Working Paper: NBER ID: w27714
Authors: Shirin A. Hashim; Thomas J. Kane; Thomas Kelley-Kemple; Mary E. Laski; Douglas O. Staiger
Abstract: Over the past 30 years, rising income inequality and income-based residential segregation have threatened to widen income-based achievement gaps. Yet, there are no national data which combine a consistent measure of parental income and achievement for individual students to measure those gaps over time. We take two alternative approaches to inferring income-based achievement gaps: First, we reconstruct the student-level relationship using school-level estimates of means and variances of achievement and income. Second, we combine estimates of mean income by race, mother’s education, urbanicity and state with mean achievement for the corresponding subgroups on a national assessment. Using both methods, we find that income-based achievement gaps in 4th and 8th grade narrowed between 1992 and 2015—while math scores rose at all income levels.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: I21; I22; I24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Income (D31) | Achievement Gap (I24) |
| Income (D31) | Achievement Increase (4th Grade Math) (I24) |
| Income (D31) | Achievement Increase (8th Grade Math) (I24) |
| Black-White Income Gap (D31) | Achievement Gap (I24) |
| Income Inequality (D31) | Achievement Gap (I24) |