Student-Teacher Race Congruence and Access to Higher Education for Black Students

This paper will attempt to identify the ways in which racism permeates education beginning in childhood and extending to higher education. Racism towards black people has existed on the North American continent even before the United States was established as an independent nation. Political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries made tremendous progress in counteracting the effects of racism. The education experience of black people in America changed dramatically after the groundbreaking court case Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed racial segregation in public schools in 1954. One of the latent functions of the court’s ruling was effectively removing an entire generation of black school teachers without ever intending to do so. While more and more black students were sent to white schools, historically black schools were shut down and their black teachers along with them. Between 1954 and 1971, the nation lost 31,584 black teaching positions and 2,235 black principals, even as the number of education jobs increased. Many of these teachers were highly qualified, some even carrying PhDs, whose positions were deemed “no longer necessary.” The lack of highly qualified black teachers has led to savage inequalities across schools in the United States. Using the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) of 2002 and an existing study by Grissom and Redding (2016), this paper offers that student-teacher race congruence is a significant factor for black children in achieving academic success and gaining access to gifted programs. An additional case study on data gathered through a Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) summer enrichment program presents optimistic outcomes for minority students gaining access to qualified STEM institutions.