Teachers in High-Poverty Schools Penalized Unfairly on Observations, Study Says Copy URL Teachers are unfairly penalized on their classroom observations for working in high-poverty schools with students who are academically disadvantaged, a new study finds . And those teachers are often Black—leading to a significant race gap in teacher-evaluation scores. The study found that the typical Black teacher in Chicago ranked at the 37th percentile in classroom observation scores, while the typical white teacher ranked at the 55th percentile. But once researchers controlled for certain school and classroom factors, including student poverty, behavioral infractions, and test scores from the previous year, the gap disappeared.