The Hechinger Report: An Analysis of Achievement Gaps in Every School in America Shows that Poverty is the Biggest Hurdle

Here’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 quantitative 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, blacks students go to schools with very high poverty rates. The students in these schools tend to come from families whose income is low enough that the children qualify for free or reduced-price 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 calculations, 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,” said Reardon, in an interview. “It’s quite big, but not enormous in New York City. And it’s among one of the two or three biggest 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 segregation 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 achievement gaps are smaller. The two phenomena — racial segregation 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,” said Reardon. “This study shows that it doesn’t seem to be possible.”

Reardon said 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 whites students. They’re not models to copy.

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 colleagues at Stanford, analyzed 350 million test scores from 2009 to 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.