Shanker Blog: Charter Schools and Teacher Diversity
A new study of North Carolina public schools finds that black students in charter schools are more likely to have black teachers than their regular public school counterparts, and that the positive effect of “teacher/student racial match” on the test scores of black students is more pronounced in charter than in regular public schools.
Like most good analyses of charter and regular public schools, this report, written by economist Seth Gershenson and published by the Fordham Institute, is an opportunity to learn from the comparison between the charter and regular public school sectors. For instance, the fact that the “match effect,” which is fairly well-established in the literature (e.g., Dee 2005), is stronger in charter schools is fascinating, though a well-informed discussion of the reasons why this may be the case is well outside of my rather modest wheelhouse (there are some possibilities mentioned in the paper’s conclusion).
I’d actually like to focus briefly on the first finding – that teacher/student racial match is more common for black charter school students. This is the descriptive and arguably less interesting part of the analysis, but it struck me because, like the paper's main finding about the magnitude of the "match effect," it too raises policy-relevant questions, in this case about why teacher diversity might vary between sectors.
Specifically, Gershenson reports that 35 percent of black charter school students had at least one black teacher between 2007 and 2012, compared with 22 percent of regular public school students.
This may be due in part to within-school assignments (i.e., charter schools may be more likely to assign black students to black teachers). It may also arise if black charter school teachers teach in schools with larger shares of black students than black regular public school teachers (though North Carolina charters overall, unlike those in most states, serve larger proportions of white and non-FRL-eligible students than do regular public schools in the state).
But the primary reason why racial match for black students is more common in charter schools is most likely the simple fact that charter schools employ more black teachers (as a proportion) than regular CONTINUE READING: Shanker Blog: Charter Schools and Teacher Diversity | National Education Policy Center