School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment

Owen Thompson

No 2019-14, Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: Prior to the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools occurring after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented a potential threat to this employment base, and this paper estimates how student integration affected black teacher employment. Using newly assembled archival data from 781 southern school districts observed between 1964 and 1972, I estimate that a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated education, which approximates the experience of the modal southern district in this period, led to a 25% reduction in black teacher employment. A series of tests indicate that these employment reductions were not due to school district self-selection into desegregation or unobserved district characteristics associated with desegregation. Additional estimates using synthetic cohorts from the Decennial Censuses indicate that displaced southern black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching, and that southern school districts compensated for reduced black teacher employment by employing fewer total teachers and by increasing their recruitment of white teachers, especially less experienced white teachers and white male teachers.

Keywords: School desegregation; education; African-American employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/OThompson_TeacherDeseg.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to web.williams.edu:443 (SSL connect attempt failed error:0A000152:SSL routines::unsafe legacy renegotiation disabled)

Related works:
Journal Article: School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment (2022)
Working Paper: School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wil:wileco:2019-14

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

The price is Free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College Williamstown, MA 01267. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Greg Phelan ().