Abstract
Recommendations for the recruitment of minority teachers are based on hypothesized role-model effects and minority teachers’ high expectations of minority students. Based on the findings of Fryer and Levitt (2004, 2006) that the achievement gap is marginal in the early grades, this paper proposes and analyzes a hypothesis that an early childhood intervention of racial pairings of students and teachers may decelerate the growth of the gap and improve students’ chances of high school graduation, using data from Tennessee’s Project STAR, a randomized experiment on class size reduction. This study finds that assignment to an own-race teacher significantly helped black students graduate from high school.