Teacher Discrimination and Student Engagement in the Context of Classroom Quality: The Mediating Effect of Relational Trust

Understanding historically marginalized students' perceptions of their classroom experience is important when addressing factors that relate to ethnic-racial inequalities in education. The current study examines the role of perceived relational trust with their teacher as a potential mediator in the longitudinal associations between Black and Latinx middle school students' self-reported discrimination from their teacher and their subsequent behavioral engagement using data from 316 Black and Latinx sixth through eighth grade students. The results from multilevel path modeling showed that Black and Latinx students' perception of teacher discrimination in the fall was associated with fall to winter declines in their perceived relational trust in their teacher (b = -.17, highest posterior density credible interval [HPD-CI] [-.31, -.03]), and winter relational trust was associated with increases in fall to spring behavioral engagement (b = .52, HPD-CI [.26, .78]). The decrements in winter trust from experiencing a teacher as discriminatory partially accounted for the differing patterns of Black and Latinx students' relative changes in engagement from fall to spring (indirect effect b = -.09, HPD-CI [-.18, -.01]). The present study highlights that discrimination from teachers can have an inhibitive effect on Black and Latinx students' academic engagement in part because perceived discrimination from a teacher erodes the trust a student may have initially felt for their teacher.