A new study by Dan Goldhaber and colleagues provides loads of descriptive data that document the extent and depth of the teacher quality gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Dan and many others have produced research that repeatedly shows that disadvantaged kids get the short end of the stick when it comes to high-quality teachers. But the bottom line of this latest study is that this inequitable distribution of teachers plays out no matter how you define teacher quality (experience, teacher licensure exam score, or value-added estimates) and no matter how you define student disadvantage (free-and-reduced-priced lunch status, underrepresented minority status, or low prior academic performance).
The analysts use grades 3–10 data from Washington State for the 2011–12 school year. They target fourth-grade classrooms in particular, then replicate their analysis for the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
Here’s a summary of their findings: The distribution of prior-year value-added estimates for teachers of students on free and reduced-price lunch is routinely lower than the distribution for fourth graders who aren’t eligible for the lunch program. Low-income fourth graders are also more likely to have teachers who earned lower scores on the teacher licensure exam. Worse, the distribution of low-quality teachers is most inequitable within the most disadvantaged districts.
These trends continue in seventh grade. For example, almost 20 percent of low-performing seventh-grade math students are assigned to teachers with low prior year VAM estimates—versus just 7 percent for high-performers. And the average experience of a seventh-grade minority student’s teacher is 1.75 years less than the average experience of a white student’s teacher—who also scores roughly 4–5 points higher on the licensure exam.
In short, disadvantaged kids are less likely to be taught by high-quality teachers in nearly every grade level. These trends are driven mostly by teacher sorting across districts and schools rather than across classrooms in schools, though inequities exist at all levels. A number of factors could be driving these trends, starting with the fact that many teachers prefer working in whiter, lower-poverty schools. Union contracts that abet the movement of senior teachers to such schools are also part of the problem.
SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, Lesley Lavery, and Roddy Theorbald, "Uneven playing field? Assessing the teacher quality gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students," Educational Researcher (June 2015).
