Equity in Education

Achieving equity in our schools is complex, important work that must involve all stakeholders. Several school districts in our area such as Abington have full-time equity officers to assess and cultivate equity in our school buildings. Below, you’ll find resources that may be useful to start conversations with your school entity and community members about the importance of equity in education.

Delaware Valley Consortium for Excellence & Equity

The Delaware Valley Consortium for Excellence and Equity (DVCEE) currently serves 39 school districts in Greater Philadelphia along with three county intermediate units and the Pennsylvania State Education Association. They are part of a regional network of school districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware committed to working together to enhance the achievement, well-being, and future success of their struggling diverse students and close the districts’ pervasive and long-standing opportunity and achievement gaps.

Working intensively over the past fifteen years, DVCEE developed a unique, cost-effective and self-sustaining regional school district consortium model for addressing priority areas. They focus on inter-district collaboration and shared learning for continuous improvement in closing the preparation, opportunity, and achievement gaps for disproportionate numbers of students of color and/or students coming from economic disadvantage.

CAPS applauds the districts in Bucks and Montgomery Counties working with this Consortium: Abington, Bensalem, Colonial, Centennial, Central Bucks, Cheltenham, Council Rock, Hatboro-Horsham, Jenkintown, Lower Merion, Morrisville, Neshaminy, Norristown Area, North Penn, Spring-Ford Area, Springfield Township, Upper Merion, and Wissahickon.

If you are a resident of any of these districts, please take a moment to thank your school board for their commitment to eliminating achievement and attainment disparities defined by race/ethnicity, economics, gender, or (dis)ability.

For more information about the programs and opportunities available to participating districts, please visit the Coalition for Educational Equity.

ProPublica | Is There Racial Inequality at Your School?

Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database called “Is There Racial Inequality at Your School?” to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts.

Equitable Education In the News

WHYY – ‘They see me as a role model’: Black teachers improve education outcomes for Black students

Scholarly Articles About Equity for Students

• Battey, D., Leyva, L. A., Williams, I., Belizario, V., Graco, R., & Shah, R. (2018). Racial (mis)match in middle school mathematics classrooms: Relational interactions as a racialized mechanism. Harvard Educational Review, 88(4), 455-482. This article builds on the racial match-academics research by adding the contributor of student-teacher relationship and shows that relational interactions are predictors of the ups and downs in achievement related to racial match.

• Dee, T. S. (2004). Teachers, race, and student achievement in a randomized experiment. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(1), 195-210. Students in Tennessee have higher achievement in math and reading with same-race teachers using very high-quality experimental design and statistical analyses.

• Egalite, A. J., Kisida, B., & Winters, M.A. (2015). Representation in the classroom: The effect of own-race teachers on student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 45, 44-52. This article goes beyond Black-White teacher diversity (although that is the major focus). It also adds that lower-achieving students benefit from racial congruence even more so than standard and high-achieving students.

• Gershenson, S., Hart, C.M.D., Hyman, J., Lindsay, C., & Papageorge, N.W. (2018). The long-run impacts of same-race teachers. [Working paper: 25254] National Bureau of Economic Research. DOI 10.3386/w25254
  This is another paper using Tennessee data showing racial match for Black students increased high school graduation likelihood by 5 percentage points and college enrollment by 4.

• Gershenson, S., Holt, S. B., & Papgeorge, N. (2016). Who believes in me? The effect of student-teacher demographic match on teacher expectations. Economics of Education Review, 52, 209-224.
  This article focuses on teacher expectations, which are strongly linked to student performance. This shows that racial mismatch has a big negative impact on teacher expectations.

• Grissom, J. A., & Redding, C. (2016). Discretion and disproportionality: Explaining the underrepresentation of high-achieving students of color in gifted programs. AERA Open, 2(1), 1-25. This article looks at high-achieving students of color and how they are under-referred to Gifted and Talented programs when taught by non-Black teachers.

• Redding, C. (2019). A teacher like me: A review of the effect of student-teacher racial/ethnic matching on teacher perceptions of students and student academic and behavioral outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 89(4), 499-535. From the abstract: “This comprehensive review examines the extent to which Black and Latino/a students (1) receive more favorable ratings of classroom behavior and academic performance, (2) score higher on standardized tests, and (3) have more positive behavioral outcomes when assigned to a teacher of the same race/ethnicity. Assignment to a same-race teacher is associated with more favorable teacher ratings, although the relationship differs by school level. There is fairly strong evidence that Black students score higher on achievement tests when assigned to a Black teacher. Less consistent evidence is found for Latino/a students.”

• Bohrnstedt, G. W. (2017). Student-teacher racial match and its association with Black student achievement: An exploration using multilevel structural equation modeling. American Educational Research Journal, 55(2), 287-324. This is a high-level statistical analysis of the benefit of Black and Hispanic teachers on students of color. It also shows it is even more helpful for male students.