Teachers, Race and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment

Abstract.—Recommendations for the aggressive recruitment of minority teachers are based on hypothesized role-model effects for minority stu-dents as well as evidence of racial biases among nonminority teachers. However, prior empirical studies have found little or no association between exposure to an own-race teacher and student achievement. This paper presents new evidence on this question by examining the test score data from Tennessee’s Project STAR class-size experiment, which ran-domly matched students and teachers within participating schools. Spec-ification checks confirm that the racial pairings of students and teachers in this experiment were unrelated to other student traits. Models of student achievement indicate that assignment to an own-race teacher significantly increased the math and reading achievement of both black and white students. I