Black Students Less Likely to Have Black Teachers in NYC Charters
Note: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
New York City public schools serve more than 1.1 million students — a population so large that by itself it would be the nation’s tenth-largest city. Of these, 85% are students of color, yet only 40% of teachers are people of color. What does this mean for New York students?
Academic studies have shown that students of color, particularly black students, benefit from having a teacher that shares their race. Black students are three times more likely to be referred to a gifted program if they have a black teacher, and are 15–18% less likely to receive punishments like detention, suspension or expulsion. Even having just one black teacher between third and fifth grade increases the likelihood a black student will graduate high school — for black boys from the poorest families, it means a 39% lower chance of dropping out.
Given this data, I wanted to figure out where in the city black students were most and least likely to be taught by teachers who look like them — and reap the accompanying benefits. Last year, the School Diversity Advisory Group released a report with demographic information on students and teachers for each district, but these figures can vary widely from school to school. I decided to zoom in to see how closely matched the proportion of black students and teachers was at each individual school.
Academic studies have shown that students of color, particularly black students, benefit from having a teacher that shares their race. Black students are three times more likely to be referred to a gifted program if they have a black teacher, and are 15–18% less likely to receive punishments.
I was able to download school-specific demographic information on teaching staff from the NYS Education Department website and on students from NYC Open Data. To make calculations easy, the first thing I did was use OpenRefine to convert data columns to a number format and then download a CSV to Excel.
Since my interest focused on NYC, I then filtered the statewide teacher data to show only schools in the five boroughs and the student data to show only black students. I added columns to both the student and teacher sheets where I could calculate the percent of each population that was black.
Next, I joined my two data sets based on the school name using VLOOKUP. Now, for each school, I could see the percent of black students and the percent of black teachers side by side. I added a column to calculate the difference between the two values and sorted the data from the greatest difference to the least.
The school with the greatest disparity, Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, has a student body that is 81% black but not one black teacher. Of the top 10 schools with the fewest black teachers relative to black students, seven were charter schools, two were transfer high schools, and one was a district middle school in Queens.
The school with the greatest disparity, Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, has a student body that is 81% black but not one black teacher.
I was curious how many other city schools had no black teachers, so I created another sheet to filter for these cases and used COUNTIF to see how these schools were distributed across the five boroughs. There are 156 schools with no black teachers, with the most, 41 schools, in Queens, and the fewest, 17, in the Bronx.
On the flip side, there are just 27 schools that reported having no black students, again with the most, 13, in Queens, and the fewest, 2, in the Bronx. From this, we can see that there are nearly six times as many schools without black teachers as there are without black students.
The list of schools with no black teachers includes four schools where more than 50% of the student body is black, of which three are charters. Another 11 schools are at least 25% black with no black teachers.
I used Desmos to create a scatterplot to show the correlation between the number of black students and teachers at charter schools and district schools.
Creating a best fit line shows, on average, district schools have two black teachers for every three black students, while charter schools have only about one black teacher for every three black students. In schools where less than half of students are black, charter schools tend to have more black teachers, while in schools whose student bodies are majority-black, district schools are more likely to have more black teachers.
Parents have many things to consider when choosing a school for their child, and, especially for black parents, how well the teaching staff reflects the student population may be one more influential data point. Just a little data work can make the final decision that much easier!
