Inequality and within-school student-teacher assignment patterns

A major goal of U.S. education policy over the past half century has been to promote more equitable access to high-quality teachers. While most of the research and policy on this topic focuses on between-school differences in access to high-quality teachers, the teacher value-added literature shows that nearly all of the variation in teacher quality is within schools. In this paper, we focus on within-school patterns of student-teacher matching using administrative records from a state in the southeastern United States. We develop a measure of within-school matching based on student achievement and teacher value-added. On average, schools systematically match students to teachers in ways that expand achievement gaps, and within-school matching accounts for more than one-third of overall system-level matching. Using a series of fixed effects regressions, we show that within-school matching increases achievement gaps. These results suggest that improving the equity of within-school student-teacher assignments is a promising and low-cost strategy to improve educational opportunity for low achieving students and reduce achievement gaps.