Representative Democracy and Its Effects on Ethnic Minority Students’ Academic Performance in American Urban Schools.

This paper investigates whether or not the increase of ethnic minority students translates into the growth of the same minority teacher representation and the students’ performance. School-level data come from over 1,000 public schools in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston, and Chicago. The analysis points to the presence of representative democracy, showing that there is a positive relationship between the ratios of ethnic minority students and teachers. The increased minority teacher representation, however, does not improve the same minority students’ academic achievement. The sole, but important, exception to this generalization lies in low-achieving Hispanic student schools. The increase of Hispanic teacher representation leads to the increase of low-achieving Hispanic students’ performance, yet this finding does not apply to high-achieving Hispanic student schools. Overall, the teacher-race factor is not as critical to the prediction of test scores as previously asserted, and its effect varies depending on ethnic groups and the degree of school performance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]