Same Race Teachers Do Not Necessarily Raise Academic Achievement

Abstract

Numerous studies have found that students who are of the same race as their teacher experience increased academic achievement. In this paper, I attempt to explain when these benefits occur and which students are most likely to achieve the largest gains. Using exogenous variation in student–teacher matches and classroom composition from Tennessee’s Project STAR experiment, I find that below average achieving students benefit most from having a teacher of the same race, but the benefits from matching can be substantially reduced in smaller classes. Moreover, the effect is decreased in racially homogeneous classes where the teacher is the majority race.