Research Suggests Students Don’t Need Teacher of Same Race to Succeed
Shocking, I know: race is not the most important part of a person’s identity and doesn’t determine how good you are at a given job.
Dave Huber at The College Fix has the story:
Do Kids Need Teachers Who ‘Look Like Them’ in Order to Succeed?
The “conventional wisdom.”
Inspired by the recent news out of Fresno, California where the minority community is upset that a new school hired a white teacher to teach courses on “cultural studies,” I ask the question: Do students (particularly minorities) require instructors of like hue to succeed in the classroom?
In American public schools today, aside from the “achievement gap,” there’s a another type of gap: that between the number of minority students and minority teachers. The number of the former is growing more rapidly than the latter.
The conventional wisdom answer says “yes” to the question. But some recent research says “not so fast.”
According to Walter Hunt, a recent graduate from University of Houston’s Executive Education Doctorate in Professional Leadership program and author of the study, they are not.
Hunt’s research — which examined eighth-graders and teacher diversity in 198 Title I Texas schools — revealed that the achievement gap between African-American and Caucasian students was greater on campuses with a larger percentage of African-American teachers.
“At first glance, it would appear that teacher race doesn’t matter when addressing student achievement of minority students, but there are many layers involved when analyzing achievement of a middle-school student, such as racial identity, self-identity, age, involvement in school activities,” Hunt said in a University of Houston release. “In this particular study, I was surprised to see that the campuses with more African-American teachers did not have the highest African-American student achievement. This just goes to show that having a positive impact on students is a complex, multi-layered process,” he added.
Precisely. It’s probably as complex and multi-layered a process as, say, teacher evaluations, but contemporary conventional wisdom lays much of the assessment of teacher competence on periodic achievement test scores.
Do Kids Need Teachers Who ‘Look Like Them’ in Order to Succeed? (The College Fix)
Comments
Good Grief!!!! The only reason to believe that a phenotype relates better to others of the same phenotype is because of stupidity. It’s all about the level of knowledge and competence of the person doing the teaching. All of this race garbage was really to reinforce diversity and racial quotas which would in turn employ minorities. If those minority hires are not good at what they do then those they teach will be at a disadvantage. So why was this policy instituted? Was it really to help minorities or was it to keep them from being successful? The people who made these policies were either stupid or evil. When I want to learn something, I go to the best person I can find to teach me regardless of race.