By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

MIAMI – It’s a demonstrated fact that many minority students, and kids of all races living in poverty, frequently have less qualified teachers than their white and more prosperous peers.

That phenomenon is most obvious when comparing different school districts. The more qualified teachers tend to end up in more prosperous districts, while the rest take jobs where they can find them.

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But a new study suggests that this tendency also exists within individual school districts, and it may not necessarily be a bad thing, according to an article in CommonWealth Magazine.

The study comes from Stanford University, whose researchers closely studied teacher assignment patterns in the Miami Dade school district, which is the fourth-largest in the nation.

They found that “less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned to classes with lower achieving students than are their more experienced, white, and male colleagues,” the news report said. “Teachers who hold leadership positions and those who attended more competitive undergraduate institutions are also assigned higher achieving students.”

But that may be a natural and even beneficial pattern, the report argues.

For instance, teachers with degrees from more competitive universities tented to be assigned to higher-performing students because they have more mastery of their subject matter, according to the news story. Female teachers were more likely to be special education instructors, so their students are bound to have lower test scores. And minority teachers tended to be assigned to minority students, a practice which has been demonstrated in some studies to improve minority student learning.

So perhaps there is some method to this seemingly unfair madness.

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As the news report put it, “the study provides a lot of new food for thought to the discussion of teacher effectiveness. Some of the sorting the study observed seems to be further evidence within schools of the type of the disparities in teacher quality seen between more and less affluent school districts. But the authors note that some of the patterns seen in Miami-Dade are likely to be neutral or beneficial to students.”

The study was published in the April edition of Sociology in Education.