Teachers' Beliefs about Students' Social Disadvantage and Student Achievement. CEPA Working Paper No. 15-03.

While progress to close racial achievement gaps has stagnated and income achievement gaps have grown, recent case studies enthusiastically describe “transformational” schools, which claim to establish conditions that enable students—primarily poor students of color—to achieve at levels far higher than their social background predicts. Accounts of such schools highlight a widespread belief among their teachers of empowerment over student outcomes despite students’ disadvantages. However, such teacher attitudes have never been analyzed on a broad scale, and many analyses of teacher effects focus solely on teachers’ human capital, overlooking their social-psychological traits. I use novel data on teachers from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to test whether teachers’ beliefs that they can overcome students’ social disadvantage are related to higher student achievement, and whether associations are stronger for racial minorities and economically disadvantaged students. Using three-level models, I find a positive association between teachers’ beliefs about social disadvantage and students’ achievement, which appears to stem from both selection and causal mechanisms. Evidence of heterogeneity contradicts academic and popular theory: rather than mattering most for poor students of color, teachers’ beliefs appear especially strongly linked to achievement for the most socioeconomically advantaged African American students. Rochmes: Teachers’ Beliefs About Students’ Social Disadvantage DRAFT 3 Teachers’ Beliefs About Students’ Social Disadvantage and Student Achievement Social inequality in education prompts debate over the extent to which schools ought to be held accountable for racial and socioeconomic disparities in academic outcomes, or whether highly entrenched inequality in broader U.S. society means some children face challenges too difficult for teachers and schools to overcome. Extensive evidence indicates that non-school factors primarily drive educational inequality (Downey, von Hippel, & Broh 2004; Gamoran 2001), but that particularly when it comes to inequality between black and white children, schools tend to exacerbate rather than ameliorate disparities (Downey, von Hippel, & Broh 2004). Meanwhile, within educational research and the media, substantial enthusiasm has recently surrounded so-called “transformational” or “gap-closing” schools, which claim to establish conditions that enable students—predominantly poor students of color—to achieve at levels far higher than their social background predicts. Accounts of such schools invariably highlight a widespread belief among their teachers of empowerment over student outcomes—a conviction that teachers can ensure students are not precluded from reaching their full potential by family background or social disadvantage (Kopp 2011; Paige and Witty 2010; Wilson 2008). This suggests that such empowered teacher beliefs may be a key aspect of promoting high achievement—or, conversely, that beliefs of helplessness in the face of social disadvantage may be a hindrance. Researchers have increasingly recognized the importance of teacher effects for explaining how schools impact students (Darling-Hammond and Youngs 2002). Studies demonstrate that teachers’ attitudes and expectations are linked to student outcomes (e.g. Lee and Loeb 2000; Lee and Smith 1996; Rist 1970; Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy 2001), but research has not fully considered teachers’ attitudes about overcoming social disadvantage. Similar concepts have been examined, but drawing on measures that do not actually reference students’ social Rochmes: Teachers’ Beliefs About Students’ Social Disadvantage DRAFT 4 background or home lives (e.g. Lee and Smith 1996; Lee and Loeb 2000) and typically using small, non-generalizable samples (e.g. Gibson and Dembo 1984; Guskey and Passaro 1994; Woolfolk and Hoy 1990). Studies of teacher effects that have systematically analyzed national data most commonly focus on teachers’ human capital characteristics, overlooking socialpsychological qualities of teachers, such as their beliefs about students’ potential or the nature of teaching. At the same time, descriptions of the success of “transformational” schools exist almost entirely in case studies and personal accounts (e.g. Kopp 2011; Wilson 2008), as well as some quasi-experimental studies of specific educational models where the “intervention” involves multiple educational dimensions besides teacher attitudes (e.g. Angrist et al. 2012; Dobbie & Fryer 2011). Although it has not been conclusively proven that such schools indeed transform educational trajectories, to the extent that they have engaged with altering the entrenched relationship between social background and academic achievement, their apparent success has implications for closing longstanding racial and socioeconomic achievement disparities, and the components of their apparent success should be appropriately scrutinized. Yet the link between teachers’ beliefs about social disadvantage and achievement has not been examined outside of these selective contexts. If teachers’ beliefs about students’ social disadvantage are a key to success in schools serving a student population that is primarily high poverty and high minority, it raises the question of whether these beliefs relate to achievement for students more broadly, and if this relationship differs depending on students’ own social background. On its face, we might expect that a teacher’s belief that social disadvantage is a barrier to effective teaching might only be activated if she teaches students who indeed face social disadvantages. Beyond this, research indicates that attitudes and expectations are lowest and matter most for groups of students who Rochmes: Teachers’ Beliefs About Students’ Social Disadvantage DRAFT 5 bear some social disadvantage or stigma (Downey & Pribesh 2004; Jussim, Eccles, and Madon 1996; McKown and Weinstein 2008; Tenenbaum and Ruck 2007). This paper contributes a more systematic and generalizable understanding of how teachers’ beliefs of helplessness or empowerment to overcome social disadvantage relate to student achievement. The analysis examines such teacher beliefs in a nationally representative sample by using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), permitting greater generalizability about their role in student success. I use multilevel modeling to isolate the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and student outcomes, accounting for numerous potential confounders at each level of analysis. Beyond student background, I introduce several aspects of teachers’ human capital in case teachers’ beliefs about the nature of teaching merely reflect things like their experience teaching or their academic preparation. And I control for school characteristics that have also been highlighted in accounts of “transformational” schools—as well as academic research on effective schools—that might explain success, rather than teachers’ attitudes. Thus, the paper establishes whether a significant relationship exists between teachers’ beliefs about students’ social disadvantage and students’ achievement independent of teachers’ human capital traits and in schools broadly, outside of the specific environments described in case studies of “transformational” schools. Further, I exploit variation in when students were tested to gain insight into whether the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and achievement is likely to be causal. Then, I analyze whether the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and student achievement differs by student race and socioeconomic background. In the remainder of the paper, I first describe the case studies that suggest teachers’ beliefs may be a crucial aspect of successful “gap-closing” school reform and highlight why they point especially to teachers’ beliefs about the extent to which students’ social disadvantage is an obstacle. I then discuss existing research on teacher effects on students, particularly how Rochmes: Teachers’ Beliefs About Students’ Social Disadvantage DRAFT 6 teachers’ human capital, expectations of individual students, and other beliefs relate to students’ educational outcomes, noting how each of these literatures has overlooked teachers’ beliefs about social disadvantage. Next, I describe the dataset, HSLS:09; my sample, which is nationally representative of high schools and specific to math teachers and ninth grade students taking math; and my modeling approach before describing my findings. My results indicate that there is some selection in the schools and students that have teachers with more empowered or more helpless attitudes toward overcoming disadvantage, but that there is also likely to be a causal effect of teachers’ beliefs on achievement. I find that the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and achievement is strengthened after longer exposure to the teacher. The findings on heterogeneous effects are surprising, contradicting the story implied by “transformational” schools: teachers’ beliefs are more strongly associated with achievement for African American students, but mainly those of higher socioeconomic status. While less clearly causal, my estimates suggest that for higher SES black students, having a teacher with the most empowered beliefs predicts achievement at least a half a standard deviation above the average among black students, while having a helpless teacher predicts achievement that is roughly a quarter of a standard deviation below the black mean. My conclusion discusses potential explanations for the average and differential effects results, and the implications of these findings for inequality. Teachers’ Beliefs in “Transformational” Schools Although racial and ethnic disparities in educational outcomes narrowed during the 1970s and 1980s, progress toward closing these gaps has slowed considerably; meanwhile, the achievement gap be