Do Low-Income Students Have Equal Access to the Highest-Performing Teachers?

Conducted by Mathematica, this Institute of Education Sciences (IES) brief sheds needed light on a controversial education-policy topic: The teacher-quality gap. While it is well known that disadvantaged youngsters have teachers with less experience and fewer credentials, there is precious little evidence showing that these easy-to-measure attributes correlate with teacher effectiveness. So IES decided to look at effectiveness itself. Through an analysis of value-added data for over 11,000 teachers in ten large districts, analysts found that, compared with their well-off peers, low-income middle schoolers had dramatically less access to the highest-performing teachers (defined as the top 20 percent of faculties, based on average student performance across multiple years, within each subject or grade level). But here’s a head scratcher: There was no significant difference in access at the elementary level. Parsing data out by district, researchers unearthed still more interesting findings. For example, one district saw an abundance of the highest-quality teachers in their low-income elementary schools (35 percent in the poorest quintile compared to 12 percent in the wealthiest). Unfortunately, the brief stops short of diving into the policies and practices that might have helped districts like this one close (or reverse) the teacher-effectiveness gap. One hopes a part II is on the horizon.

Steven Glazerman and Jeffrey Max, “Do Low-Income Students Have Equal Access to the Highest-Performing Teachers?,” (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, April 2011).