Content area
Full text
Deciphering the causal effects, or “treatment effects”, of different educational designs on student outcomes is an increasingly difficult task in the United States. Understanding these effects is vitally important in order to provide students with the best opportunity for positive educational outcomes. This difficulty in parsing out design outcomes is due in large part to state-to-state variation in education approaches, particularly in low-income Black and Brown communities. It is also exacerbated by the ethical considerations of conducting randomized experiments in the public education sphere. Therefore, it is rare to find strong correlations between a treatment and long run student outcomes.
Same-race teaching is one of the few treatments that appear to have long run benefits on student outcomes
There is no doubt, though, that race plays a significant role in student outcomes. Researchers Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M.D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance Lindsay, and Nick Papageorge recognize the potential for a causal relationship between race and education and examine this interaction on a granular level, focusing on the relationship between student and teacher. Specifically, they explore the role of same-race teaching. Same-race teaching is one of the few treatments that appear to have long run benefits on student outcomes, which is important considering baseline outcome rates for Black students are relatively low. The United States Census Bureau reported 55% of Black students graduated from high school in 1985 (we use this year because the study does), and 12% graduated from college. The authors approach the experiment by conducting an analysis of the Tennessee STAR study of 1985 and leveraging their findings against North Carolinian administrative data from 2000-2005.
The Tennessee STAR data consists of students in grades...