Sufficiency in Teacher–Student Race Matching

Same-race teachers are linked to better academic outcomes for minoritized students, yet most students never encounter a teacher who shares their racial background. Prior work underscores the benefits of race-matched instruction but focuses on overall workforce diversity rather than the institutional structures that make cross-racial contact possible. We formalize this opportunity as race-match sufficiency, defined as whether the expected number of same-race teachers for students of a given race at a school is at least one. We treat this sufficiency measure as a structural property of schools. Using administrative data from 8,691 Texas public schools serving 5.4 million students, we model sufficiency as a function of racial composition, enrollment, grade span, and district context. Same-race student concentration emerges as the dominant factor, following a steep nonlinear S-curve whose thresholds differ markedly across racial groups. Secondary grade configurations and larger campuses modestly expand opportunities, yet disparities persist: white students experience near-universal sufficiency, Black students experience moderate access, and Hispanic students experience chronic underexposure—even in majority-Hispanic settings. These results show how diversity translates unevenly into contact and illustrate a portable framework for exposure-based staffing metrics that can be applied wherever administrative data exist.