More than a decade of research on teacher characteristics shows that, on almost every quality measure you can think of, schools with large populations of low-income, minority, and low-achieving students get shortchanged. They have fewer experienced teachers, fewer teachers teaching within their field, and teachers who show greater variations in effectiveness, including more of the worst performers.
A new paper indicates that these patterns may be more entrenched than we knew: Even withinschools, this kind of "systematic matching" of teachers to students appears to occur, likely the product of both principal and teacher decisions.
Published this month in the Sociology of Education, the paper, by Stanford University researchers Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb, and Tara Béteille at the World Bank in Washington, finds that within schools, less experienced and minority teachers are more frequently assigned classes with lower-achieving students than their more experienced or white colleagues.
