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Low levels of teacher diversity in U.S. elementary and secondary schools represent a wasted opportunity to narrow achievement gaps. Evidence from other states suggests that students of color have better outcomes in the classrooms of teachers of color, but the teaching workforce remains predominantly white. Teachers of color are underrepresented at all stages of the human capital pipeline into teaching, and demographic projections suggest that the problem is likely to worsen. Given the existing literature on teacher-student demographic match which mostly focuses on the positive effects of teacher-student race match for Black students, there are additional questions that have yet to be explored. These include the role of gender and matching effects for Latino and Hispanic students. In this report, the researchers study the effects of exposure to Hispanic and Latino teachers on Hispanic and Latino students' scholastic and economic outcomes in Texas public schools, where the Hispanic share of teachers has increased from 15 percent to 27 percent from 1995 to 2018. The research design relies on within-school comparisons over time that control flexibly for variation in outcome dynamics across school districts. The researchers study short- and medium-term outcomes (e.g., standardized exam scores, discipline rates, and high school dropout rates) and long-term outcomes (e.g., high school graduation rates, college enrollment, college persistence, and college graduation) and find that exposure to teachers of color significantly improves short- and medium-term outcomes among elementary school students. The effects of teacher diversity are smaller and less precisely estimated for later grades and for long-term outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of policies aimed at increasing the representation of teachers of color in public schools.

As of 2015, eighteen states in the nation had enacted tuition equity laws granting resident tuition rates to qualifying undocumented students. The state of Texas was the pioneer of this movement, approving House Bill 1403 in July of 2001. The initiative came to be known as the 'Texas Dream Act' (TDA). It granted a large reduction in the cost of college attendance for undocumented students, moving them from out-of-state to in-state status in terms of tuition and fees. The complex institutional environment faced by the affected population, however, hinders the ability to predict the effect of this reform on education attainment on purely theoretical grounds. Thus, the effect of tuition equity reforms on the postsecondary educational attainment of undocumented immigrant students is theoretically ambiguous, and better studied empirically. This paper contributes to this endeavor by estimating the effect of the TDA on the post-secondary educational attainment of undocumented public high school students. To do this, the author exploits administrative data from Texas public education agencies -- the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board (THECB) -- via the Texas Education Research Center at UT Austin. The author estimates the effect of the reform using a generalized differences-in-differences research design, in which non-immigrant Hispanic high schoolers serve as a comparison group for the group affected by the reform.