Report: minority students get less effective, less experienced teachers
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.
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.
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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