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ARP45310.1177/0275074013492008American Review of Public AdministrationMarvel and Resh

Article
American Review of Public Administration
2015, Vol. 45(3) 281–310
Bureaucratic Discretion, Client © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0275074013492008
Bureaucracy arp.sagepub.com

John D. Marvel1 and William G. Resh2

Abstract
For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have
discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has
received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming
by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying particular attention to how
the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats interact to influence the amount of
discretion that individual bureaucrats possess. Specifically, we examine whether the amount
of discretion that minority bureaucrats have is positively related to the percentage of an
organization’s clients who are from the same minority group. We argue that there are three
reasons to expect a positive relationship: client demand, managerial deference to bureaucratic
expertise, and bureaucratic appropriation. Our findings suggest that a positive relationship
exists for African American bureaucrats, but not for Hispanic bureaucrats.

Keywords
representative bureaucracy, bureaucratic discretion

According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, a public workforce that is demographi-


cally representative of the clients it serves will produce policy outputs that are beneficial to those
clients (Dolan & Rosenbloom, 2003). More specifically, the theory suggests that “passive repre-
sentation” will lead to “active representation” given the satisfaction of certain enabling condi-
tions (Keiser, 2010; Keiser et al., 2002). Principal among these conditions is that bureaucrats
have sufficient discretion to act on behalf of clients with whom they share salient demographic
characteristics. Despite its importance to the theory of representative bureaucracy, though,
bureaucratic discretion has received little empirical attention from public administration schol-
ars. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discre-
tion, paying particular attention to how the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats
interact to influence the amount of discretion that individual bureaucrats possess.
This study is interested in two hallmark components of representative bureaucracy theory—
race and discretion. It is not a study of representative bureaucracy theory in the typical mold,

1George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA


2Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:
John D. Marvel, Department of Public and International Affairs, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive,
Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.
Email: jdmarvel@gmail.com
282 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

though. Many representative bureaucracy studies test for a race-based relationship between pas-
sive representation and active representation, treating discretion as a given. We do not treat dis-
cretion as a given; instead, we examine whether it is related to the race of individual bureaucrats
and to the race of the clients who those bureaucrats serve. Though ours is not a typical representa-
tive bureaucracy study, we are interested in whether discretion varies with the race of bureaucrats
and clients precisely because discretion is such an important element of representative bureau-
cracy theory. It not only makes active representation possible in the first place but also makes the
link between passive representation and active representation more robust (Meier & Bohte, 2001;
Riccucci & Meyers, 2004; Sowa & Selden, 2003).
The empirical question we are interested in is the following: Is the amount of discretion held by
minority bureaucrats positively related to the percentage of a public organization’s service recipi-
ents who are also minorities? There are three reasons to expect this will be the case: (a) client
demand, (b) managerial deference to bureaucratic expertise, and (c) bureaucratic appropriation.
Each of these can be thought of as a distinct theoretical mechanism that links client demographics
to discretion for minority bureaucrats. Client demand refers to the idea that a bureaucracy’s minor-
ity service recipients will lobby for minority bureaucrats to have more discretion since this discre-
tion will allow minority bureaucrats to better serve minority clients. Managerial deference to
bureaucratic expertise refers to the idea that public managers recognize minority bureaucrats’
unique capacities for relating to minority clients and, recognizing these capacities, grant minority
bureaucrats the latitude to act on them. Finally, bureaucratic appropriation refers to the idea that
minority bureaucrats will feel empowered to claim more discretion for themselves when they
serve client populations that are heavily minority.
Below, we begin with a summary of representative bureaucracy theory and a discussion of
how our study aims to advance the theory. We then explicate the three theoretical mechanisms
mentioned above. Next, we describe our data, model, and method. We note here that our study is
set in the public education context, and so our specific empirical question is whether the amount
of discretion held by minority public school teachers is positively related to the percentage of a
school’s students who are minorities. For a few reasons—the open and democratic nature of
public schools chief among them—public education is a useful setting for our study. After
describing our data, model, and method, we present our results. We close the article with a dis-
cussion of how our results advance representative bureaucracy theory and of what they might tell
us about the management of public organizations.

The Theory of Representative Bureaucracy


Public administration scholars have long recognized that the existence of bureaucratic discretion
poses a problem for democratic governance (Finer, 1941; Friedrich, 1940). Because bureaucrats
are unelected, citizens cannot, via elections, hold them directly accountable for the decisions they
make. Given that these decisions affect the distribution of public policy outputs to citizens, this
is a problem with potentially serious consequences. The theory of representative bureaucracy
“solves” this normative problem by treating discretion as a positive rather than a negative. In
short, the theory suggests that a bureaucracy employing a cross-section of individuals who “look
like” the population as a whole will make decisions that represent the will of the people.
Underlying this logic is the assumption that individuals from similar demographic backgrounds
will tend to share the same values and attitudes and will, consequently, tend to make similar deci-
sions (Meier, 1975).
In addition to being an important normative component of representative bureaucracy theory,
discretion is also a crucial instrumental component of the theory. For passive representation to
translate into active representation, minority bureaucrats must have sufficient discretion to act on
behalf of minority clients. Moreover, as noted in our introduction, studies suggest that the link
Marvel and Resh 283

Bureaucrat’s
Race

The relationship between client


demographics and bureaucratic
discretion depends on
bureaucrat’s race.

Client Bureaucrat’s
Demographics Discretion

The relationship between passive


representation and active
representation depends on how
much discretion bureaucrats
possess.

Passive Active
Representation Representation

Figure 1. The Relationship between client demographics and bureaucratic discretion.

between active and passive representation becomes stronger as discretion increases (Meier &
Bohte, 2001; Riccucci & Meyers, 2004; Sowa & Selden, 2003). But as we have already pointed
out, bureaucratic discretion and its determinants have received little empirical attention within
the representative bureaucracy literature. The figure that appears below illustrates the usual focus
of empirical representative bureaucracy studies while also illustrating the novel focus of our
study.
The bottommost arrow in the figure—the right-facing arrow pointing from the passive repre-
sentation box to the active representation box—has been the focal point of many representative
bureaucracy studies. Usually, these studies regress an outcome measure (e.g., % of a school’s
female students who perform satisfactorily on a standardized math test) on a measure of passive
representation (e.g., % of a school’s teachers who are female; see, for example, Keiser et al.,
2002; Pitts, 2007; Smith & Fernandez, 2010; Wilkins & Keiser, 2006). A significant positive
coefficient for the passive representation variable is usually taken as evidence for the operation
of active representation.1 Studies of this type have done much to advance our knowledge con-
cerning where, when, and for whom passive representation is likely to translate into active
representation.
In contrast to studies of this type, our study focuses on the arrows contained in the top half of
Figure 1. The key object in this portion of the figure is the downward-facing arrow that points
from the bureaucrat’s race box to the right-facing arrow that represents the relationship between
client demographics and discretion. This downward-facing arrow indicates that the relationship
between client demographics and an individual bureaucrat’s discretion depends on the race of the
bureaucrat. It is useful to think about the top portion of the figure as portraying an interaction
between a bureaucrat’s race and client demographics; indeed, the focus of our empirical analysis
will be on a group of Bureaucrat Race × Client Demographics interaction terms.
284 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Ultimately, we are interested in the top portion of this figure because of its connection to the
bottom portion of the figure. The downward-facing arrow pointing from the top portion’s discre-
tion box to the bottom portion’s right-facing arrow illustrates that discretion enables the relation-
ship between passive representation and active representation. Despite this connection,
representative bureaucracy studies have tended to treat discretion as a given—or, in method-
ological terms, as exogenous. But discretion is not a given; it is manipulable. It varies across
organizations and across individual bureaucrats, and this variation has important implications for
representative bureaucracy, both in theory and in practice. One of these implications, as we will
discuss below, is that a bureaucracy’s clients and personnel might consciously do things to make
the link between passive representation and active representation stronger.

Bureaucratic Discretion and


Minority Bureaucrats in the Context of Public Schools
Inevitably, public sector employees will have at least some discretion. Laws, statutes, and orga-
nizational rules cannot anticipate every decision situation that bureaucrats will encounter in the
course of doing their work, and so bureaucrats will retain some measure of individual control
over workplace decision making. Public school teachers in particular will retain a great deal of
discretion since their jobs are fraught with novelty, ambiguity, and unpredictability (Lipsky,
1980; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003; Prottas 1978). This—teachers’ possession of consid-
erable discretion—in combination with the democratically and organizationally open nature of
schools, makes public education a good setting for research on whether client demographics are
associated with bureaucratic discretion.
A good deal of recent representative bureaucracy research is set in public schools (e.g.,
Grissom et al., 2009; Grissom & Keiser, 2011; Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2011; Pitts 2005, 2007).
One advantage of using schools as a setting for representative bureaucracy research—or any
public administration research, for that matter—is that schools are the most common type of
public organization in the United States (Meier & Bohte, 2001). Consequently, when we learn
something about public schools, we learn something that generalizes to an extremely large class
of public organizations. Another advantage (one that is specific to our study) is that we are seek-
ing to extend the theory of representative bureaucracy in a new way. Since the theory already
has a firm foundation in the education setting, it seems reasonable to us to first explore whether
the theory might be extended in this same setting rather than to venture into a less established
domain. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the public education setting is appropriate
because schools are “open systems” organizations that are subject to the democratically legiti-
mate demands of internal and external actors, such as parents, teachers, citizens, and politicians
(Chubb & Moe, 1990; Meier et al., 2000; Weick, 1976). Put differently, they are open systems
whose internal and external environments are highly politicized. The open, political nature of
schools is important to our study because the theoretical mechanisms we describe below assume
that internal and external actors can and do make demands about what schools do and how they
do it.
Below, we describe the three theoretical mechanisms that link client demographics to minority
bureaucrats’ discretion: client demand, managerial deference to bureaucratic expertise, and
bureaucratic appropriation. Each of these three mechanisms should be thought of as a potential
linking process. An observed relationship between client demographics and minority bureau-
crats’ discretion might operate through any or all of these mechanisms; in the present study, we
cannot identify their individual contributions to any observed relationship. Before we proceed, it
is important to note that the focus of our analysis will be on African American and Hispanic
teachers. When we use the word minority below, we are referring to these two minority groups
unless otherwise indicated.
Marvel and Resh 285

Client Demand
In the public education context, client demand refers to the idea that a bureaucracy’s minority stu-
dents and their parents will lobby for minority teachers to have more discretion since this discretion
will allow minority teachers to better serve minority students. Our expectation is that as the percent-
age of a school’s students who are minorities increases, lobbying for minority teacher discretion
will increase. In other words, minority parent demand will be directly proportional to minority
students’ (or parents’) prevalence in the school’s client population. There are a couple of assump-
tions built into this causal mechanism, each of which requires justification. The first is that a chan-
nel for minority parent demands exists. The justification for this assumption is mainly theoretical,
and was noted above: Public schools are typically classified as open systems by organization theo-
rists and education sociologists (Ballantine & Hammack, 2012; Hanson, 1996). The primary impli-
cation of public schools’ status as open systems organizations is that they are subject to forces in
their external environments. Public schools are political institutions, and so these forces include the
demands pressed on them by interested political actors, including parents (Chubb & Moe, 1988;
Cutler, 2000; Meier et al., 2000). Since public schools are democratic political institutions, they are
expected to attend to these demands, which are normatively legitimate.
While the preceding justification is theoretical, Chubb and Moe (1990) have shown empiri-
cally that public schools are subject to external demands from parents and other interested groups
to a much greater degree than are private schools. Moreover, a great deal of research in the educa-
tion literature indicates that parents are intensely involved in the governance of their children’s
schools (e.g., Booth & Dunn, 1996; Cutler, 2000; Epstein & Salinas, 2004), sometimes to such a
degree that teachers and principals perceive their involvement to be intrusive (Addi-Raccah &
Arviv-Elyashiv, 2008). And so, it seems reasonable to conclude that parents are able to, and in
fact do, press demands on their children’s schools. The key question is whether these include
demands made by minority parents that minority teachers be given more discretion.2 Our assump-
tion is that they do.
We are not aware of any research that would allow us to directly substantiate this assumption;
that is, research showing that minority parents actually do make demands for more minority
teacher discretion. Nevertheless, research does suggest that minority parents are actively engaged
in their children’s schooling. More basically, this research indicates that minority parents are
keenly concerned about what goes on at their children’s schools. Chavkin and Williams (1993)
surveyed 1,188 African American and Hispanic parents about their level of interest in 14 areas of
school decision making. At least 75% of surveyed parents were highly interested in the following
areas: amount of homework assigned, classroom discipline, student evaluation, setting school
behavior rules, and setting school rules for grading and passing children. (We note these specific
decision-making areas because they are captured in our measure of teacher discretion). Moreover,
70% of surveyed parents were highly interested in textbook selection. Similarly, Ritter et al.
(1993) showed that African American and Hispanic parents are highly involved in the areas of
course selection and scheduling, and are well-attuned to the amount of homework assigned to
their children. More recently, a number of studies have indicated that Hispanic parents are deeply
concerned with the academic progress of their children, though it is important to note that their
involvement with their children’s’ schools tends to be informal (e.g., helping with homework and
talking about the school day’s events vs. attending PTA meetings; Behnke et al., 2004; De
Gaetano, 2007; LeFevre & Shaw, 2012). While findings like these do not directly substantiate the
assumption that minority parents use open channels to make demands about minority teacher
discretion, they do suggest that minority parents are actively engaged in their children’s educa-
tions and are well-attuned to the happenings at their schools. It is plausible to think that engaged,
attentive parents would be inclined to intervene on their children’s behalf by making demands
about teacher discretion if they believed that doing so would benefit their children.
286 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Studies in the representative bureaucracy literature lend some additional indirect support to
our assumption that minority parents will make demands for more minority teacher discretion.
These studies all suggest that a bureaucracy’s minority clients value minority bureaucratic repre-
sentation. Thielemann and Stewart (1996), for instance, show that large majorities of Black and
Hispanic persons living with AIDS (PLWAs) care whether the staffs of HIV service delivery
agencies include members of their ethnic group. Moreover, they show that significantly larger
percentages of Black and Hispanic PLWAs (relative to White PLWAs) are concerned about
whether an agency’s director is from their ethnic group. Recent qualitative research by Watkins-
Hayes (2011) provides additional support for the proposition that minority clients value minority
bureaucratic representation. Watkins-Hayes (2011), who conducted interviews with 20 minority
(Black and Latino) welfare clients in Massachusetts to explore the role of race in the client–
caseworker relationship, notes that a

small but important group of clients hoped that a connection with caseworkers from their racial groups
would translate into a sympathetic ear (and hand) when it came to service delivery and, in an often-used
phrase, “an understanding of where I’m coming from.” (p. i242)

Bradbury and Kellough (2008) surveyed African American and White citizens in the city of
Athens, GA, about the importance of African American representation in local administrative
organizations. African American citizens, to a much greater degree than White citizens, believed
that African Americans should be given access to positions in local administration and be encour-
aged to use those positions to advocate for African American citizens. While these findings do
not directly show that a bureaucracy’s minority clients will make demands about minority
bureaucrats’ discretion, they do indicate that minority clients place a premium on minority repre-
sentation. That minority clients value minority bureaucratic representation suggests that it would
be plausible for them to want minority bureaucrats to have the discretion necessary to better serve
their interests.
Related to the studies described above, a small but growing body of representative bureau-
cracy research is concerned explicitly with symbolic representation, or the idea that minority
bureaucratic representation legitimizes a bureaucracy’s actions in the eyes of minority clients. In
other words,

members of different groups may feel better about public agencies simply because they believe that
people who share their demographic characteristics will share their policy views, will be responsive to
them, will not discriminate against them, and/or will act in their interest. (Keiser, 2010, p. 1206)

Research shows, for instance, that minority citizens perceive traffic stops to be more legitimate
when the police officer making the stop is also a minority (Theobald & Haider-Markel, 2006).
Similarly, female victims of sexual assault are more likely to file a formal report when their local
police station has a high proportion of female officers on staff (Meier & Nicholson-Crotty, 2006).
Again, these findings are not direct evidence that a bureaucracy’s minority (or female) clients
explicitly demand that minority bureaucrats be given more discretion, but they do help build the
case that minority clients want to be represented within the bureaucracy by individuals who share
their race. As Theobald and Haider-Markel (2009) sum up in their own study of symbolic repre-
sentation, “for population sub-groups, such as racial and ethnic minorities, real value is placed on
having members of the group in elected or nonelected [emphasis added] positions in govern-
ment” (p. 411).
Before moving to the second of our three causal mechanisms, we want to make two important
points, both of which have implications for our empirical analysis. As noted at the outset of this
section, our expectation is that minority parent demand for minority teacher discretion will be
Marvel and Resh 287

directly proportional to the prevalence of minority students in a school’s total student population.
By extension, we expect to observe a linear relationship between our client demographic vari-
ables (e.g., % African American students) and minority teacher discretion. Our first point is that
the expectation of a linear relationship should be considered a baseline, against which other
expectations can be compared. A plausible alternative expectation is that the relationship between
client demographics and minority teacher discretion hinges on the presence of a critical mass of
minority students. In this view, client demographics have no effect on minority teacher discretion
up to a certain point, but once that point is reached, an effect manifests.
The theoretical notion of a critical mass is a familiar one in the representative bureaucracy
literature, where the expectation is that passive representation translates into active representa-
tion only when minority bureaucrats constitute a nontrivial percentage of a bureaucracy’s total
workforce (see, for example, Keiser, 2010). Traditional representative bureaucracy studies have
not yet identified the causal mechanisms that underpin this process, but a plausible argument is
simply that minorities (whether they are elected or nonelected officials) become more assured of
their actions and more likely to win over others once their numbers reach some threshold.
Mansbridge (1999) makes this argument thus:

representatives of minority groups may need a critical mass for their own members to become willing to
enunciate minority positions. They may also need a critical mass to convince others—particularly
members of dominant groups—that the perspectives or insights they are advancing are widely shared,
genuinely felt, and deeply held within their own group. (p. 636)

We believe that this reasoning applies in the context of our study. Once minority parents consti-
tute a significant share of a school’s total parent population, it is reasonable to expect that they
will be more likely to air demands—including demands about minority teacher discretion.
Moreover, once these demands accumulate to a considerable threshold, it becomes much more
likely that they will be heard.
Evidence suggests that the application of this reasoning in our study is warranted. Kerbow and
Bernhardt (1993) find, for instance, that African American and Hispanic parent involvement in
Parent–Teacher Organizations (PTOs) is greater in schools with high concentrations of African
American and Hispanic students. Once members of these parent subgroups constitute a consider-
able share of a school’s total parent population, it appears that they become more comfortable
formally participating in school governance. Weiher (2000) also offers evidence that speaks to
our argument. Specifically, he shows that growth in the proportion of a school district’s total
students who are Hispanic begins to have a positive impact on Hispanic student performance
once Hispanic students reach critical mass. Conversely, decline in the proportion of a district’s
total students who are African American has a negative impact on African American student
performance only when African American students lose critical mass. These findings are relevant
to our argument about parent demand for the underlying political dynamics they hint at. As
Weiher (2000) notes,

Districts adjust their focus to address the needs of Hispanic students when Hispanics become a politically
potent constituency. Furthermore, the fact that decreases in proportions of Black students in districts that
are not heavily Black depress the performance of these students suggests that Blacks may be passing the
same political threshold in the opposite direction. As proportions of African-American students in school
districts decline, the districts become less attentive to them. (p. 894)

In the same way, it could be the case that minority parent demands for minority teacher discretion
become politically efficacious once minority parents attain critical mass and cease to be effica-
cious once critical mass is lost.
288 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

The second point we want to make concerns how parents’ involvement in their children’s
schools tends to change as their children get older. A good deal of evidence indicates that parent
involvement is considerably higher at lower grade levels and that it is particularly high at the
elementary school level (e.g., Greenwood & Hickman, 1991; Herrold & O’Donnell, 2008; Izzo
et al. 1999). We call attention to this evidence because our client demand mechanism rests on the
assumption that minority parents make demands about minority teacher discretion. While we
cannot directly test this assumption in the current study, the relationship between parent involve-
ment and school level noted above suggests that the parent demand causal mechanism is more
likely to operate at lower grade levels than higher grade levels. If parents are more involved in
their children’s schools at lower grade levels, it is reasonable to think that they will have a greater
number of formal and informal interactions with school officials at these lower grade levels and
that they will be more inclined—and have more opportunities—to make demands that are rele-
vant to their children’s schooling. Consequently, we expect to observe a stronger relationship
between client demographics and minority teacher discretion at lower grade levels than at higher
grade levels. If such a relationship does exist in our data, it would make the client demand mecha-
nism more plausible.

Managerial Deference to Expertise


In the context of our study, managerial deference to bureaucratic expertise refers to the idea that
public school principals recognize minority teachers’ unique capacities for relating to and
instructing minority students and, recognizing these capacities, grant minority teachers the lati-
tude to act on them. For our purposes, then, “expertise” includes the special relational abilities
that minority teachers possess vis-à-vis minority students, in addition to any unique technical
skills they enjoy.3 As with our client demand mechanism, a few key assumptions are built into the
managerial deference mechanism. One assumption is that minority teachers actually do possess
expertise vis-à-vis minority students. A second assumption is that principals will permit minority
teachers the discretion to deploy that expertise.
The assumption that minority teachers are uniquely capable in the instruction of minority
students is common in the representative bureaucracy literature (e.g., Meier et al., 1991, 1999;
Meier & Bohte, 2001). Meier and Bohte (2001) note, for instance, that “minority teachers might
well have additional insight into how to motivate and teach minority students” (p. 459). Similarly,
Meier et al. (1999) point out that “minority teachers are more effective at teaching minority stu-
dents” (p. 1030). Research bearing on this claim suggests that minority teachers are indeed spe-
cially equipped to instruct minority students. Much of this research, which focuses on the
relational component of expertise, shows that minority teachers’ interactions with and percep-
tions of minority students are more positive than those of their White colleagues (Aaron &
Powell, 1982; Cole, 1986; Dee, 2005; Irvine, 1990; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Lipman, 1995; Moore
& Johnson, 1983). Recently, Dee (2004) has shown that Black elementary school students4 who
are randomly assigned to Black teachers tend to perform better on standardized math and reading
tests than Black students who are randomly assigned to non-Black teachers. While the causal
mechanisms underlying this finding are not clear—whether relational or technical expertise (or
some other factor) is at work is not demonstrated—the key takeaway is that Black students do in
fact do better under Black teachers than White teachers.
The justification for our second assumption—namely, that principals will grant minority
teachers the leeway to capitalize on their expertise—is primarily theoretical. Public managers are
held accountable for the performance of their organizations (Lipsky, 1980). Like any manager in
any industry, public managers must rely on their employees to work diligently in pursuit of orga-
nizational goals (Brehm & Gates, 1997; Riccucci & Meyers, 2004). Oftentimes, a public man-
ager’s employees may possess expertise that the manager lacks. When this is the case, it is in the
Marvel and Resh 289

manager’s interest to defer to the employees’ expertise (Lipsky, 1980, pp. 24-25). Consider, for
instance, a manager at NASA, a federal agency whose work is of a highly technical nature. If this
manager presides over a group of employees who have expertise in different areas of rocket
design, it is unlikely that she—even if an expert herself—will be knowledgeable in all of these
areas. Consequently, the manager will have to cede decision-making authority to her employees
if she wants a well-designed rocket. As Romzek and Dubnick (1987) emphasize in their land-
mark case study of accountability at NASA, deference characterizes the relationship between
managers and employees in highly technical agencies like NASA (p. 229).
Schools are not as highly technical as NASA, but their employees often do possess expertise
that managers (principals, vice-principals, school district officials) lack. This is especially true
at higher grade levels, where subject matter can be quite specialized (e.g., physics, calculus,
chemistry; Busher & Harris, 1999). When a public school teacher has subject matter expertise
that his principal does not, it is reasonable to expect that the principal will defer to the teacher’s
judgment regarding matters like textbook selection, instructional pacing, and course content. At
the same time, it is also reasonable to expect that teachers will use their expertise to resist top-
down attempts at limiting their discretion. As Little (1995) notes in her case study of public
school restructuring, “teachers routinely employ claims to subject expertise and department
affiliation in shaping their response to new formal structures . . . and to shifts in the balance
between individual and collective autonomy” (p. 50). More generally, studies in the public man-
agement literature suggest that frontline employees will resist managers’ efforts to control their
actions when employees feel they have firsthand experiential knowledge that managers lack
(Sandfort, 1999, 2000).
At this point, it is important to reemphasize that expertise in the context of our study has a
relational component. As noted above, evidence suggests that minority teachers are better than
their White counterparts at connecting with minority students. Consequently, we expect that
public school principals (or vice-principals, etc.) will more readily defer to minority teachers
than White teachers as the percentage of a school’s total students who are minorities increases.
This is not to say that principals will rigidly oversee White teachers while employing a laissez-
faire managerial style with minority teachers. Rather, it is to say that on the decision-making
margins, minority teachers’ decisions are less likely to be contested than White teachers’
decisions.

Bureaucratic Appropriation
Our final causal mechanism—bureaucratic appropriation—refers to the idea that minority
bureaucrats will feel empowered to claim more discretion for themselves when they serve client
populations that are heavily minority. Street-level bureaucracy theory suggests that bureaucrats
value discretion because it allows them to cope with the difficulties, ambiguities, and conflicting
obligations of their jobs (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003; Watkins-Hayes,
2011). Consequently, it is reasonable to expect that they will, in general, make claims for more
of it. But we are interested in a more specific explanation for why minority bureaucrats will
appropriate more discretion when the client population they serve is composed of a large percent-
age of minorities.
A simple explanation is that they will feel justified in appropriating it, and therefore will be
more likely to do so. According to Saward’s (2010) theoretical notion of a “representative claim,”
minority bureaucrats have special standing to demand more discretion when the bureaucracies in
which they work have large minority client populations. Saward (2010) defines a representative
claim as “a claim to represent or know what represents the interests of someone or something”
(p. 38) and argues that these claims are legitimated by various kinds of “resources,” including
descriptive similarity between the representer and the representee. In the context of the current
290 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

analysis, Saward’s (2010) argument implies that minority bureaucrats will be able to legitimately
claim more discretion when the client population they serve comprises a large percentage of
minorities.
Research on minority teachers’ attitudes about teaching minority students suggests that they
would indeed feel justified in claiming more discretion. In interviews with 22 minority public
school teachers, Carr and Klassen (1997) found that nearly all believe that minority teachers
“play a crucial role in connecting to racial minority students” (p. 75). Interviewees tended to
emphasize their relational expertise vis-à-vis minority students. One interviewee noted, for
instance, “The racial minority kids are more comfortable with me. They’re polite to me, let’s put
it that way. They cooperate more” (p. 75). Another pointed out, “As a minority teacher I feel I
have more patience and understanding of new students lacking some of the social aspects of
schooling” (p. 75). Similar to Carr and Klassen (1997), Foster (1998) interviewed 20 Black pub-
lic school teachers and found that many saw themselves as being uniquely able to connect with
and instruct Black students. While these findings do not demonstrate that minority teachers actu-
ally appropriate discretion in heavily minority schools, they do imply that minority teachers
would view doing so as legitimate.
Research in the representative bureaucracy literature provides additional support for the argu-
ment that minority bureaucrats will feel warranted in appropriating discretion to act on behalf of
minority clients. Specifically, this research suggests that minority bureaucrats acknowledge, and
often even embrace, a special responsibility to act as representatives for minority clients. Selden
at al. (1998), for instance, use data on 184 bureaucrats working in the Department of Agriculture’s
Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) to show that minority bureaucrats more readily adopt a
“minority representative role”—an orientation toward acting on behalf of minority clients—than
do nonminority bureaucrats. Similarly, Martinez (1991) and Murray et al. (1994) adduce evi-
dence in support of the proposition that minority bureaucrats view advocating for minority cli-
ents as a duty. Martinez (1991), for instance, uses data on 93 public administrators from California
to show that Hispanic administrators are significantly more likely than White administrators to
view administrative representation on behalf of the Hispanic community as a valid role obliga-
tion. Likewise, Murray et al. (1994) produce survey evidence suggesting that many Black admin-
istrators view advocacy on behalf of Black clients to be a legitimate undertaking. More recently,
Bradbury and Kellough (2008) demonstrate, via a survey of local government administrators in
Georgia, that Black administrators believe much more so than White administrators that local
government officials should make efforts to promote policies that benefit Black citizens. For
instance, they show that 86% of surveyed Black administrators (as opposed to just 17.4% of
surveyed White administrators) agree with the statement that government employees “should
actively advocate in favor of policies that specifically address the interests of African American
citizens” (p. 707) Moreover, 96% of surveyed Black administrators (as opposed to 28.9% of
surveyed White administrators) agree that government employees “should actively advocate for
organizational change to ensure responsiveness to African-American interests” (p. 707). These
findings do not demonstrate the actual appropriation of discretion by minority bureaucrats; nev-
ertheless, they constitute convincing evidence that minority bureaucrats are inclined to act on
behalf of minority clients. In our view, this acting on behalf of minority clients would imply the
claiming of discretion.
Importantly, the operation of our first causal mechanism (client demand) may reinforce the
operation of our bureaucratic appropriation mechanism. The idea here is that minority clients’
demands induce minority bureaucrats to claim discretion to act on their behalf. Scott (1990), for
one, finds that Black school district superintendents feel that Black citizens “impose greater
demands on black superintendents” than on White superintendents (p. 167). Scott (1990) further
shows that Black school district superintendents assimilate these demands by making the
advancement of Black interests a priority: 56 out of 62 agree that “black superintendents should
Marvel and Resh 291

Discretion

Minority teachers (black/Hispanic)

White teachers

% Minority students (black/Hispanic)

Figure 2. The relationship between minority student share and teacher discretion, by teacher race.

identify with black-directed endeavors to resolve the problems and needs of black Americans in
a racist society” (p. 168). In a pair of earlier studies, Mann (1974, 1975) elucidates a similar
dynamic, showing that minority superintendents are subject to increased demands by minority
clients and therefore feel compelled to advance a minority-oriented agenda. In short, minority
client demand spurs minority bureaucrats to appropriate discretion and become active represen-
tatives of minority clients’ interests.

Empirical Implications
The above reasoning has two primary empirical implications, which we call Hypotheses 1 and
1a. First, and as already emphasized, minority teachers’ discretion will increase as minority stu-
dents constitute a larger and larger share of a school’s total student population. Second, this
relationship will not hold for nonminority (White) teachers. White teachers’ discretion will either
remain the same or decrease as minority students constitute larger and larger shares of a school’s
total student population. The relationship between minority student share and White teachers’
discretion is expected to be zero or negative because the three potential causal mechanisms link-
ing minority client share to minority bureaucrats’ discretion do not apply to White teachers.
Minority students (or their parents) will not demand that White teachers be given more discre-
tion; managers will not defer to White teachers when it comes to relating to minority students;
and White teachers working in heavily minority schools will not make claims for more discre-
tion.5 Accordingly, our hypotheses are as follows:

Hypothesis 1 (H1): The effect of minority student share on a teacher’s discretion will depend
on the race of the teacher. For minority teachers, the effect will be positive;
Hypothesis 1a (H1a): for White teachers, the effect will be null or negative.

We will test H1 for two minority groups: African Americans and Hispanics. Figure 2 helps to
clarify our expectations.
We also test two additional hypotheses, both of which were alluded to in our discussion of the
client demand causal mechanism. The first of these hypotheses concerns the relationship between
a minority student critical mass and minority teacher discretion. Our expectation is that the exis-
tence of a minority student critical mass will be positively related to discretion for minority
teachers but not for White teachers. There is no consensus in the representative bureaucracy lit-
erature on what, precisely, constitutes a critical mass (Keiser, 2010). Nevertheless, as Hindera
292 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Discretion

Minority teachers

White teachers

% Minority students

Figure 3. Minority student critical mass and teacher discretion, by teacher race.

Discretion Minority Teachers:


Lower grades

Minority Teachers:
Higher grades

White Teachers: All


grades

% Minority students

Figure 4. Minority student share and minority teacher discretion, by grade level.

and Young (1998) point out, “two a priori points are suggested from normative theories of
democracy” (p. 663). These, they note, are the point at which a minority group constitutes a plu-
rality and the point at which a minority group constitutes a simple majority. Consequently, we
will test our third hypothesis using both points.

Hypothesis 2 (H2): Minority student critical mass (plurality/majority) will be positively


related to discretion for minority teachers;
Hypothesis 2a (H2a): for White teachers, the effect will be null or negative.

As Figure 3 shows, we expect a threshold effect: Minority teachers in critical mass schools will
have more discretion than minority teachers in noncritical mass schools.6
The second of our two additional hypotheses (and the third overall) is that the relationship
between minority student share and minority teachers’ discretion will be more pronounced at
lower grade levels than higher grade levels. Recall the reasoning that underlies this hypothesis:
Parents are more involved with their children’s schools when their children are young, and so the
parent demand mechanism will be more operative at lower grade levels than higher grade levels.
Consequently, we should observe a stronger relationship between the percentage of minority
students and minority teachers’ discretion at lower grade levels. Again, we expect no relationship
(or a negative relationship) for White teachers. Figure 4 illustrates these expectations.
Marvel and Resh 293

Hypothesis 3 (H3): At lower grade levels, the relationship between minority student share and
minority teachers’ discretion is stronger (i.e., more positive).
Hypothesis 3a (H3a): At lower grade levels, there is no relationship between minority student
share and White teachers’ discretion.

Data, Model, and Method


Data
The analysis sample for this study comprises 31,640 public school teachers from 6,400 public
schools.7 Data for these units are drawn from the 2007-2008 wave of the Department of
Education’s Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). The SASS is a quadrennial survey that collects
nationally representative data from public school teachers in all 50 states as well as data about
these teachers’ schools, principals, and school districts. Thus, for any given teacher, the researcher
can link to data about the teacher’s principal, school, and school district.
In brief, the SASS’s sample selection procedure is as follows. It first draws a nationally repre-
sentative sample of public schools (schools are the SASS’s primary sampling units),8 each of
which receives the SASS “school questionnaire.” Once a school is selected for inclusion in the
sample, that school’s district and principal are automatically sent a “district questionnaire” and
“principal questionnaire,” respectively. Finally, from within each of the sampled schools, a sam-
ple of teachers is drawn, and each of these teachers receives the SASS “teacher questionnaire.”
The separate questionnaires elicit a wealth of information from each set of respondents (teachers,
principals, schools, and districts). Below, we present our model of bureaucratic discretion and
describe the variables that go into it.

Model
Though we are chiefly interested in the interaction between teacher race and student demograph-
ics (recall Figure 1), we begin by estimating a simple model of teacher discretion, one that does
not include any interaction terms:

discretiont,s = β1blacktcht,s + β2Hisptcht,s + β3 pctblackstus + β4 pctHispstus + controls + µs + εt,s

We then estimate a model that does include interaction terms:

discretiont,s = β1blacktcht,s + β2Hisptcht,s + β3pctblackstus + β4pctHispstus +


β5blacktcht,s·pctblackstus + β6Hisptcht,s·pctHispstus + controls + µs + εt,s

We begin with the simple model because doing so helps to clarify the theoretical importance and
substantive interpretation of the interaction terms.
Above, discretiont,s is the discretion of teacher t in school s; blacktcht,s is a dummy variable
that equals one if teacher t (in school s) is African American and zero otherwise; Hisptcht,s is a
dummy variable that equals one if teacher t is Hispanic and zero otherwise; pctblackstus is the
percentage of school s’s students who are African American; pctHispstus is the percentage of
school s’s students who are Hispanic; blacktcht,s·pctblackstus and Hisptcht,s·pctHispstus are
interaction terms; controls is a collection of control variables; µs is a random school-level error
term; and εt,s is a random teacher-level error term. It is important to note that teacher race is a
six-category variable whose categories are the following: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian
American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native.
We “dummy out” this six-category race variable, creating a set of five indicator variables—one
294 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics: Focal variables.

Mean SD Min Max


Discretion 16.88 2.77 5 20
White teachers only 17.00 2.72 5 20
Black teachers only 16.17 3.01 5 20
Hispanic teachers only 16.20 3.02 5 20
%Black students 14.55 24.17 0 100
%Hispanic students 12.04 20.32 0 100
Freq. %
Teacher race
White 27,520 86.98
Black 1,770 5.61
Hispanic 1,200 3.79
Asian American 450 1.43
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander 90 0.28
American Indian or Alaska Native 600 1.91

Note. N = 31,640.

for each race category except White. Consequently, White teachers constitute our reference
group throughout the analysis.9 Table 1, which contains descriptive statistics, shows that there
are 1,770 Black teachers and 1,200 Hispanic teachers in our sample. As the table further shows,
the student bodies of the 6,400 schools in our sample are about 14.6% Black and 12.0% Hispanic,
with a good deal of variation around these means.
The above model’s two focal interaction terms serve to test the hypothesis that minority teach-
ers’ discretion will increase with the percentage of a school’s total students who are minorities.
Positive signs on these interaction terms’ coefficients would support this hypothesis.10 The pct-
blackstus and pctHispstus variables test H1a, which states that White teachers’ discretion will
either remain the same or decrease as the percentage of a school’s total students who are minori-
ties increases. Since White teachers constitute our omitted race category, these variables’ coeffi-
cients represent, respectively, the effects that increases in the percentage of a school’s students
who are Black and Hispanic have on White teachers’ discretion.
To test our second hypothesis, we estimate the following model:

discretiont,s = β1blacktcht,s + β2Hisptcht,s + β3blackstuPluralitys +


β4HispstuPluralitys + β5blacktcht,s·blackstuPluralitys +
β6Hisptcht,s·HispstuPluralitys + controls + µs + εt,s

Above, blackstuPluralitys is a dummy variable that equals one if school s’s Black students
constitute a plurality and zero if they do not; HispstuPluralitys is a dummy variable that
equals one if school s’s Hispanic students constitute a plurality and zero if they do not; and
blacktcht,s·blackstuPluralitys and Hisptcht,s·HispstuPluralitys are interaction terms. A signifi-
cant positive coefficient for the blacktcht,s·blackstuPluralitys interactions term would indi-
cate that the existence of a Black student critical mass is positively related to discretion for
Black teachers. A null coefficient for the blackstuPluralitys variable would indicate that a
Black student critical mass has no effect on White teachers’ discretion. Similar logic would
apply to the coefficients of the Hisptcht,s·HispstuPluralitys and HispstuPluralitys variables.
Note that we estimate the same model as above with variables measuring minority student
majorities.
Marvel and Resh 295

To test our third hypothesis, we estimate the above two models while restricting the estimation
sample to include only elementary schools. We then estimate the above two models for all other
schools. Comparing our results across the different estimation samples allows us to informally
assess our third hypothesis.

Method
As indicated above, we begin with a simple model and add in complexity. The simple model
contains a group of control variables that we call exogenous. We use the term exogenous some-
what informally, applying it to any variable for which reverse causality can reasonably be
assumed to be a nonissue. These are mostly demographic or structural variables like school
size, the percentage of a school’s students who are eligible for free lunch, and organizational
span of control (the ratio of vice-principals to teachers). Our more complex models include
these exogenous controls as well as additional controls that we call endogenous, given that
they do raise the issue of reverse causality. One such variable, for instance, is a measure of red
tape: It is plausible to think that red tape affects teachers’ discretion, but it is also plausible to
think that teachers with lots of discretion can choose to ignore red tape. Ultimately, whether the
endogenous variables are included in our models does not impact our results in a substantively
meaningful way. Nevertheless, we do want to acknowledge this potential problem. Our models
include a long list of controls, measured at both the teacher level and the school level. To pre-
serve space, and to keep the focus of our article on our variables of theoretical interest, we do
not catalogue our control variables here. Instead, we list them in our control variables appendix
(Table A1) along with the details of their measurement and brief comments regarding their
purpose.
We estimate each of the models shown above with school district fixed effects, which control
for any district to district differences that could be correlated with our independent variables of
interest as well as our dependent variable, teacher discretion. The district fixed effects are par-
ticularly important because different school districts may have different formal policies in place
that affect how much discretion teachers have. These policies might also limit or enable the
operation of our three causal mechanisms. For instance, district policies could restrict formal
parent involvement in school governance (stifling our parent demand mechanism). The inclusion
of school district fixed effects in our models accounts for this kind of possibility.11 More gener-
ally, the district fixed effects give us more confidence in the validity of our results.

Measuring Discretion
Scott (1997) has defined discretion as “a range of choice within a set of parameters that circum-
scribes the behavior of the individual service provider” (p. 37). Formal policies will likely set the
boundaries of teacher discretion; within these boundaries, different teachers will have more or
less room to exercise their own judgment. As we noted above, since our models include school
district fixed effects, any impact that formal, district-level policies have on teacher discretion is
accounted for in our analysis.
We measure discretion using the sum of a teacher’s answers to five survey items. Teachers are
asked to rate the amount of control they have over various areas of teaching and planning. These
areas are as follows: (a) selecting textbooks and other instructional materials; (b) selecting con-
tent, topics, and skills to be taught; (c) selecting teaching techniques; (d) evaluating and grading
students; and (e) determining the amount of homework to be assigned. Response options include
(1) no control, (2) minor control, (3) moderate control, and (4) major control. Thus, if a teacher
were to report major control for all five items, his score on our multi-item index of discretion
would be 20. By contrast, if a teacher were to report no control for all five items, his score would
296 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

be five. On average, teachers have a good deal of discretion—the mean value of the discretion
index for our sample of 31,640 teachers is 16.88. The minimum sample value for the index is five
and the maximum is 20; the standard deviation is 2.77. Black and Hispanic teachers tend to have
less discretion than White teachers. For Black teachers, mean discretion is 16.17; for Hispanic
teachers, mean discretion is 16.20; for White teachers, mean discretion is 17.00. These figures
are shown in Table 1.12.13

Results
Table 2 shows our results. The first two rows of the table show our Black Tch and Hispanic
Tch coefficients, which speak to the question of whether Black teachers and Hispanic teachers
have different amounts of discretion than White teachers. As we will emphasize throughout
our discussion of the results, these coefficients—as well as our %Black students and
%Hispanic students coefficients—must be interpreted carefully since they appear in interac-
tion terms. In general, our results suggest that Black teachers tend to have less discretion than
White teachers, while Hispanic teachers tend to have the same amount of discretion as White
teachers.
We begin with a simple model that does not include interaction terms (Model 1). The Black
teacher variable’s (Black Tch) coefficient indicates that Black teachers have, on average, about
0.20 more units of discretion than White teachers (the omitted teacher race category). As the table
further shows, this is with our exogenous control variables included in the model and our endog-
enous variables excluded. All models include school district fixed effects. Given the inclusion of
the district fixed effects, the Black teacher variable’s coefficient can be interpreted as a within-
district comparison of Black and White teachers: Black teachers have about 0.20 more units of
discretion than White teachers working in the same district, holding constant all exogenous con-
trol variables. While the Black teacher variable’s coefficient is statistically significant, it is not
substantively meaningful. Recall that our discretion variable ranges from 5 to 20, with a mean of
16.88. Since 0.20 units of discretion would constitute a mean-anchored increase of only 1.2%
(0.20/16.88), we consider 0.20 units small.
Model 1’s %Black students coefficient indicates that increases in the percentage a school’s
students who are Black are associated with decreases in teacher discretion. Importantly, since
Model 1 does not include any teacher raceXstudent demographic interaction terms, this coeffi-
cient applies to all teachers. However, like the Black teacher variable’s coefficient, the %Black
students coefficient, though statistically significant, is quite small: A one percentage point
increase in Black students is associated with a decrease in teacher discretion of 0.005 units. The
%Hispanic Students variable is also negative, statistically significant, and substantively small.
The Model 1 results, then, suggest that student demographics have no appreciable impact on
teacher discretion.
Our argument is that Model 1 is overly simple and theoretically incorrect since it does not
recognize that minority student demographics might impact teacher discretion differently for
minority teachers than for White teachers. To account for this possibility, Model 2 includes two
key interaction terms: Black Tch X %Black Students and Hispanic Tch X %Hispanic Students.
The coefficient of the first of these interaction terms represents by how much the relationship
between Black student share and teacher discretion differs for Black teachers and White teachers.
In other words, this coefficient represents the difference between the slopes of the two lines
shown above, in Figure 2. Similarly, the coefficient of the Hispanic Tch X %Hispanic Students
interaction term represents by how much the relationship between Hispanic student share and
teacher discretion differs for Hispanic teachers and White teachers. Our three theoretical mecha-
nisms suggest that these coefficients should be positive.
Table 2. Results: Teacher Discretion.
Linear interactions Linear interactions: Critical mass Critical mass Critical mass
No Linear with endogenous Elementary schools interactions: interactions: interactions: Majority,
interactions interactions controls only Plurality Majority elementary schools only

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Black Tch (ref. category: White Tch) 0.198* –0.221 –0.201 –1.037* 0.151 0.012 –0.702*
Hispanic Tch (ref. category: White Tch) –0.093 –0.227 –0.221 –0.173 –0.122 –0.115 0.062
%Black students –0.005* –0.007* –0.004 0.001 — — —
Black Tch X %Black students — 0.009** 0.008** 0.016** — — —
%Hispanic students –0.006** –0.005 –0.004 0.003 — — —
Hispanic Tch X %Hispanic students — –0.001 –0.001 –0.006 — — —
Black student plurality — — — — –0.133 — —
Black Tch X Black student plurality — — — — 0.473 — —
Hispanic student plurality — — — — –0.023 — —
Hispanic Tch X Hispanic student plurality — — — — 0.044 — —
Black student majority — — — — — –0.211 –0.145
Black Tch X Black student majority — — — — — 0.361* 1.112**
Hispanic student majority — — — — — –0.154 –0.037
Hispanic Tch X Hispanic student majority — — — — — –0.085 –0.647
Exogenous control variables included Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Endogenous control variables included No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
R-squared (overall) 0.147 0.150 0.164 0.114 0.156 0.159 0.115
R-squared (within) 0.102 0.103 0.112 0.114 0.112 0.112 0.114
R-squared (between) 0.233 0.238 0.287 0.107 0.267 0.274 0.115
Observations 31,640 31,640 31,640 8,780 31,640 31,640 8,780

Note. All models include school district fixed effects. Standard errors (not shown) are clustered by district. Control variable results are not shown, but the models include the control variables listed in Table
A1. As indicated, two models include exogenous control variables only, while the remaining models include both exogenous and endogenous control variables.
*p < .05. **p < .01.

297
298 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Since White teachers constitute our reference racial category, the presence of the interaction
terms in Model 2 means that the %Black Students and %Hispanic Students coefficients represent
the impact of Black student share and Hispanic student share on discretion for White teachers.
These coefficients correspond to the horizontal line for White teachers that appears in Figure 2.
Recall that our expectation is that minority student share will either have no impact or a negative
impact on discretion for White teachers.
The presence of the interaction terms, both here and in our remaining models, has two more
implications for the interpretation of our results. First, the Black Tch and Hispanic Tch coeffi-
cients represent the difference between Black teachers’ (Hispanic teachers’)14 discretion and
White teachers’ discretion when the %Black Students [%Hispanic Students] variable equals
zero. For instance, Model 2’s Black Tch coefficient indicates that Black teachers have, on aver-
age, 0.221 fewer units of discretion than White teachers when a school has no Black students.
Second, the impact of Black [Hispanic] student share on discretion for Black [Hispanic] teachers
is equal to the coefficient of the %Black Students [%Hispanic Students] variable plus the coef-
ficient of the Black Tch X %Black Students [Hispanic Tch X %Hispanic Students] interaction
term. Our expectation is that this will be positive. For instance, the Model 2 impact of Black
student share on Black teachers’ discretion is equal to −0.007 + 0.009, or 0.002. To assess whether
this impact is statistically significant, a joint F test can be performed on the %Black Students and
Black Tch X %Black Students coefficients. The results of this test (F = 6.88, p = .001) indicate
that it is, though we note that it is quite small. To sum up, our theoretical expectations are that the
%Black Students [%Hispanic Students] coefficient will be null or negative, that the coefficients
of our interaction terms will be positive, and that the sum of the two will also be positive.
Statistically, our Model 2 results confirm these expectations for Black teachers but not Hispanic
teachers. However, as already noted, these results are substantively trivial.
Except for the addition of our endogenous control variables, Model 3 is the same as Model 2.
Its results are similar to Model 2’s results in that the Black Tch X %Black Students coefficient is
positive and statistically significant and the total impact of Black student share on Black teachers’
discretion is statistically significant (–0.004 + 0.008 = 0.004, F = 4.67, p = .009), though substan-
tively insignificant. Additionally, Model 3 does not produce any statistically significant results
for Hispanic teachers.
Our results are substantively more meaningful in Model 4, which is the same as Model 3,
but is estimated for elementary schools only. Note first the Black Tch coefficient, which indi-
cates that Black teachers have, on average, about 1.04 fewer units of discretion than White
teachers in elementary schools with zero Black students. To get a sense for what 1.04 units
mean, recall that the mean of discretion for our sample is 16.88. These 1.04 units represent
about 6.2% of that mean. While not overly large, this does strike us as substantively meaning-
ful. The null %Black Students coefficient indicates that Black student share is, as expected, not
related to White teachers’ discretion, while the positive and statistically significant Black Tch
X %Black Students coefficient means that the relationship between Black student share and
discretion is 0.016 units larger for Black teachers than White teachers.15 An F test (F = 4.11, p
= .017) suggests that the impact of Black student share on Black teachers’ discretion (0.001 +
0.016 = 0.0161) is statistically significant. For an idea of the size of this impact, consider a one
standard deviation increase in Black student share (i.e., an increase of 24.2 percentage points).
Such an increase would be associated with an increase in Black teachers’ discretion of about
0.39 (24.2 × 0.0161) units. By extrapolation, a two standard deviation increase in Black stu-
dent share would be associated with an increase in Black teachers’ discretion of 0.78 units.
Taken together, the Model 4 results suggest that Black teachers in elementary schools “start
off” with less discretion than White teachers, but then close this initial discretion gap as Black
student share increases. It is important to note that this scenario, which Figure 5 depicts, is
Marvel and Resh 299

Discretion

Black teachers

White teachers

% Black students

Figure 5. Results: The relationship between Black student share and teacher discretion, by teacher race
(elementary schools only).

stylized for illustrative purposes. It should not be taken as a causal claim, given that our analy-
ses rely on nonexperimental cross-sectional data.
Model 5 tests our critical mass hypotheses, which stated that the presence of a minority stu-
dent plurality will be positively associated with discretion for minority teachers, but not for
White teachers. Model 5’s estimated coefficients conform to our expectations for White teachers:
The Black Student Plurality coefficient indicates that White teachers have 0.133 fewer units of
discretion than Black teachers in the presence of a Black student plurality. This result is not sta-
tistically significant, but our hypothesis was that the relationship between a minority student
plurality and White teachers’ discretion would be null or negative, so a statistically insignificant
result is consistent with that hypothesis. The impact of a Black student plurality on Black teach-
ers’ discretion (–0.133 + 0.473 = 0.340) is positive, but it is not statistically significant. The same
pattern of results obtains for our Hispanic variables.
Model 6 tests our critical mass hypotheses using a simple majority as the critical mass point.
Here, the model’s results conform to expectations for White teachers and for Black teachers in
terms of sign. Additionally, F test results indicate that Black teachers have (–0.211 + 0.36) 0.15
more units of discretion than White teachers in schools with Black student majorities (F = 2.79,
p = .06). Note, though, that these F test results are significant only at the 0.10 level. Model 6’s
Hispanic results, like Model 5’s, are statistically insignificant.
Model 7 is the same as Model 6, except that it is restricted to elementary schools only. The
results of this model indicate that in elementary schools without a Black student majority, Black
teachers have, on average, about 0.7 fewer units of discretion than White teachers. The Black
Student Majority coefficient’s sign is in accord with expectations—the presence of a Black stu-
dent majority has no impact on White teachers’ discretion. Also in accord with expectations, the
Black Tch X Black Student Majority coefficient (1.112) indicates that the presence of a Black
student majority has a larger impact on black teachers’ discretion than on White teachers’ discre-
tion. According to the Model 6 results, Black student majorities are associated with Black teach-
ers’ having about 0.97 (–0.145 + 1.112) more units of discretion than White teachers. A joint F
test (F = 4.43, p = .0121) suggests that this result is statistically significant.16 To get a sense for
the magnitude of this finding, consider again how it compares to average teacher discretion
(16.88 for the entire sample, 16.2 for Black teachers, 17.0 for White teachers). It is about 6% of
our sample mean for the discretion variable. Consider also that our discretion variable ranges
from a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 20. As a percentage of this response range (15 units), 0.97
300 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Discretion

Black teachers

White teachers

% Black students

Figure 6. Results: Black student critical mass and teacher discretion, by teacher race (elementary
schools only).

units is not trivial: 0.97/15 = 6.5%. Once again, our results for Hispanic teachers are statistically
insignificant. Figure 6, shown below, depicts these results: Black teachers “start off” with less
discretion than White teachers, but once a critical mass is achieved, their discretion jumps up.
Again, our analyses rely on nonexperimental cross-sectional data, and so the figure should not be
taken as a causal illustration.
Before turning to a deeper discussion of our results, we want to comment on Table 2’s
R-squared rows. Because our models include school district fixed effects, Table 2 displays an
“overall” R-squared, a “within” R-squared, and a “between” R-squared. In our modeling set-up,
discretion varies within school districts: Different teachers within the same district have different
amounts of discretion. Discretion also varies between school districts: Average teacher discretion
is different in different school districts. R-squared (within) represents the percentage of within-
district variation in discretion that our independent variables explain, while R-squared (between)
represents the percentage of between-district variation in discretion that our independent vari-
ables explain. R-squared (overall) is a weighted average of the two.
A few patterns are apparent in the R-squared results. First, the models tend to explain
more between-district variation than within-district variation. This is probably because of
the school district fixed effects, which account for critical factors like district policies, dis-
trict quality, district resources, and so forth. District policies are especially likely to account
for district to district differences in teacher discretion. The comparatively low within-district
R-squared results could suggest one of two things. It could be the case that our models leave
out important teacher-level and school-level variables that would account for more within-
district variation if included in our models. Or, it could be the case that within-district varia-
tion in teacher discretion is largely random; that is, it varies from teacher to teacher for
reasons that we cannot systematically explain. Since our models include an extensive list of
teacher-level and school-level control variables, including measures of teacher quality,
teacher experience, teacher tenure, teaching field, teacher education level, perceptions of
administrative support, school quality, school resources, and so forth, we are inclined to
think that the issue is more one of random variation in teacher discretion than one of omitted
variables. Still, it is useful to consider what factors our analysis might be leaving out. Prime
suspects include school-level variables like organizational culture and managerial disposi-
tions toward teacher discretion. In some schools, for instance, teachers might be encouraged
by their principals to exercise discretion; in others, they may not. Our models control for
school-level administrative support, but this is an imperfect proxy for managerial
Marvel and Resh 301

dispositions. Ideally, we would like to use a school fixed effects approach to control for these
types of school-level variables, but our student demographic variables are measured at the
school level, and so would be excluded from our analysis if we used school-level fixed
effects.

Discussion and Conclusion


Is the discretion of minority bureaucrats positively related to the percentage of an organization’s
total clientele who are from the same minority group? Our results suggest that this is the case for
Black teachers but not for Hispanic teachers, particularly at lower grade levels. We have argued
that there are three reasons to expect to observe such a relationship: client demand, managerial
deference to expertise, and bureaucratic appropriation. First, minority clients will want minority
bureaucrats to have the discretion that is necessary to act on their behalf. Prior empirical research
suggests minority clients value bureaucratic representation, presumably because minority clients
believe that minority bureaucrats are more likely to share their values and will be better able to
empathize with them than nonminority bureaucrats (Thielemann & Stewart, 1996; Watkins-
Hayes, 2011).
Second, public managers will defer to minority bureaucrats working with heavily minority
client populations since minority bureaucrats possess a unique capacity to serve those clients. For
instance, research in the education literature indicates that Black students do better under Black
teachers than White teachers (Dee, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lipman, 1994). As we note
above, minority bureaucrats’ unique capacity to serve minority clients need not entail technical
expertise; instead, it can be based on a unique ability to empathize with, or relate to, minority
clients. Indeed, one of the premises of representative bureaucracy theory is that minority bureau-
crats tend to share the same values, attitudes, and worldviews of minority clients (Dolan &
Rosenbloom, 2003).
Finally, in organizations serving heavily minority client populations, minority bureaucrats
will make claims for discretion on the basis of race. Research indicates that minority bureaucrats
are more likely to adopt a minority representative role than nonminority bureaucrats and that
minority bureaucrats view advocating on behalf of minority clients as a valid role obligation
(Martinez, 1991; Murray et al., 1994; Selden et al., 1998). More specifically, research in the
education literature indicates that minority teachers consciously view themselves as possessing
special capacities to connect with minority students (e.g., Carr & Klassen, 1997). Taken together,
these streams of research suggest that minority bureaucrats view acting for minority clients as
legitimate, and so would be inclined to claim discretion to do so.
It is important to note that the relationship between minority client share and minority bureau-
crats’ discretion that we propose is not contingent on the operation of any one of the above
mechanisms we have discussed. We might observe a positive relationship between the discretion
of minority bureaucrats and the percentage of an organization’s clients who are from the same
minority group because client demand, managerial deference, and bureaucratic appropriation are
all in play, or simply because of bureaucratic appropriation alone. Much as the empirical repre-
sentative bureaucracy literature has been unable to pinpoint why, exactly, passive representation
translates into active representation, we cannot pinpoint which of the three mechanisms proposed
here is responsible for the positive relationships we observe. Nevertheless, we expected the client
demand mechanism to be stronger at lower grade levels and our results confirmed this
expectation.
Our findings have some interesting implications for representative bureaucracy theory and,
more generally, for the management of public organizations. First, they suggest that a bureau-
cracy’s minority clients can and do take concerted action to strengthen the link between passive
and active representation. Standard statements of representative bureaucracy theory typically
302 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

posit that passive representation will lead to active representation when certain enabling condi-
tions are satisfied—including, prominently, the condition that bureaucrats have nontrivial
amounts of discretion. In this view, minority bureaucrats who have sufficient discretion advocate
for minority clients’ interests. This view says nothing about a bureaucracy’s minority clients; it is
merely implicit that they will be the passive recipients of active representation. Our results indi-
cate that minority clients take steps to make active representation more likely; put differently,
they act as their own advocates. These results are consistent with previous research showing that
minority clients value bureaucratic representation (e.g., Bradbury & Kellough, 2008; Thielemann
& Stewart, 1996). Our own research builds on these findings by providing evidence that minority
clients act on their valuation of bureaucratic representation by demanding that minority bureau-
crats be given more discretion.17
Second, our results have some normative, managerial, and policy implications. We emphasize
again that it is not clear which of our proposed theoretical mechanisms is at work, but in so far as
our lack of significant findings for Hispanic teachers reflects Hispanic parents’ inability to make
demands about teacher discretion—whether because their involvement in their children’s school-
ing is mostly informal or because they often are not proficient in English18—managerial efforts
and policies to facilitate the airing of these demands may be warranted. Whether such efforts and
policies are warranted is ultimately a normative question. As we have already emphasized, public
schools are democratic institutions, and so demands made by interested actors (e.g., parents) are
typically viewed as legitimate. This line of thought would support the notion that managers and
policies should facilitate client demand. Additionally, distributional equity in terms of client out-
comes is a central concern of representative bureaucracy scholars (e.g., Nicholson-Crotty et al.,
2011). Potential inequities in client outcomes resulting from active representation are usually
viewed unfavorably. Consequently, promoting equity in the airing of demands by different minor-
ity subgroups (via managerial and policy efforts) would seem to be a reasonable managerial
objective.
Finally, and most basically, our results suggest that future work on representative bureaucracy
should attend to client demographics as well as to internal organizational demographics (i.e., mea-
sures of passive representation). Though discretion and race are central components of representa-
tive bureaucracy theory, no large-N studies have examined whether the demographic makeup of a
bureaucracy’s client population is related to the discretion held by individual bureaucrats. More
fundamentally, though representative bureaucracy theory posits that the exercising of discretion
by minority bureaucrats is intimately tied up with their race and the race of the clients they serve,
there has been little theoretical discussion of how or why race might affect discretion.
A potentially useful line of inquiry for future research would be to examine whether the race
of higher level administrators influences the amount of discretion held by frontline workers.19
Minority administrators may be inclined to more readily defer to their coethnic subordinates
because they share the interests of minority clients and are more likely to acknowledge their
unique ability to connect with minority students. It is also possible that the presence of minority
administrators might not affect (or might even lessen) minority teacher discretion since minority
administrators can serve as a more “powerful” avenue of representation for minority clients. For
instance, parents may seek less teacher discretion if they have administrative representation
addressing their demands and interests.
Another potentially useful line of inquiry for future research would be to investigate whether
the empirical relationships we observe in the context of public education hold in other bureau-
cratic milieus. We have proposed three mechanisms linking client demographics to bureaucratic
discretion that generalize across contexts. Much as representative bureaucracy theory evolved as
the link between passive and active representation was tested in new contexts, our knowledge of
how race affects discretion is likely to advance as researchers direct their attention to new
settings.
Marvel and Resh 303

Appendix
Table A1. Control Variables.
Variable Measurement Comments

Teacher-level exogenous
Teacher gender Male/female
BA or lower
MA
Teacher education Education specialist Proxy for teacher expertise
Doctorate
Teaching field Math/science: Yes/No Proxy for teacher specialization/
Special education: Yes/No expertise
Union member Yes/no
Teacher salary US$1,000s Proxy for teacher quality
Age 1. < 30
2. 30-50 No change in main results if treated
as continuous
3. > 50
Classroom type 1. Several classes of different students
2. Elementary school teacher who teaches
only one subject to different classes of
students
3. Same group of students all or most of
the day in multiple subjects
4. One of two or more teachers, in the Proxy for teacher-level task type
same class, at the same time; jointly
responsible for teaching the same group
of students all or most of the day)
5. Instruct a small number of selected
students released from their regular
classes in specific skills or to address
specific needs
Teacher-level endogenous
Years at current school 1. < 3 years
2. 3-20 years No change in main results if treated
as continuous
3. > 20 years
Total teaching 1. < 3 years
experience
2. 3-20 years No change in main results if treated
as continuous
3. > 20 years
Highly qualified teacher Yes/No Proxy for teacher quality
School-level exogenous
School location 1. Urban Proxy for task type (e.g., teachers in
urban schools confront different
issues than teachers in rural
schools)
2. Suburban
3. Rural
School level 1. Elementary
2. Middle Proxy for task type (e.g., teachers
at different levels structure
instruction differently)
3. High School
4. Combined (High and Middle)

(continued)
304 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

Table A1. (continued)

Variable Measurement Comments

Principal race 1. White


2. Black
3. Hispanic
4. Asian American
5. Native Hawaiian or other Pacific
Islander
6. American Indian or Alaska Native
%Black teachers %Total teachers who are Black
%Hispanic teachers %Total teachers who are Hispanic
%Low income students %Students who qualify for free or reduced- Proxy for task difficulty/school
price lunch quality
Total enrollment Number of students
Average daily attendance %Students present Proxy for school quality/school-level
task complexity
%Students suspended %Student receiving suspensions during Proxy for school quality/school-level
previous academic year task complexity
Administrative span of Ratio of vice-principals to teachers Proxy for managerial oversight:
control when there are many employees
and few supervisors, employees
tend to have more discretion
because oversight is more difficult.
Support staff per student Ratio of support staff to students. Support Proxy for school resources
staff includes nurses, social workers,
psychologists, speech therapists, and other
professional nonteaching staff
Aides per student Ratio of aides to students. Aides include Proxy for school resources
classroom teacher aides as well as
noninstructional aides
School-level endogenous
Administrative support Teachers indicate their degree of agreement Response options: 1 = strongly
with the following statements: disagree, 2 = somewhat disagree, 3 =
somewhat agree, 4 = strongly agree;
1. The school administration’s behavior For each individual teacher, we
toward the staff is supportive and sum over the six items to the left.
encouraging We then take the school average
of teacher sums and use this
school average as our measure
of administrative support. We
use the school-level average to
address potential endogeneity.
2. My principal enforces school rules for The basic reasoning is that supportive
student conduct and backs me up when administrators communicate clear
I need it goals and trust their teachers. In
general, in any principal–agent
relationship, goal clarity and trust
are expected to be positively
related to the agent’s discretion.
3. The principal knows what kind of
school he or she wants and has
communicated it to the staff
4. In this school, staff members are
recognized for a job well done
5. I am given the support I need to teach
students with special needs
6. I like the way things are run at this
school

(continued)
Marvel and Resh 305

Table A1. (continued)

Variable Measurement Comments

Parental support I receive a great deal of support from Response options are the same as
parents for the work I do above;
School-level mean is used to address
potential endogeneity. Teachers
who have parental support might
use it as a resource to resist top-
down attempts by managers to
limit their discretion.
Red tape Routine duties and paperwork interfere Response options are the same as
with my job of teaching above; School-level mean is used.
External actors’ School principals indicate the degree of For each of the external actors (in
influence in school influence that select actors have in various each of the policy areas), principals
policy areas of school policy. respond on the following 4-point
Actors: State Department of Education, scale: 1 = no influence, 2 = minor
local school board, school district staff, influence, 3 = moderate influence, 4
curriculum specialists, and parents. = a great deal of influence. For each
Policy area: Setting performance standards external actor, we use the sum of
for students, establishing curriculum, the principal’s responses across
determining the content of in-service the seven policy areas to measure
professional development programs, influence.
evaluating teachers, hiring new full-time External actors’ influence can
teachers, setting discipline policy, and impinge on teachers’ autonomy.
deciding how the school budget will be
spent.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests


The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. It should be noted that in studies of this type, the causal mechanism underlying the observed relation-
ship between the outcome measure and the measure of passive representation is often unclear (Lim,
2006).
2. There is a large literature on the general topic of parent–teacher relations. This literature is concerned
with, among other things, differences in the quality and types of parent–teacher relationships (e.g.,
Vickers & Mincke, 1995) and the effects that healthy parent–teacher relationships have on student
achievement (e.g., Hughes & Kwok, 2007). Since we are focusing on the specific question of whether
minority parents demand that minority teachers be granted more discretion, we confine our discussion
here to evidence that bears as directly as possible on this question.
3. While we recognize that expertise typically connotes technical expertise of some kind and that the
ability to “relate to” another individual on the basis of race is not a form of technical expertise, it is
nonetheless an ability that is exclusive to individuals of the same race in the same way that technical
expertise is exclusive to individuals in a given professional field. Black teachers can relate to—or
claim to be active representatives of—Black students on the basis of shared race; White teachers can-
not relate to Black students on the basis of shared race. Medical doctors have technical expertise about
diagnosing illnesses; laypersons do not.
4. More specifically, Dee (2004) uses data on kindergarten students and students in the first through third
grades. Percentile ranks based on Stanford Achievement Test scores in reading and mathematics are
used as outcome variables.
306 American Review of Public Administration 45(3)

5. This is not to say that White parents will not demand that White teachers be given more discretion,
and so forth. The amount of discretion held by White teachers might be related to the percentage of
a school’s students who are White for the same reasons we expect the amount of discretion held by
minority teachers to be related to the percentage of a school’s students who are minorities. Ultimately,
we view this as an empirical question, one that we tested using our data. Our results were null: the
percentage of a school’s students who are White is not positively related to White teachers’ discretion.
6. This is in contrast to the expectation that minority client share is more strongly related to minority
teacher discretion in schools with a critical mass of minority students. Graphically, this would appear
as a more steeply positive line for schools with a critical mass than schools without a critical mass. In
other words, minority student share would be positively associated with minority teachers’ discretion
in critical mass and noncritical mass schools, but more strongly so in the former. We did not find sup-
port for this expectation in our data.
7. In observance of federal restricted-use data rules, all sample size numbers are rounded to the nearest 10.
8. The SASS sample is a stratified probability-proportionate-to-size sample. The details of the SASS
sampling procedure are too complex to cover here, but note that the SASS sampling method neces-
sitates the use of appropriate weighting techniques so that point estimates and standard errors are cor-
rectly calculated.
9. Note also that we interact every teacher race category with our pctblackstus and pctHispstuss variables.
These interaction terms are not shown in Model 2 and in subsequent models to prevent clutter.
10. More specifically, positive signs on these interaction terms would indicate that the relationship between
minority student share and discretion was different (in the sense of being more positive, or larger) for
minority teachers than White teachers.
11. Formal policies could embody current trends in school reform, such as teacher pay-for-performance
and standardized test-based accountability. It is reasonable to think that policies based on these
reforms will act to narrow teacher discretion. Pay-for-performance systems typically reward teach-
ers for attaining certain specific goals, and so teachers hoping to reap rewards will be inclined to
pursue those goals, rather than to use their discretion in whatever way they deem appropriate (e.g.,
to produce well-rounded students who are capable of participating constructively in civil society).
While this is speculative, some empirical research suggests that public sector workers dislike pay-
for-performance systems because they seek to externally control worker behavior (see Perry et al.,
2009).
12. To assess the validity of our multi-item index of teacher discretion, we perform a principal components
factor analysis on the five items that compose the index. The first-factor eigenvalue—2.47—is signifi-
cantly larger than the next largest eigenvalue. Moreover, each of the individual items loads positively
and strongly on the first factor. These results suggest that the five items that make up the index are
measuring a single underlying construct. Cronbach’s alpha for the five items is .72, indicating suffi-
ciently high reliability. We use the sum of a teacher’s responses to the five survey items about discre-
tion instead of a weighted factor score simply because the former eases substantive interpretation. Our
results do not change if we use a weighted factor score.
13. Some of the individual discretion items noted above may be, from a theoretical standpoint, more or
less revealing as indicators of teacher discretion. By using a multi-item index of teacher discretion, our
measurement approach could obscure potentially interesting variation in discretion that occurs across
the five areas that combine to form our multi-item index. For instance, the partially subjective nature
of evaluating and grading students may allow teachers a greater deal of discretion than does textbook
selection. Teachers may choose to be liberal or stingy in the awarding of partial credit. Or they may
choose to grade an essay primarily based on content (i.e., does the student adequately cover all relevant
material?) rather than on clarity, grammar, and organization. Additionally, teachers’ personal biases
may affect the grades they give. By contrast, textbook selection will likely be more tightly circum-
scribed by school and subject matter curriculum requirements, or might simply be based on what texts
a school happens to have stored in its inventory. Similarly, the selection of content, topics, and skills to
be taught will probably also be limited by curriculum requirements.
Selecting teaching techniques and determining the amount of homework to be assigned are areas
in which it is reasonable to expect that teachers will have a good deal of discretion. Teachers will have
to meet basic curriculum requirements—a math teacher covering college algebra will have to deliver
Marvel and Resh 307

some instruction on solving polynomial equations, for instance—but they will have some latitude in
deciding how exactly to do so. Some teachers might put students into groups and encourage them to
help each other figure things out; others might spend the majority of their time at the chalk board,
illustrating the various steps that go into solving a polynomial equation. Some biology or chemistry
teachers might incorporate significant lab work into their courses; others might stick to a lecture-based
format.
For the most part, our data support these expectations. On average, teachers report the least
amount of discretion in the area of selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught (mean = 2.90); they
report the next lowest amount of discretion in the area of selecting textbooks and other instructional
materials (mean = 2.91). Teachers report having more discretion in the areas of determining the amount
of homework to be assigned (mean = 3.72), selecting teaching techniques (mean = 3.71), and evaluat-
ing and grading students (mean = 3.64).
14. The brackets indicate that the same logic applies to Hispanic teachers.
15. When we restrict our estimation sample to all nonelementary schools, our results are statistically insig-
nificant. Though comparing our elementary school results to nonelementary school results does not
constitute a formal statistical test, it does informally confirm our supposition that the parent demand
mechanism is more likely to manifest at lower grade levels.
16. When we restrict our estimation sample to nonelementary schools, our results are all statistically insig-
nificant. This provides informal support for our claim that the parent demand mechanism will be
stronger at lower grade levels.
17. One empirical implication of our findings is that discretion is endogenous to the representative bureau-
cracy process. This suggests that future empirical studies that model active representation will need
to account for endogeneity, though given the modest magnitude of our findings, the potential for bias
arising from this problem is likely small.
18. Hispanic parents, unlike Black parents, are not always proficient English speakers. Compounding
this problem is that school districts often lack the translation services to accommodate these parents
(LeFevre & Shaw, 2012, Lee & Bowen, 2006).
19. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

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Author Biographies
John D. Marvel is an assistant professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George
Mason University. His research focuses on public management.
William G. Resh is an assistant professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana
University, Bloomington. His research focuses on public management.

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