Sean Reardon and colleagues at the Graduate School of Education reviewed more than 200 million test scores to spotlight communities with the nation’s worst achievement gaps. The results show almost every school district enrolling large numbers of low-income students has an average academic performance significantly below the national grade-level average.
Reardon and colleagues already have been examining the data and identifying key patterns in educational inequality.
Among their findings:
- One sixth of all students attend public school in school districts where average test scores are more than a grade level below the national average; one sixth are in districts where test scores are more than a grade level above the national average.
- The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart.
- Average test scores of black students are, on average, roughly two grade levels lower than those of white students in the same district; the Hispanic-white difference is roughly one- and-a-half grade levels.
- Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers; where parents on average have high levels of educational attainment; and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment.
- The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.
The researchers stress that their findings do not prove cause and effect, though they do point to promising areas for further study.
According to Reardon:
The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district. Nonetheless, poverty is not destiny: There are districts with similarly low-income student populations where academic performance is higher than others. We can – and should – learn from such places to guide community and school improvement efforts in other communities.
For more information and analysis, see https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/29/local-education-inequities-across-u-s-revealed-new-stanford-data-set/.
For interactive maps of the data, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0.
