Teachers Are People Too: Examining the Racial Bias of Teachers Compared to Other American Adults

By Jordan G. Starck, Travis A. Riddle, S. Sinclair, Natasha Warikoo. 2020

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Schools are heralded by some as unique sites for promoting racial equity. Central to this characterization is the presumption that teachers embrace racial equity and teaching about this topic. In contrast, others have documented the ongoing role of teachers in perpetuating racial inequality in schools. In this article, we employ data from two national data sets to investigate teachers’ explicit and implicit racial bias, comparing them to adults with similar characteristics. We find that both teachers and nonteachers hold pro-White explicit and implicit racial biases. Furthermore, differences between teachers and nonteachers were negligible or insignificant. The findings suggest that if schools are to effectively promote racial equity, teachers should be provided with training to either shift or mitigate the effects of their own racial biases.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a26be1c43f2c14085049cb87efa8d53bad5809b0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Mark J. Chin
2. Tasminda K. Dhaliwal
3. Virginia S. Lovison
4. S. Peters
5. David M. Quinn

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Mark J. Chin
2. S. Peters
3. David M. Quinn

Citations in the corpus

• The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs (2021, background): “Starck et al. (2020) found that teachers are just as likely to hold pro-White implicit and explicit biases as anyone else.”
• Bias in the Air: A Nationwide Exploration of Teachers’ Implicit Racial Attitudes, Aggregate Bias, and Student Outcomes (2020, background): “In the United States, teachers and nonteachers exhibit similar levels of implicit bias overall (Starck et al., 2020), and teachers with higher levels of racial bias on the IAT were less likely to report that they promoted mutual respect among students in their classrooms (Kumar et al., 2015).”