From Stanford’s Sean Reardon: Schools Alone Cannot Overcome Racial Achievement Gaps Caused By Concentrated Poverty
Here is the succinct conclusion of a complex, technical, and nuanced report released on Monday by Stanford University’s Sean Reardon and a team of researchers, Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps: “We use 8 years of data from all public school districts in the U.S. We find that racial school segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in 3rd grade, and with the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade. The association of racial segregation with achievement gaps is completely accounted for by racial differences in school poverty: racial segregation appears to be harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower poverty schools… We find that the effects of school poverty do not appear to be explained by differences in the set of measurable teacher or school characteristics available to us.”
In the report, Reardon defines academic test score gaps: “We examine racial test score gaps because they reflect racial differences in access to educational opportunities. By ‘educational opportunities,’ we mean all experiences in a child’s life, from birth onward, that provide opportunities for her to learn, including experiences in children’s homes, child care settings, neighborhoods, peer groups, and their schools. This implies that test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience. Moreover, in saying that test score gaps reflect differences in opportunities, we also mean that they are not the result of innate group differences in cognitive skills or other genetic endowments… (D)ifferences in average scores should be understood as reflecting opportunity gaps….”
The new report is part of a huge mapping study across the United States of unequal educational opportunity: “There are 403 metropolitan areas, 3,142 counties (and county-equivalents) and roughly 13,200 school districts serving grades 3-8 in the United states. Our analytic sample for the white-black achievement gap models contains 5,755 school districts, 2,067 counties, and 389 metropolitan areas. For the white-Hispanic achievement gap models, CONTINUE READING: From Stanford’s Sean Reardon: Schools Alone Cannot Overcome Racial Achievement Gaps Caused By Concentrated Poverty | janresseger
