Teachers' Beliefs About Students' Social Disadvantage Exploring High School Contexts and Teachers' Influence on the Achievement Gap.

Abstract

The association between social background and academic achievement has long been of significant interest within sociology, yet we know little about how teachers understand this relationship. Substantial enthusiasm has recently surrounded “transformational” schools, where poor and minority students achieve at levels far higher than their social background predicts, and their implications for educational inequality. Case studies of such schools portray a widespread belief among teachers of empowerment to overcome student disadvantages, but the effect of such teacher beliefs has not been generalized to schools broadly. This dissertation pursues a more systematic exploration of whether teachers’ beliefs about social disadvantage are a key aspect of school success by analyzing the prevalence of more empowered or, conversely, more helpless beliefs, their association with other teacher traits and school contexts, their relationship to student outcomes, and their implications for racial and socioeconomic inequality by using multilevel quantitative analyses and large-scale, nationally representative data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09).

The first empirical chapter shows that among math and science teachers, although the most helpless attitudes are rare, a nontrivial minority of teachers express them; empowered attitudes are somewhat more prevalent. Teachers’ beliefs are largely independent of their human capital, but are strongly related to school context, with the most important predictors being school culture and school racial/socioeconomic composition, rather than school reform characteristics or academic composition as might be expected. The second empirical chapter finds that the students of more empowered teachers have better motivation and achievement in math. However, evidence is mixed as to whether these relationships are explained by selection of students into classrooms/schools or by a causal influence of teachers’ beliefs on student outcomes. Finally, interaction analyses in the third empirical chapter reveal that the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and student achievement is much stronger for black students than for other groups, but rather than poorer students benefiting most, this effect increases for more advantaged black students. In sum, this dissertation indicates that teachers’ beliefs about students’ social disadvantage may have implications for inequality in education, although not necessarily in the exact ways we might have expected.