Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Student Composition on Academic Achievement in High School

By R. Rumberger, Gregory Palardy. Teachers College Record, 2005

739 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Coleman report, published 12 years after the Brown decision, confirmed that widespread school segregation in the United States created inequality of educational opportunity. This study examines whether racial and socioeconomic segregation, which is on the rise in the United States, is still contributing to the achievement differences among students. The study used data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 to estimate multilevel models of achievement growth between Grades 8 and 12 in mathematics, science, reading, and history for a sample of 14,217 students attending a representative sample of 913 U.S. high schools. The study found that the average socioeconomic level of students’ schools had as much impact on their achievement growth as their own socioeconomic status, net of other background factors. Moreover, school socioeconomic status had as much impact on advantaged as on disadvantaged students, and almost as much impact on Whites as on Blacks, raising questions about the likely impact of widespread integration. The impact of socioeconomic composition was explained by four school characteristics: teacher expectations, the amount of homework that students do, the number of rigorous courses that students take, and students’ feelings about safety. The results suggest that schools serving mostly lower-income students tend to be organized and operated differently than those serving more-affluent students, transcending other school-level differences such as public or private, large or small. This article then addresses the question of whether such school characteristics can be changed by policies to reform schools and funding systems versus policies to desegregate schools.

Subfields: Education

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Citations in the corpus

The Effect of Peer Socioeconomic Status on Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis (2010, neutral): “It has often been pointed out (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1997; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2002; Ho Sui Chu & Willms, 1996; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005) that not correcting for prior scores leads to an overestimation of effects.”
Higher Education: Gaps in Access and Persistence Study. Statistical Analysis Report. NCES 2012-046. (2012, background): “Some studies suggest that the number of schools serving mostly racial/ethnic minorities and lower income students is increasing and that these schools tend to be organized and operated differently than those serving higher income or predominantly White students (Clotfelter 2001, 2004; Frankenberg et”
High School Socioeconomic Segregation and Student Attainment (2013, methodology): “School effects can be classified into four types including compositional effects, resources, structures, and practices (Gamoran, 1996; Morgan & Sorensen, 1999; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005a).”
Segregating Arizona's English Learners: A Return to the “Mexican Room”? (2012, neutral): “…and materials (Phillips & Chin, 2004), less experienced (see, for example, Lankford, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2002; Darling-Hammond, 2001),4 less qualified teachers (Clodtfelter, Ladd & Vigdor, 2005; Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain, 2005), and less successful peers (Rumberger & Palardy, 2005; Schofield, 2006).”
Why poor children are more likely to become poor readers: The school years (2013, background): “Research in the UK and USA has also provided evidence of a significant school SES effect on literacy scores and reading growth that is equivalent to, or exceeds, the effect of student SES (Cassen & Kingdom, 2004; Palardy, 2008; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005; Sirin, 2005).”
Income Segregation Between Schools and School Districts (2016, background): “…studies have suggested that mean student socioeconomic status (SES) impacts student achievement (Gamoran, 1996; Mayer, 1991; Reardon, 2016; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005), although others have not found much relationship between the two (Carbonaro & Gamoran, 2002; Jencks & Mayer, 1990; Lauen…”
Bringing the Schools Back in: The Stratification of Educational Achievement in the Chilean Voucher System. (2012, background): “If, in contrast, the contextual effect of SES cannot be traced to school characteristics potentially modifiable by policy, then peer effects emerging from socioeconomic segregation itself may be a concern (Rumberger and Palardy, 2005).”
Neotracking in North Carolina: How High School Courses of Study Reproduce Race and Class-Based Stratification (2008, background): “16 Borman and Dowling (2006) and Rumberger and Palardy (2005) demonstrated that school-level poverty is a more powerful influence on student academic outcomes than students’ own SES.”
Ethnic school composition and peer victimization: A focus on the interethnic school climate (2011, neutral): “…for educational achievement (for Belgium: Jacobs, Rea, & Teney, 2009; for France: Felouzis, 2005; for Germany: Kristen, 2005; for the Netherlands: Westerbeek, 1999; Driessen, 2002; for Sweden: Szulkin & Jonsson, 2006; for the United States: Bankston & Caldas, 1996; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005).”
Effects of school composition and school climate on teacher expectations of students: A multilevel analysis (2014, background): “…expectations, empirical research has shown lower expectations in schools with greater proportions of ethnic minority, lower socioeconomic, or lower academic capability students (Agirdag et al., 2013; Diamond et al., 2004; Newman et al., 1989; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005; Solomon et al., 1996).”