School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps

By Sean F. Reardon. RSF, 2016

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although it is clear that racial segregation is linked to academic achievement gaps, the mechanisms underlying this link have been debated since James Coleman published his eponymous 1966 report. In this paper, I examine sixteen distinct measures of segregation to determine which is most strongly associated with academic achievement gaps. I find clear evidence that one aspect of segregation in particular—the disparity in average school poverty rates between white and black students’ schools—is consistently the single most powerful correlate of achievement gaps, a pattern that holds in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. This implies that high-poverty schools are, on average, much less effective than lower-poverty schools and suggests that strategies that reduce the differential exposure of black, Hispanic, and white students to poor schoolmates may lead to meaningful reductions in academic achievement gaps.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf52defa988869486a54d0a51c8bfbe89c4ebd2d

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring the Effect of Disability, Race-Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Status on Scores on the Self-Determination Inventory: Student Report (2018, background): “…potentially impact self-determination scores (e.g., gender, teacher attitudes, family practices), but research on educational outcomes, generally, has consistently suggested a complex pattern of relationships between socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity, and educational outcomes (Reardon, 2016).”
Income Segregation Between Schools and School Districts (2016, background): “Some correlational 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,…”