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Black Students Assigned A Black Teacher In Grades K-3 Are More Likely To Graduate, Go To College

Black Students Assigned A Black Teacher In Grades K-3 Are More Likely To Graduate, Go To College

Written by Ann Brown

Nov 30, 2018

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Kids are in school at least six hours a day, and they sometimes spend more time with their teachers than their parents, so it is all the more important that teachers reflect the diversity of the student body. There are much deeper ramifications for why Black students should have Black teachers.


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Black students who have one Black teacher are more likely to go to college, according to a new study by researchers at University of Connecticut, Johns Hopkins University, American University, and the University of California-Davis. They published their findings in a working paper titled “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers” from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Black students who had just one Black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college – and those who’d had two Black teacher were 32 percent more likely. Having at least one Black teacher in elementary school lowered the student’s probability of being a dropout by 29 percent for low-income Black students – and 39 percent for extremely low-income Black boys, according to the researchers.

“Having just one Black teacher in elementary school not only makes children more like to graduate high school – it also makes them significantly more likely to enroll in college,” Phys.org reported.

Black students who were taught by a Black teacher in kindergarten were as much as 18 percent more likely than their peers to attend college. “Black children who had two black teachers during the program were 32 percent more likely to go to college than their peers who didn’t have black teachers at all,” Phys.org reported.

Who teaches your child is important. Another working paper by the same team titled “Teacher Expectations Matter” showed that teachers’ beliefs about a student’s college potential can affect that child’s future. “Every 20 percent increase in a teacher’s expectations raised the actual chance of finishing college for white students by about 6 percent and 10 percent for Black students. However, because Black students had the strongest endorsements from Black teachers, and Black teachers are scarce, they have less chance to reap the benefit of high expectations than their white peers,” Phys.org reported.

Black students
Image: Anita Sanikop

Why do teachers have such influence on children? For one, they are a consistent person in a child’s life. “Black student students often don’t have parents or other Black adults in their lives who have gone to college and gotten professional jobs,” said Joshua Hyman, an assistant professor of public policy at University of Connecticut who co-authored the papers.

“All it takes is one Black teacher to influence a student,” he said. “They see someone like them in their classroom and start to believe they can go to college too, and get a good job.”

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