Working Paper: NBER ID: w30631
Authors: Elizabeth U. Cascio; Ethan G. Lewis
Abstract: In the late 1930s, the NAACP launched a campaign to equalize Black and white teacher salaries in the de jure segregated schools of the American South. Using newly collected county panel data spanning three decades, this paper first documents heterogeneous within-state impacts of the campaign on teacher salaries. In states that reinforced successful NAACP litigation by introducing universal minimum salary schedules based on objective criteria, the relatively large wage penalty historically suffered by Black teachers in districts with higher Black enrollment shares disappeared by the mid-1950s. In states that resisted by adopting salary schedules using the National Teacher Examination as a measure of teaching efficacy, that penalty remained. In the second part of the paper, we estimate the effect of teacher pay on educational attainment exploiting variation in Black salary gains over time across counties with different Black enrollment shares, and across states by whether subsequent state policy reinforced or resisted court rulings favorable to the NAACP. We find that Black teacher salary gains contributed to the large reductions in racial inequality in school enrollment and grade progression in the South at mid-century.
Keywords: teacher salaries; racial inequality; educational attainment; NAACP; American South
JEL Codes: H7; I2; J15; N32
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| NAACP campaign for teacher salary equalization (I24) | increase in black teacher salaries (J45) |
| increase in black teacher salaries (J45) | reduction in racial inequality in educational attainment (I24) |
| increase in black teacher salaries (J45) | increase in school enrollment and grade progression among black students (I24) |
| NAACP campaign for teacher salary equalization (I24) | policy changes that improved salary conditions for black teachers (J45) |
| gains in black teacher salaries (J45) | increases in 12th-grade completion rates among black students in counties with higher baseline black enrollment shares (I24) |