Minority Students Need Minority Teachers

Minority students perform better in classes where their instructor is of the same minority group. This is the claim made by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled, “A Community-College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom.”

The study, performed on a group of community college students in the San Francisco Bay area of California, found that minority students were nearly three percent less likely to drop a course taught by an instructor from the same minority group. It also found that minority students were about three percent more likely to pass a course when a member of the same minority group acts as the instructor.

The authors note that as recently as 2010, the United States Department of Education found that African-American, Latino, and Native-American students had overall lower test scores, lower rates of high school graduation, as well as lower rates of college attendance and graduation.

They offer an explanation for this phenomenon that has been put forth by others in the past. Less than ten percent of all full-time college instructors in the U.S. are of African-American, Latino, or Native-American descent. Consider that nearly 33 percent of the college-age citizens of the U.S. are African-American, Latino, or Native-American, and the discrepancy becomes too large to ignore.

The authors explain that social scientists have hypothesized that because these minority students aren’t able to view many positive role models in an educational setting, they aren’t able to properly model positive behaviors. They also point to language and cultural differences that may help minority students learn more effectively from members of their own minority group.

This paper is somewhat unique, not only in the fact that it investigates the possible connection between minority instructors and the performance levels of minority students. It is also the first study to look solely at community college data. The authors feel that this is especially important, since more than half of all public university minority students start out at a community college.

With President Obama’s call for increased funding for community colleges, which hopes to add 5 million graduates by the year 2020, this type of research is especially timely and important. Community colleges are a gateway for many to a four-year university, and finding out how students learn best is the first step to ensuring that they succeed in their educational journeys.