In the most recent edition of Education Next, economist Thomas S. Dee takes on the complex question of how a teacher's race impacts student achievement. Using data that included 11,600 students from Tennessee's class-size reduction experiment, Dee finds that both black and white elementary students did better when their teachers were of the same race as they were. The study is an important contribution to this complicated subject but (as the author himself emphasizes) the findings are not without multiple caveats. Other researchers have looked at this issue and their findings have been decidedly mixed (see Farkas 1990; Ehrenberg, Goldhaber and Brewer 1995; Ferguson 1998; and Murnane, 1975). Dee's study does not address how a teacher's race impacts middle and high school students or for that matter, elementary students outside of Tennessee. Most importantly, the research does not answer why race impacted student performance. As Dee points out, using his findings to encourage increased racial segregation is precisely the wrong thing to do. Using it to spur more exploration into how teachers can more effectively reach students of all races would be the more intelligent approach.