The Micropolitics of Educational Inequality: The Case of Teacher–Student Assignments

Abstract

Politics of education researchers have long recognized the role of micropolitics in school decision-making processes. We argue that investigating micropolitical dynamics is key to an important set of school decisions that are fundamental to inequities in access to high-quality teachers: assignments of teachers and students to classrooms. Focusing on the intraorganizational political power of experienced teachers, our analysis of survey and administrative data from a large urban district suggests that more experienced teachers have more influence over which students are assigned to their classrooms. By a variety of measures, we also find that more experienced teachers are assigned fewer disadvantaged students, on average, a pattern inconsistent with goals of ameliorating educational inequality by matching more qualified teachers with the students who need them most.

Notes

Although it may be useful to examine total teaching experience as well, M-DCPS data do not contain reliable indicators of total teaching experience, only experience within the district.

Table 1 Teacher and Characteristics

Note that the administrative data measure personnel experience as number of years worked in the district. On the survey, we instead asked teachers how many years they had worked in the current school, in other schools in the district, and outside the district. Thus the experience measures in the two samples are not directly comparable.

In results not shown, we also find that teachers with more experience at their school report more involvement from parents and students in the assignment process. We find no relationship between teaching experience and reports of the involvement of teachers in the grade below, other teachers in their grade, or counselors.

We choose to omit these analyses because they are only based on one year of data and about 6,000 observations, while the full administrative sample (using total years of experience in the district) is based on more than 175,000 observations.