Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Educational attainment gaps across socio-demographic groups are well-documented, large, and frustratingly persistent (Bailey & Dynarski 2011). Attainment gaps are policy relevant in part because they potentially generate negative externalities, but also because they could reflect sub-optimal investments in human capital by historically disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities. However, the sources of attainment gaps are poorly understood, which undermines effective policy remedies.

There is growing sense that attainment gaps originate as early as elementary school, when corresponding achievement gaps are observed. Accordingly, a large literature in economics investigates the efficacy of K-12 interventions and inputs. Teachers are generally agreed to be the most important school-provided determinants of test scores in the K-12 setting (Hanushek & Rivkin 2010). Moreover, primary school teachers have been shown to have long-run impacts on socio-economic outcomes over and above test scores, such as earnings and educational attainment (Chetty et al. 2014). However, with a handful of exceptions (e.g., experience), value-added methods fail to identify the observable teacher characteristics that drive differences in student outcomes, which limits the policy relevance of the knowledge that teachers matter and vary widely in quality.

A notable exception is mounting evidence of teacher-student demographic match effects (Dee 2004, 2007). Students, especially those from historically disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities, score higher on tests when they are randomly assigned to teachers that are demographically similar to them (Dee 2004). This provides important evidence of an observable characteristic that policy makers can respond to—and that can explain why some teachers are more effective with certain types of students than others. However, the policy relevance of these findings is limited because to date, student-teacher racial mismatch has only been shown to affect intermediate outcomes such as test scores, suspensions, and attendance, which could potentially fade out over time.

We contribute to this literature by estimating the long-run impact of having a same-race elementary school teacher on black students’ educational attainment. Using administrative data on the universe of public school students in North Carolina, we show that for black males, having at least one black teacher in grades 3-5 significantly reduces the probability of high school dropout by 8 percentage points (50%). For persistently low-income black males, this effect is even larger (70%). Similarly, for persistently low-income black students of both sexes, having at least one black teacher in grades 3-5 significantly increases the probability of expecting to earn a four-year college degree by 10 percentage points (30%).

We identify these arguably causal effects using an instrumental variables (IV) strategy that exploits transitory (conditionally random) variation within schools over time in the demographic composition of teachers (e.g., Bettinger & Long 2005, 2010; Fairlie et al. 2014). The results are quite robust to various modeling decisions.

By demonstrating that black students, particularly males and those from low-income households, invest more in their human capital when quasi-randomly exposed to a black teacher in grades 3-5, our findings suggest that even the most stubbornly persistent attainment gaps are not impervious to feasible policy responses.