Akin to my teacher: Does caste, religious or gender distance between student and teacher matter? Some evidence from India

Shenila Rawal () and Geeta Kingdon
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Shenila Rawal: Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL.

No 10-18, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: This paper uses a unique data set from 5028 primary school children in rural India to examine whether the demographic interactions between students and teachers influence student outcomes and whether social distance between student and teacher exacerbates gender, caste and religious gaps in children's achievement. One would expect this to be the case if discrimination and/or role model effects persist in the classroom. School and individual fixed effects methodology are used. In the pupil fixed effects model, across subject variation is used to test whether having a teacher whose gender, caste and religion are the same as that of the student improves student test scores. We find statistically significant positive effects of matching student and teacher characteristics. We find that a student's achievement in a subject in which the teacher shares the same gender, caste and religion as the child is, on average, nearly a quarter of a SD higher than the same child's achievement in a subject taught by a teacher who does not share the child's gender, caste or religion. Policy implications are considered.

Keywords: education; religion; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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