Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Like race, ethnicity and gender, birth cohort is an important demographic characteristic that predicts personality, skills, and beliefs (Woodruff and Birren 1972). For teachers, birth cohort has the potential to be particularly important because in addition to shaping the childhood environment, cohort is predictive of the type of teacher training a teacher experienced. For example, culturally responsive pedagogy became popular in the mid-1990s so recent cohorts are much more likely to have gone through a teacher training program emphasizing diverse and culturally appropriate instruction compared to older cohorts. In this study, we provide the first empirical analysis of how teacher cohort affects student achievement, paying particularly close attention to how teacher cohort affects achievement gaps.

Using North Carolina administrative data, our preliminary analysis finds that teachers born in earlier cohorts have higher test score gaps by race relative to teachers from more recent cohorts. As in related research studying the effect of teacher race and gender on student outcomes, we cannot definitively identify the underlying mechanism that drives the reduced form results. We discuss several potential mechanisms and provide indirect empirical evidence on some of these mechanisms.