Softpedia >News >Science >Behavior/Humans
Softpedia Homepage   

Teachers Leave Schools with Inflow of Black Students

All good teachers apparently approve

May 28, 2009 01:01 GMT  ·  By
A new study shows that American teachers would rather work in a White-dominated classroom, than in one where African Americans are represented as well
   A new study shows that American teachers would rather work in a White-dominated classroom, than in one where African Americans are represented as well

According to the first study ever to assess the behavior of high-quality teachers in American schools, top educators are very likely to leave the institutions that are experiencing an affluence of African American students. In other words, whenever a learning institution – that is supposed to offer equal opportunities for everybody – gets more Black students, the best teachers move away, presumably to schools where White children are predominant. The new research paper was authored by Cornell University expert C. Kirabo Jackson, and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Labor Economics.

“It's well established that schools with large minority populations tend to have lower quality teachers. But it is unclear whether these schools are merely located in areas with a paucity of quality teachers, whether quality teachers avoid these schools because of the neighborhood or economic factors surrounding a school, or whether there is a direct relationship between student characteristics and teacher quality,” the expert wondered.

According to the troubling results, it would appear that it's not the neighborhoods in themselves that keep quality teachers away, but the race or ethnicity of the students themselves. And the correlation was most obvious in the case of the African American ones. “This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction. This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools,” he added. “This study implies teachers may prefer a student body that is more white and less black.”

For the new research, Jackson used data he collected from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district, in North Carolina, PhysOrg reports. In 2002, the minority population in predominantly Black schools was distributed evenly to schools around the area, which meant that some of these institutions suddenly received an inflow of African Americans in their classrooms. And that was the point at which some of the best teachers in those institutions simply left or asked to be reassigned.