Harming the Best: How Schools Affect the Black-White Achievement Gap. NBER Working Paper No. 14211.

By Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin. 2008

286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show that the overall growth in the achievement gap between third and eighth grade is higher for students with higher initial achievement and that specific teacher and peer characteristics including teacher experience and peer racial composition explain a substantial share of the widening. The adverse effect of attending school with a high black enrollment share appears to be an important contributor to the larger growth in the achievement differential in the upper part of the test score distribution. This evidence reaffirms the major role played by peers and school quality, but also presents a policy dilemma. Teacher labor market complications, current housing patterns, legal limits in segregation efforts, and uncertainty about the overall effects of specific desegregation programs indicate that effective policy responses will almost certainly involve a set of school improvements beyond simple changes in peer racial composition and the teacher experience distribution.

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Citations in the corpus

What happens after enrollment? An analysis of the time path of racial differences in GPA and major choice (2012, background): “These trends continue through middle school with both Phillips and Chin (2004) and Hanushek and Rivkin (2006,2009) documenting increases in the math achievement gap between blacks and whites through the eighth grade.”
From Parental Involvement to Children's Mathematical Performance: The Role of Mathematics Anxiety (2013, background): “…the disproportionately low mathematical performance of ethnic minority children residing in low-income communities (e.g., Attewell & Domina, 2008; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2009; Plantey et al., 2009), there is a pressing need to identify factors that mitigate the negative effects of mathematics…”
New Evidence about Brown v. Board of Education: The Complex Effects of School Racial Composition on Achievement (2009, background): “…perspectives and empirical approaches and reaching different conclusions, can be found in Fordham and Ogbu (1986), Cook and Ludwig (1997), Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998), Ferguson (1998a, 2001), Steele and Aronson (1998), McWhorter (2000), Bishop et al. (2001), and Hanushek and Rivkin (2009).”
SCHOOL DISCIPLINE: A SOURCE OR SALVE FOR THE RACIAL ACHIEVEMENT GAP?† (2013, background): “2 Recent examples include Cooley (2011), Todd and Wolpin (2007), and Hanushek and Rivkin (2009).”
Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?. (2016, unknown): “Although significant test score gaps have already emerged by age five (Fryer and Levitt 2006), recent studies show that racial disparities in the upper tail continue to widen as students progress through school (Hanushek and Rivkin 2009; Clotfelter et al. 2009).”
Peer Effects in Education: How Might They Work, How Big Are They and How Much Do We Know Thus Far? (2011, background): “Hoxby and Weingarth (2005), Burke and Sass (2008), Lavy, Paserman, and Schlosser (2007), Cooley (2009), and Imberman, Kugler, and Sacerdote (2009) all find this form of complementarity in elementary and secondary schools using test scores as the outcome.”