers.”