Did Teachers' Race and Verbal Ability Matter in the 1960's? Coleman Revisited

Ronald Ehrenberg and Dominic Brewer

No 4293, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including race and verbal ability, influenced "synthetic gain scores" of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined. We find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic gain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers as it did for white teachers. Finally, holding teacher characteristics other than race constant, black teachers were associated with higher gain scores for black high school students, but lower gain scores for white elementary and secondary students. Because these findings are for American schools in the mid-1960's. they do not directly apply to our contemporary experience. However, they do raise issues that should be addressed in discussions of hiring policies in American education.

Date: 1993-03
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Economics of Education Review, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1-21, (March 1995).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4293.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:4293

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4293

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().