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POVERTY IS THE BIGGEST HURDLE TO CLOSING STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT GAPS
By Jill Barshay
H ere’s a tale of three cities: Atlanta, New York and
Detroit. In all three cities, there is a high degree of
racial segregation in the schools. White students go
to schools with relatively few black and Hispanic students.
Black and Hispanic students attend schools that don’t have
many white students. When Sean Reardon, a sociologist at
Stanford University, measures the racial isolation in a quan
titative way, he finds that the schools in the three cities are
“equally racially segregated.”
But the poverty rates in the schools are very different.
In Atlanta, black students go to schools with very high pov
erty rates. The students in these schools tend to come from
families whose income is low enough that the children qual
ify for free or reduced priced lunches, a federal measure of
poverty. The white students in Atlanta tend to go to schools
with very low poverty rates. In New York City, Reardon
finds the same pattern, but not to the same extreme.
Meanwhile, in Detroit, this pattern isn’t
true at all. White and black students attend
different schools, but the poverty levels are
high in both white and black schools.
It turns out, according to Reardon’s cal
culations, that the differences in poverty
rates between the black and white schools
are very predictive of the achievement gaps
between black and white students. “The
achievement gap is very small, virtually
zero in Detroit,” says Reardon. “It’s quite
big, but not enormous, in New York City.
And it’s among one of the two or three big
gest in the country in Atlanta.”
This example arises from a new study of
achievement gaps and racial segregation in
nearly every school in the United States. In
the study, Reardon finds that racial segrega
tion is a very strong predictor of the gaps in
academic achievement between white and
black or Hispanic students, but it’s school poverty—not the
student’s race—that accounts for these big gaps. When the
difference in poverty rates between black and white schools
is larger, the achievement gaps between black and white
students are larger. When the difference in poverty rates
between black and white schools is smaller, the achieve
ment gaps are smaller. The two phenomena—racial segre
gation and economic inequality—are intertwined, because
students of color are concentrated in high-poverty schools.
“There’s a common argument these days that maybe we
should stop worrying about segregation and just create
high-quality schools everywhere,” says Reardon. “This study
shows that it doesn’t seem to be possible.”
Reardon says he couldn’t find a single school district
in the country where black and Hispanic students were
learning apart from white students and performing well
with test scores that weren’t lagging behind those of white
students. In the cases where achievement gaps were small,
such as Detroit, achievement was low for both black and
white students. They’re not models to copy.
“It doesn’t seem that we have any knowledge about how
to create high-quality schools at scale under conditions
of concentrated poverty,” says Reardon. “And if we can’t
do that, then we have to do something about segregation.
Otherwise, we’re consigning black and Hispanic and low-in
come students to schools that we don’t know how to make
as good as other schools. The implication is that you have
got to address segregation.”
The study, “Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence
on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement
Gaps,” is a draft paper, meaning that it hasn’t yet been
published in a peer-reviewed journal and may still be
revised. Reardon, along with four current and former col
leagues at Stanford, analyzed 350 million test scores from
2009-2016, representing about 50 million students, as
they attended public schools from third to eighth grades. To
compare apples to apples, scores from different state tests
were converted to a single national yardstick.
Achievement gaps between white students and students
of color are large. On average, across the country, white stu
dents are scoring nearly two grade levels higher than black
students—the difference between fifth and third-grade
achievement, for example. But it varies a lot by school dis
trict. In some districts, the black-white gap was as small as
one-third of a grade level. In other districts, the achieve
ment gaps are three grade levels apart. The white-Hispanic
achievement gap across the nation is smaller—between one
and one-and-a-half grade levels.
It’s well known that high-income students perform
better on tests than low-income students. Higher-income
students tend to have better educated parents who not only
may read and talk to their kids more, but also convey the
importance of an education and set high academic expec
tations for their kids. What’s interesting in this study is
that not only does the level of school segregation predict
the size of the achievement gap between white and black
students, it also predicts the rate at which the achievement
gap grows as students progress from third to eighth grade.
In conjunction with this study, the Stanford Education
Data Archive released its vast data trove on an interactive
website, the “Opportunity Explorer,” where anyone can see
the test scores for every public school in the United States.
It allows you to compare test scores within a district or
between schools in two different states. Parents and policy
makers can compare schools in Wichita, KS, with those in
Bangor, ME, for example. In a separate “learning rates” tab,
it also shows test score patterns over time, so you can see
how students improve as they progress from third to eighth
grade—a measure of how much kids are learning during
their school years. In a third “trends” tab, it shows how
schools are performing over time, measuring student test
scores in the same grade from year to year.
Reardon advises visitors to the website to avoid equating
test scores with school quality. “The average test scores that
kids have in schools or school districts are the results of all
the opportunities these kids have had to learn their whole
lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the
school year,” Reardon said, “so it’s misleading to attribute
average test scores solely to the school where they take the
test.”
“If you want to know how good the schools are,” Reardon
says, “a better but not perfect measure would be the learn
ing rates, because those are measuring how fast kids are
learning while they’re in school, regardless of where they
started.” O
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, inde
pendent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in
education.
wtT\ It doesn’t seem that we have any
■ knowledge about how to create
high-quality schools at scale under
conditions of concentrated poverty.
nr
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FLAGPOLE.COM | OCTOBER 9, 2019
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