They Can Reduce Negative Consequences of Grouping and Tracking
Having a Black teacher may result in Black students being less likely to be placed in lower-performing groups in the classroom. Once Black students are placed in lower groups, they get stuck there — researchers have found that Black students were less likely than white students to be reassigned to a higher ability group during the school year. Researchers Christy Lleras and Claudia Rangel from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that grouping may exacerbate achievement gaps among African-American students in the earliest years of schooling. Within nongrouped classrooms, they found the reading gap between students in lower and higher reading proficiency classrooms actually disappears by third grade. That is, among African-American students who are not grouped for reading instruction, there are essentially no differences in the reading achievement gains among students in lower reading proficiency and higher reading proficiency classrooms by the third grade.
