This fall Teach for America welcomes its “most diverse” corps in its history, according to a recent press release, with 50 percent of its teachers identifying as people of color.
“We’re proud that our incoming corps is more diverse than it’s ever been,” said Elisa Villanueva Beard, the group’s co-CEO. “We know that teachers from all backgrounds can have a meaningful impact on their students’ trajectories.”
Really? How meaningful?
Sure, we’re constantly told that having teachers who look like us — whether of the same race or gender — is important to our learning experience. But what about all those generations of immigrants who came to this country and were able to learn just fine from people of other races and ethnicities?
And what about the Asian kids who learn well today, though their teachers are overwhelmingly not Asian?
Maybe some cultural factors have shifted. For instance, if black kids today are getting the unfortunate message that education is a white value and that working hard in school is “acting white,” then perhaps having a black teacher will change that perspective.
The research, though, is not exactly conclusive. One of the largest studies was done by Thomas Dee, a Swarthmore economics professor, who wrote up his results in a 2004 article in Education Next.
Looking at a dataset of more than 20,000 separate observations of students in Tennessee, Dee found that:
“On average, students’ performance improved by roughly 2 to 3 percentile points during their first year with a teacher of the same race,” and kids who spent more years with same-race teachers added to those gains.
“The cumulative effect of being assigned to an own-race teacher for four consecutive years is roughly 9 percentile points in math and 8 points in reading,” Dee found.
Of course, those gains lump together how white students fared with white teachers, blacks with blacks and so on.
And these gains are “zero sum,” notes Jay Greene, who heads the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
That is, students who aren’t the same race as the teacher don’t get the benefit. Are we supposed to segregate our classrooms to maximize this effect?
Anyway, says Greene, if you look at all such studies, you find, “The benefit [of having same-race teachers] is tiny” when compared to other possible improvements.
Finally, he notes, “Legally we can’t consider race when hiring so it is mostly useless to try to improve things by changing the race of teachers. Yes, we should recruit broadly for quality teachers but we should do that no matter what.”
Indeed, the real question isn’t how to improve the diversity of the teacher corps, but how to improve teacher quality: We need more teachers who help their students perform well.
Right now, the quality of American teachers is in a sorry state. Decades of studies suggest that it’s the lowest-caliber students who are most likely to enter the teaching profession and stay in it for the long haul.
The best teachers, though, make a real difference. Economist Eric Hanushek has found that the top 15 percent of teachers “raise the present value of each student’s lifetime earnings by over $20,000.” For a class of 20 kids, he notes, that means “over $400,000 in economic benefits.”
These high-performing ones are exactly the kind of teachers that Teach for America manages to recruit every year. Kids who are at the top of their Ivy League graduating classes. (About one in five Harvard grads applies to the program.)
In other words, Teach for America already has the cream of the crop. If it wants to concern itself with diversity when deciding between a Havard math major and a Yale one, well who can argue with that?
But the vast majority of our country’s school districts aren’t in that position. For them, the diversity argument is merely a distraction from the more important question: How good is the teacher?