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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.

Although increasing the racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses is a key component of any broad policy agenda aimed at reducing structural inequality, access to higher education does not always equate to graduation and equal labor market opportunities. For colleges, students, and society to reap the benefits of diversity, there needs to be more than just a diverse student population in colleges; there needs to be representation of all groups across all fields of study. To understand whether increasing diversity on campus is translating to equal access to opportunity, we examine racial and ethnic representation across college majors over time, finding that Asian, Black, and Hispanic students are often concentrated in majors with other students of the same race or ethnicity and that at institutions where Black and Hispanic segregation is worst, these students are least likely to graduate with high-paying degrees. We examine racial and ethnic imbalance within higher education institutions by using segregation indexes to summarize racial and ethnic sorting inside universities. We analyze whether students of different races or ethnicities are over- or underrepresented in certain fields of study, relative to the institutions they attend.

The US population is becoming more educated, but large gaps in postsecondary attainment based on race or ethnicity remain, particularly at more selective colleges. As a growing number of jobs require a college degree, it is imperative to increase college access among all racial and ethnic groups. In this report, we examined whether different racial and ethnic groups have equal access to higher education by looking at representativeness across postsecondary institutions. We constructed a new measure that compares each college's racial and ethnic demographics with the demographics of the college's market, evaluating whether each racial or ethnic group is over- or underrepresented at individual colleges and college sectors, relative to that college's or sector's pool of potential students. We confirm the presence and persistence of large national gaps in representation and find that Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented at more selective schools in ways that cannot be explained by differences in community demographics.

Private school choice programs are rapidly gaining traction, with nearly 450,000 student participants in 2019--an increase of 300,000 students in just 15 years. This report evaluates how well some of these programs prepare students for college by examining college enrollment and completion data from the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and the Washington, DC, Opportunity Scholarship Program. Unlike previous research on private school choice, this body of work takes a long-term approach, focusing on college enrollment and graduation rates rather than student satisfaction and test scores. Over the past three years, this research has demonstrated that private school choice programs yield varying results on graduation rates, with positive outcomes for students in the Florida and Milwaukee programs and no statistically significant positive or negative outcome in DC. This report presents the most up-to-date data and proposes topics for future research that would better equip policymakers to make decisions. The updated data in this report show more consistent positive effects of Milwaukee's private school choice program, and the results in DC still show no significant effect, even as we broaden the sample to include more students. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Bill and Susan Oberndorf Foundation and by Kate and Bill Duhamel.]

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.