Study: Minority students do better under minority teachers

[dkf]

A group of researchers has found that minority students in community colleges tend to perform better when they’re taught by minority instructors — particularly those of similar race or ethnicity. In a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, three economists explain how the minority performance gap narrows: According to their research at California’s De Anza College, one of the biggest community colleges in the United States, black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American students are 2.9 percent more likely to pass courses with instructors of a similar racial or ethnic background. They elaborate:

We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout and pass rates between white and minority students falls by roughly half when taught by a minority instructor. In models that allow for a full set of ethnic and racial interactions between students and instructors, we find African-American students perform particularly better when taught by African-American instructors. . . . The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black instructor. Conditional on completing the course, the relative fraction attaining a B-average or greater is 13 percentage points higher.

The paper’s authors — Robert Fairlie, Florian Hoffmann and Philip Oreopoulos — conclude that this effect is due to minority students’ positive reactions to minority teachers — what other researchers have dubbed the “role-model effect”:

First, we find dropout effects from instructor race and ethnicity prior to receiving grades. This outcome is entirely determined by the student rather than the instructor. Second, as shown in table 4, it is the young students who are most affected by the instructor’s minority status . . . young students are likely to be susceptible to role-model effects, while older students are not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/study-minority-students-do-better-under-minority-teachers/2011/10/10/gIQAFZAWaL_blog.html

[Number23]

1. How interesting.

I grew up in an all-black environment. Didn't have a white teacher until I was in the 10th grade. Did pretty well. However I excelled when I went to a predominantly white university. And it's probably because I had teachers who, for the first time in my life, openly ignored or dismissed me.

Having grown up with "young, gifted and black" as my theme song, there was no way in hell I was going to allow that to happen. So in that regard, going to a white university helped propel me even further. But I was 17 years old when I started college. A black child going through something similar but at a much younger age could have a completely different experience.