Having at least one Black teacher in the third through fifth grade “significantly reduces” the likelihood that Black male students will drop out of high school and increases the likelihood that both Black male and female students will aspire to attend a four-year college.
Such are the key findings of a new study that examined data in two states — North Carolina and Tennessee — and found similar results.
Dr. Constance Lindsay — a public administration and policy professorial lecturer at American University and a co-author of the study — says one of the major implications of the study is that educational leaders can make a difference in outcomes for Black students by ensuring that they have Black teachers during the latter part of their elementary school experience.
It’s a relatively easy fix that doesn’t come with a big price tag.
“One of the things that we thought about is [that], a lot of times, education interventions will be these huge, expensive things and not get any results,” Lindsay said. “Here we found that doing something that isn’t necessarily a big, large expensive intervention in terms of diversifying the workforce is actually something that brings about results that are large.”
In the study — titled “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers” — Lindsay and her fellow researchers found that, in North Carolina, having a Black teacher in grades 3 through 5 “significantly reduced the probability of dropping out of high school among low-income Black males by seven percentage points, or 39 percent.”
“Similarly, regarding postsecondary educational attainment, we find that among persistently-poor students of both sexes, exposure to at least one Black teacher in grades 3-5 increased students’ self-reported intent to pursue a four-year college degree” by about 19 percent, the study states.
