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According to a report released by The Center For American Progress, low-income students of color generally have less experienced and less effective teachers.

The report analyzed the evaluation scores of teachers in low-income and affluent districts in both Massachusetts and Louisiana.

From Huffington Post:

Throughout the past few years, states have been incentivized to adopt new teacher evaluation systems through Race To The Top funding. The teacher evaluations in Massachusetts and Louisiana — two states that are unique in making evaluation scores public — rate teachers based on measures like student scores on standardized tests and effectiveness during classroom observation sessions.

In Louisiana, where teachers are rated as either “ineffective,” “effective-emerging,” “effective-proficient” or “highly effective,” researchers found that “a student in a school in the highest-poverty quartile is almost three times as likely to be taught by a teacher rated ineffective as a student in a school in the lowest-poverty quartile.”

Similarly, students in schools with a high concentration of minorities are more than twice as likely to have an ineffective teacher than students in schools with a low minority enrollment.

Read more at Huffington Post

While Massachusetts has fewer teachers with poor ratings than Louisiana, students in high-poverty schools are three times as likely to be taught by a teacher rated “unsatisfactory” than students in low-poverty schools.

Click here for the full report.

Numerous studies show that education inequality is very real. What steps can we take to level the playing field?

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