Another Reason Why Segregated Education Is Bad For Young Students
By Rebecca Klein Huffington Post. July 30, 2014 Updated: 6:59 PM EDT
A new study offers more evidence that segregated schooling is bad for students.
The study, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, used previously compiled data from the Department of Education to track how first-grade students’ reading abilities change over time, depending upon whether they attend a racially segregated or integrated school. It found that black students in segregated schools tended to make smaller gains in reading than their black counterparts in more integrated schools. This held true even when researchers accounted for black students’ backgrounds.
The study defines a segregated school as one where 75 percent of its population is made up of minorities. Researchers used data from the 1998 – 99 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study on about 4,000 first-graders nationwide.
When accounting for the differences a student’s background might have on their first-grade reading ability, the study’s researchers looked at the concentration of school poverty, the years of experience students’ teachers had and the type of literacy curriculum used by the teacher. Even after accounting for these factors, however, black students in segregated schools were still performing worse, researchers found.
“When similar groups of first-graders do better in one type of school than another, then it must be some aspect of the school that accounts for the difference,” Kirsten Kainz, the director of statistics at the university’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the author of the study, said in a press release. “This study goes further than any other in being able to say, ‘It’s not the kids.’”
The same trend did not necessarily hold true for Latino or white students, researchers found. Kainz told The empathyeducates – Another Reason Why Segregated Education Is Bad For Young Students:
