When I first published on ethnic matching in 2009, the study was specifically about Black students and Black teachers. I was trying to answer a fairly narrow empirical question: does it matter, over time, whether Black students have at least one teacher who shares their racial and cultural background? The data said yes. Across multiple years and multiple subjects, Black students taught by even one Black teacher showed measurable, durable academic gains.
In the years since, the work has grown. The questions I was asking about Black students and Black teachers turned out to apply, in different ways, to other communities of color as well. The line of research has expanded to examine students of color and teachers of color more broadly, while staying close to the specificity of community, history, and context that the original study took seriously. That expansion is part of what produced the 2018 book Ethnic Matching: The Academic Success of Students of Color, which the National Association for Multicultural Education recognized with the 2019 Philip C. Chinn Book Award.
Seventeen years on, I have been invited to revisit that work for Urban Education’s 60th-anniversary issue. The new article, “Still Searching for a Match: Revisiting Ethnic Matching in Urban Education through the Lens of Equity, History, and Place,” is now available through Sage. Before readers click through, I want to say a little about why I returned to this question, and what is different this time.
Why come back to ethnic matching now
The simplest answer is that the field, the country, and the politics around education have all changed. In 2009, “diversifying the teacher workforce” was a slogan that mostly lived in panel discussions. Today it lives in legislation, sometimes as a goal and sometimes as a target. State policies that restrict how race, history, and identity can be discussed in classrooms sit alongside renewed federal interest in teacher pipelines. The original finding, that Black students benefit when their teachers reflect their cultural and racial communities, now lands in a very different room. So does the broader version of the finding for students of color and teachers of color that the research has produced in the years since.
The harder answer is that the original framing of the work was incomplete. Ethnic matching, taken on its own, can sound transactional: pair this student with that teacher and watch the test scores rise. That was never how I meant it, and it is not how the literature has matured. The new article makes the underlying argument more explicit. Matching matters not because race is a credential but because relationships, recognition, and shared cultural reference points are part of what we mean by good teaching, particularly in urban schools that carry histories the rest of the system would prefer to forget.
The three lenses: equity, history, and place
The subtitle is doing real work. Each of those three words names a lens the original 2009 study left implicit.
Equity is the easiest to name and the hardest to operationalize. The article pushes back on the version of equity that gets reduced to a representation count, that is, the share of teachers of color in a building, in a district, on a slide in a strategic plan. Representation matters, but ethnic matching is not a numbers game. It is a question of who has access to teachers who can see them clearly, and what we owe students when that access is uneven. I argue that equity here means designing for the relational outcomes, not just the demographic ones.
History is what most current ethnic-matching conversations underweight. Urban schools did not become majority students-of-color institutions by accident, and the teaching workforce did not become predominantly white by accident either. Brown v. Board dismantled a Black teaching profession that had sustained communities for generations. Urban renewal, redlining, and decades of testing and certification regimes did the rest. You cannot read the current ethnic-matching numbers without reading that history, and the article tries to put them on the same page.
Place is the lens I am most interested in pushing forward. Urban education is not a synonym for “schools that serve children of color.” It is a particular set of conditions, including density, mobility, resource concentration, and neighborhood-level inequality, that shape what teaching and learning can look like. A teacher of color in one urban district is not interchangeable with a teacher of color in another. Place changes what matching means and what it can do. The article tries to give that intuition some empirical and conceptual structure.
What’s new, and what I left alone
Readers familiar with the 2009 piece and the 2018 book will recognize the foundation. I have not walked back the central finding. If anything, the years since have strengthened it. What is new is the framing, a sustained attempt to answer questions that my earlier work was, in retrospect, raising without resolving. Why does matching produce these effects? Where does it matter most? When does it stop being enough on its own?
The article also engages the most serious critiques of matching research head-on, including concerns that the framework can flatten the diversity within communities of color, or that it can be used as a substitute for the harder structural work of changing how schools are organized. I take those critiques seriously. Matching is necessary but not sufficient, and the new piece tries to mark the boundary clearly.
A note of thanks
This issue would not exist without the editors who shaped it: Donna Y. Ford, Erik M. Hines, Tanya J. Middleton, and James L. Moore. Bringing together six decades of urban education scholarship into a single coherent volume is the kind of intellectual labor that is mostly invisible until you try to do it yourself. I am grateful for their care and their patience.
I also want to thank Urban Education’s chief editor, H. Richard Milner IV, whose stewardship of the journal has kept it both rigorous and relevant during a period when it would have been easy for either commitment to slip. To be included in this anniversary issue is an honor I do not take lightly.
Where to read more
The full article is available through Sage at journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420859261433886. Readers who want the longer treatment of the underlying research will find it in Ethnic Matching: The Academic Success of Students of Color (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), the book that earned the 2019 NAME Philip C. Chinn Book Award.
I am also at work on a second edition of Ethnic Matching. Many of the questions taken up in the new Urban Education article will sit at the center of that revision, alongside updated data, new chapters, and a more developed account of the equity, history, and place arguments previewed here. More on the second edition as it nears.
I will be writing more about specific threads from the article in the coming weeks, particularly on the place argument, which I think has the most to offer practitioners and policymakers right now. If there is a piece of the new article you want me to take up first, the inbox is open.
DEB