Teachers, race and student achievement revisited

Abstract

Within the education literature, a controversy exists with respect to the issue of matching student and teacher race in an effort to improve student performance. Ehrenberg et al. (1995) finds very little support for this issue, while more recently Dee (2004) finds that there are significant educational gains when students are assigned to an own-race teacher. Dee's result is found after confirming that there was no association between assignment of an own-race teacher and student characteristics, i.e., sorting of students did not transpire. We extend Dee's work by including the effects of student innate ability and teacher gender on student achievement. Our findings indicate that once these two variables are taken into consideration, sorting of students does transpire, and matching students and teachers of similar race has no statistically significant affect on student achievement.