Working Paper: NBER ID: w12207
Authors: Charles T. Clotfelter; Helen F. Ladd; Jacob L. Vigdor
Abstract: Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on successive cohorts of students who stay in the state's public schools for all six years, and study both differences in means and in quantiles. Our results on achievement gaps between black and white students are consistent with those from other longitudinal studies: the gaps are sizable, are robust to controls for measures of socioeconomic status, and show no monotonic trend between 3rd and 8th grade. In contrast, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress through these grades. Looking beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps in math between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while racial gaps between high-performing students have widened for black and American Indian students.
Keywords: Achievement Gap; Racial Equity; Public Education
JEL Codes: I21; J15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| black-white achievement gap in math (I24) | sizable gap (I24) |
| black-white achievement gap in reading (I24) | sizable gap (I24) |
| socioeconomic factors (P23) | black-white achievement gap (I24) |
| low-performing students (I24) | gap shrinks over time (F62) |
| high-performing black students (D29) | gap widens over time (F62) |
| Hispanic students (I24) | achievement gap decreases (I24) |
| Asian students (N95) | performance advantage over whites (J79) |