CDC Classroom Climate Scale
Category: Student Well-Being and Mental Health
A growing body of research shows that students benefit when they demographically match their teachers. However, little is known about how matching affects social-emotional development. We use student-fixed effects to exploit changes over time in the proportion of teachers within a school grade who demographically match a student to estimate matching's effect on social-emotional measures, test scores, and behavioral outcomes. We find improvements for students in grit and interpersonal self-management when matched to teachers of their race and gender. Black female students drive these effects. We also find that matching reduces absences, especially for Black students. Our findings add to the emerging teacher diversity literature by showing its benefits for Black and female students during a critical stage of development.
Keywords
Social-emotional; non-cognitive skills; teacher-student assignment; teacher-student gender and race match; minority students; minority teachers; achievement gap
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/3xq6-4k05
