Teachers Are as Racially Biased as Everybody Else, Study Shows

Teachers are just as likely to have racial biases as non-teachers, a recent study finds—suggesting that schools need to do more work to combat stereotypes and discrimination.

In a paper titled "Teachers Are People Too," which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Researcher, a team of researchers from Princeton and Tufts universities compare teachers' explicit and implicit biases with those of other American adults. The findings, they say, are not necessarily a surprise. But as Americans work to confront racism in society, educators need to acknowledge that they play an ongoing role in perpetuating racial inequality in schools, experts say.

"Our schools are a microcosm of society,” said Jordan Starck, an author of the study and a doctoral student in the department of psychology at Princeton. “Given what we know of how pervasive bias is, ... I didn't suspect that either the selection process [of who becomes a teacher] or being in school [with children of different races] would be strong enough to curb that pervasive bias."

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/06/09/teachers-have-racial-biases-too-study-shows.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1&M=59592975&U=2050105&UUID=42d8eaa0e1fd83d2d422f1841ef2e9b9