Black-White Test Scores: Neighborhoods Matter

From the NBER Digest, research on the "persistently large black-white differences in standardized test scores":

Black-White Test Scores: Neighborhoods, Not Schools, Matter Most, by David R. Francis, NBER Digest: The large gap in student achievement, particularly between blacks and whites, has long troubled Americans. Fifty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, persistently large black-white differences in standardized test scores remain central to education policy.

In Racial Segregation and the Black-White Test Score Gap (NBER Working Paper No. 12078 [open link]), NBER researchers David Card and Jesse Rothstein cast some fresh and perhaps surprising light on this issue. Using data from SAT records for roughly one third of test takers in the 1998-2001 high school graduation classes, they find that the black-white achievement gap is clearly linked to racial segregation.

To reach this conclusion, the authors match test-takers to information on the racial composition of their high schools and to an extensive set of family background characteristics of black and white students in their metropolitan areas. They compare the black-white achievement gap across areas with more- and less-segregated neighborhoods and schools. Within a metropolitan area, families living in integrated neighborhoods (and students attending integrated schools) may be different in a variety of unobserved ways from those in segregated neighborhoods and schools, confounding the effect of inter-racial exposure. The focus on across-area differences in segregation eliminates biases deriving from this sort of within-city sorting. Similarly, the focus on metropolitan-level black-white test score gaps removes the impact of a variety of omitted characteristics -- potentially including school quality and resource levels -- that do not vary within a city but might be correlated with inter-racial contact.

The results indicate that segregation has large, negative effects on black students' relative test scores. When a city is completely integrated, the gap in relative SAT scores between blacks and whites proves to be one quarter smaller (about 45 points) than in a city with the races fully segregated in different neighborhoods, holding family background characteristics constant.

The authors also attempt to distinguish between the effects of residential and school segregation. Considered separately, each appears to have a negative effect on the relative test scores and educational attainment of blacks students. In statistical models that include both school and neighborhood segregation, though, the effects of relative exposure of black and Hispanic students to their white schoolmates are "uniformly small and statistically insignificant." Although the authors acknowledge that the data could be consistent with equally negative effects of neighborhood and of school segregation, they write that, "Our tentative conclusion is that the neighborhood composition matters more than school composition."

These results -- both the negative effects of segregation, and the indication that neighborhood segregation matters more than does school segregation -- stand up in the face of a variety of statistical tests designed to rule out competing explanations. The segregation effects do not appear to be attributable to differential family background characteristics of black students living in more- and less-segregated cities, nor to resource differences between students' schools.

One potential explanation for the apparent lack of a school segregation effect is the prevalence of within-school segregation: if black students rarely attend class with white students even in cities with integrated schools, these cities may not post higher black test scores even though truly integrated education would have a positive effect. Indeed, the authors find a strong relationship between school integration and at least one proxy for classroom-level exposure: white students are more likely to take honors and advanced placement classes, which typically have few black students, in cities where the schools are integrated than in cities where schools are segregated. Although the authors have no way of measuring direct interactions between students of different races at school, this result suggests that school integration may not achieve high exposure rates of black to white students, potentially accounting for the lack of an integration effect on black students' test scores.

Comments

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/books/review/25glazer.html?ex=1285300800&en=102aa7de01c051e0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

September 25, 2005

'The Shame of the Nation': Separate and Unequal
By NATHAN GLAZER

Jonathan Kozol has been writing books rather similar to this one since "Death at an Early Age" in 1968. He is persistent, it is true, but so is the problem that has aroused his passions since he began teaching in a Boston school more than 40 years ago, when he was a young civil rights activist. That problem is the conditions under which we educate the children of the poor and minorities. In his account, they are trapped, almost uniformly, in old schools that are overcrowded, in poor repair, with scanty teaching materials and disgraceful toilets, and staffed by generally underqualified teachers.

In the five years up to the writing of "The Shame of the Nation," Kozol visited approximately 60 schools, in 30 school districts, in 11 states. Some of these schools are in the South Bronx, and he became familiar with their principals, their teachers and many of their students. (He dedicates the book to a teacher in one such school.)

But along with his familiar theme of the inadequacy of the education we provide the children of the poor and minorities, he has a new focus in this book - the return of a substantial degree of segregation in our urban schools. Black and Hispanic students, he writes, are concentrated in schools where they make up almost the entire student body. (I should say that I once opposed the use of the word "segregation" to cover both the state-imposed separation of the races in the South and the concentration of minority students in schools outside the South, which arises for a number of reasons, but that is a lost cause - today we use "segregation" for both.)

The chief academic authority on this issue, whom Kozol interviews and quotes, is Gary Orfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has been as persistent in documenting the scale of segregation, and attacking its presumed educational effects, as Kozol has been in describing it. According to Orfield and his colleagues, writing in 2004, and quoted by Kozol, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. . . . During the 1990's, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968."

Because Kozol's forte is the detailed description of the school, the classroom, the work of the teacher and its effect on the student, we do not get from him any large discussion of why this resegregation has occurred. It's true court-ordered desegregation programs have been abandoned in many cities, as judges have been persuaded either that they are having no useful effects in closing the educational gap between blacks and others, or that they have become futile, since the number of white students in many school districts, particularly in large cities, has declined to insignificance. A further problem with these plans is that the number of minority groups to be considered for redistribution has been rising with immigration, and some oppose the breakup of their communities for purposes of desegregation. (In San Francisco, school districts making assignments had to keep in mind nine specified groups.) ...

[evagrius]

I can attest to what's argued with two simple examples;

In the Northern California county I worked in,there's a school district in a very rich area, ( median income exceeds Census figures +$200K/ year), less than one mile from a poor school district, ( median income around $40K/year, which is $40K less than the county median). Guess which area is overwhelmingly Hispanic?

Further south, there's Palo Alto, Ca, ( median income easily over $100K/yr), next to East Palo Alto, ( with a median income of $40-50K/yr). Guess which neighborhood is overwhelmingly black, Hispanic and Pacific Islander?
Guess which school district has higher academic scores?

There's an insidious pattern of segregation that's occuring that is not explicitely racial, but economic-racial. It's just "accidental" that minorities are at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. After all, one can point to a number of minorities who've "made it" into the economic mainstream. They "prove" that there's really no true segregation anymore.

[georgist]

evagrius:

Look up "Tiebout equilibrium" - schools are mostly funded by property taxes, and the poor get bid out of all the best-funded school districts. One solution is school vouchers, which however are opposed by suburban residents since their property values would be lowered.

[evagrius]

georgist;

The best solution is not vouchers, ( it would only increase the segregation, in my opinion), but an equal distribution of tax funds.
I believe that's how it's done in Ontario, Canada. Each school district receives an amount per enrolled student.
Statism/ Sure. But it beats what's going in the States.

As for bureaucracy- the county I worked for had 23 school districts for approximately 100,000 students. That's one school superindentent per district at a minimum salary of $120K a year plus the assistant superindendent, secretaries etc; to "support" the bloke.

Imagine, more than 2 million dollars wasted on just those superindentents.

[Arne]

"23 school districts for approximately 100,000 students"
That's 4300 students per district. With grade schools of 300 and secondary schools of 800, that's 10 schools per district. 10 principals and a business staff managed by each superindendent. Sounds more efficient than the management ratio as a typical large corporation.

[Arne]

The whole abstract seems remarkably inarticulate. I could not tell whether they were including what I thought were important confounding factors. I skimmed the paper. They fit 20 metro areas into four categories of segregation. They did not include any info about whether it was segregated by wealth as well as by race.
They came up with the results most of us could have predicted without adding much of anything definitive about what the correlation implies about a cause.

[dissent]

In San Francisco, the school system operated under a strict desegregation order for quite awhile, perhaps two decades. No school was allowed to have more than 40% of any group. This resulted in no, none, nada increase in minority test scores among black and latino youth.

Yes, residential segregation has a strong relationship to income. But that is not amenable to a policy fix.

I think the research on schools has to focus on what works with communities As They Are. One example of that is something called KIPP, Knowledge As Power Program. Part of their method is "no shortcuts". That means that the school day and school year is much, much longer and more intensive. 10 hours of school per day, mandatory summer school, saturday classes: It amounts to years more time spent in school. This is a leg up that poor children in chaotic and violent urban neighborhoods need. It's a charter school movement and the schools are free. The test results are impressive.