Representative Bureaucracy, Ethnicity, and Public Schools: Examining the Link Between Representation and Performance

Demographic changes in the United States have led to challenges for public organizations that are tasked to serve shifting target populations. Many arguments exist for including greater numbers of ethnic minorities among an organization's personnel, under the guise that greater ethnic representation will result in greater competitiveness in the market or effectiveness in governance. This paper tests this proposition empirically, using data from the public education policy setting. Results show that representativeness along ethnic lines leads to gains for the organization as a whole, but some segments of the target population appear to respond more positively to representativeness than others. Working Paper 06-1