Do School Counselors Exhibit Bias in Recommending Students for Advanced Coursework? (with Angela de Oliveira and Carey Dimmitt)

In this paper, we seek to understand minority and female underrepresentation in advanced STEM courses in high school by investigating whether school counselors exhibit racial or gender bias during the course assignment process. Using an adapted audit study, we asked a sample of school counselors to evaluate student transcripts that were identical except for the names on the transcripts, which were varied randomly to suggestively represent a chosen race and gender combination. Our results indicate that black female students were less likely to be recommended for AP Calculus and were rated as being the least prepared. Female students were penalized less for having borderline behavior while male students were penalized less for having borderline academics. Our results have policy implications for any program that asks individuals to make recommendations that may be subject to bias. Keywords: Human Capital; STEM Participation; Race and Gender. JEL Classifications: I24, J15, J16

“Why Don’t More Black Students Take AP Math Courses? Racialized Tracking, Social Isolation and the ‘Acting White’ Hypothesis.” (with William A. Darity, Jr. and Kara Bonneau)

In this paper we use administrative data from three cohorts of North Carolina public high school students to examine the effects of within-school segregation on the propensity of academically eligible black high school students to take advanced math courses.  Conceptually, black students bay be less likely to take advanced courses even when they are academically eligible if they are at risk of social isolation.  This is most likely to happen in  schools that are segregated along racial lines with advanced courses populated mainly by white students and general or remedial education courses populated mainly by black students.  Our identification strategy takes advantage of cohort-to-cohort variation in the share of 11th and 12th grade black students enrolled in advanced math courses when a cohort first enters school in the 9th grade.  We find that a 1% increase in the share of black 11th and 12th graders in advanced math classes increases the likelihood that an academically eligible black student will take an advanced math course before they graduate by 20%.  Effects for black males are even larger.  Keywords: Racial Inequality, STEM Participation, Structural Barriers 

Bias or Behavior? Using Differences in Perceived and Reported Tardiness and Attendance to Identify Biases in Teacher Perceptions of Student Behavior.

Subjective perceptions that teachers form about students’ classroom behaviors matter for student academic outcomes. This paper uses longitudinal data from the 1998 ECLS-K in conjunction with longitudinal, student-level data from North Carolina to estimate racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic differences in teacher reports of student absenteeism while controlling for administrative records of actual absences.  I employ a variation of a two-sample instrumental variables approach in which I instrument for actual eighth grade absences with simulated measures of eighth grade absences.  I find consistent evidence that teacher reports of the attendance of low-income students are negatively biased.  There is mixed evidence with respect to race and ethnicity. Keywords: Socioeconomic Status, Inequality, Non-Cognitive Skills