Let's Talk About Race: Racial Teacher Matching and Student Achievement Growth

Should public school districts purposefully recruit African American teachers to help close the racial achievement gap? To answer this question, piecewise achievement growth models are fit to all seven data points in the Early Childhood Education Longitudinal Study in a test of the racial matching hypothesis, which posits that African American students experience greater rates of achievement growth when they have African American elementary school teachers. Furthermore, this study situates the racial teacher matching hypothesis as a test of two larger theoretical frameworks pertaining to the black-white test score gap, namely the oppositional culture and sociolinguistic theories. The results of this study yield null effects of racial teacher matching on students' achievement growth rates, which supports neither the sociolinguistic nor the oppositional cultural hypothesis. Positioning the findings of this study within the current era of accountability in American education leads to two possible interpretations of the null effects of racial teacher matching on the achievement growth rates of black students: 1) the increasing professionalization of the teaching profession, and 2) the increasing standardization of the task of teaching.