Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years, you are now fully aware of the problem that is plaguing education in America: while we are blessed with enormous ethnic diversity, too many students are not being instructed by teachers who share their racial identities.

Now, you may remember the not-so-distant past when the prevailing wisdom was that racial segregation was a major hindrance to opportunity and equality in education. But that was before we discovered “social justice.” For decades, fringe voices in politics have claimed that “students need teachers who look like them” if they are to meet their academic potential. But it was only after the racial panic of 2020 that elite institutions and the media began to insist that re-segregating our schools is a scientifically proven means to produce better academic outcomes.

As a professor at a public university that is a federally designated “minority-serving institution,” I have sat in countless faculty meetings where people parrot the “students need teachers who look like them” canard as an unassailable truth. I wasn’t so sure, so I asked one of my colleagues to direct me to the scientific research that validates the claim.

Initially, I received about a dozen links to articles from outlets like the New York Times, which referred to a scientific consensus, but did not document it. When I asked my colleague for peer-reviewed studies, I received a curt reply: he reminded me that he is “not [my] research assistant.”

That’s true. But I smelled blood in the water. If “the science is settled,” why can’t the advocates of neo-segregationist policies in education readily point me to a single study? With the gauntlet thrown, I set out to educate myself. Is it true that “students need teachers who look like them” to succeed? How much supporting evidence exists? And how strong is it?

I recently published the results of my study, Teachers Who Look Like Them: A Critique of the Evidence for Neo-Segregationist Approaches to Education. My short book exposes a refreshing truth: there is very little compelling evidence backing the claim in question. Both the qualitative and quantitative studies of racial matches between teachers and students have persistent flaws: limited sample sizes, anecdotal reasoning, and correlational relationships masquerading as causal ones. Below, I provide a brief overview of my findings. I encourage readers to purchase the book for a more detailed analysis of the existing literature.

The first theme of the research that allegedly proves that “students need teachers who look like them” is a surprising one: nearly all the major researchers admit that the supporting evidence is scant. Cross and Carmen explain that “Prior to 2018 there was little research published to address the impact of faculty racial/ethnic diversity on student graduation rates.”

Similarly, Stout et al. concede that “there is a paucity of research on the contribution of faculty diversity to student retention.” Llamas et al. say the same: “quantitative support is limited” for the theory that “students of color perform better with instructors of their same race/ethnicity.” Elsewhere, Egalite et al. emphasize that the effect of teacher diversity on student performance has “proven challenging to measure,” while Museus notes that the minimal evidence that does exist is “primarily qualitative in nature and examines small samples.”

Indeed, the bulk of the scholarship relies on anecdotal qualitative evidence. In other words, researchers ask students—mostly non-white ones—about their feelings and perceptions regarding faculty diversity. Given that the media is actively invested in stoking ethnic grievance, it follows that many students claim that they do—or would—benefit academically from more teachers who match their race or ethnicity. But whatever benefits exist, they typically don’t relate to learning or course content. Rather, students testify to the ability of said teachers to serve as role models, or the subjective feelings of “belonging” and “inclusion” that come from a diverse faculty.

The problem, of course, is that students’ perceptions of a benefit don’t mean that such a benefit exists. And even if there is some emotional benefit to racial matching between teachers and students, this offers no evidence of enhanced academic performance. Further, if it’s true that students have an affective preference for teachers of their same race, well, isn’t that a problem? What was the point of all the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” seminars and equity workshops if not to overcome in-group biases among students and faculty?

The quantitative research reflects different problems than the qualitative studies, but it is ultimately no more compelling. In many cases, researchers find the opposite of what they expected to find. For example, while Egalite, Kisida, and Winters’ results showed very minor—statistically insignificant—gains for black and white students with same-race teachers, they also found that racial matching had “no effect for Asian/Pacific Island students.” Not only that, they found that racial matching actually hurt outcomes for Hispanic students. Although there are isolated studies that show modest gains in academic performance, the data are highly questionable. Sample sizes tend to be very small, and researchers make little effort to eliminate other variables—aside from race—that might explain the phenomena.

Credit is due to the honest researchers who admit that their data only show a correlation between a teacher/student racial match and improved performance. But there are many studies that use causal language in the abstract, only to admit deep within the text that their results are merely correlational.

Sadly, it comes as no shock that so many editors and peer-reviewers were willing to look away from this sleight of hand: for political reasons, academics are heavily invested in propagating the “teachers who look like them” thesis. The mainstream media shares this commitment, which points toward a likely explanation for the false advertising in so many abstracts. Reporters and journalists don’t read the whole study; they assume the accuracy of the summary the abstract provides. Even if the results of the research don’t offer valid evidence for the “teachers who look like them” mantra, the misleading abstracts ensure the literature can still do important political work: convincing the public of the need for neo-segregationist policies in our schools. Trust “the experts.”

Despite this duplicity and the ideological motives that pervert so much academic research, the studies’ failure to prove that “students need teachers who look like them” is good news for regular Americans. Most people remain committed to a colorblind society. The happy takeaway from the scholarship is that there is no compelling evidence that students would benefit academically from abandoning those principles.

Sadly, the ideological agenda of American universities ensures that scholars will continue to publish dubious research calling for a return to segregation in the schools. Even worse, the political gatekeeping endemic to academic publishing ensures that no critical analysis of the evidence for the “teachers who look like them” thesis would clear the peer-review process. That’s why my own critique of this body of literature is self-published.

Nevertheless, I hope that patriotic Americans and media figures will seek it out—and share the good news it contains.

Follow Adam Ellwanger on X.