The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Academic Achievement Inequality

While much is known about patterns of racial academic achievement gaps at the national and state level, little is known about their patterns at smaller geographic scale. In this paper, we use new data to estimate racial achievement gaps in almost every metropolitan area and school district in the US with a significant population of black or Hispanic students. The precision and detail of our estimates—which are based on the results of roughly 200 million standardized math and reading tests administered to elementary and middle school students from 2009-2012—far surpasses that of any previously available data. Using these estimates, we first describe the geographic patterns of achievement gaps among metropolitan areas, and school districts in the US. We then examine the extent to which these gaps are correlated with socioeconomic characteristics of the white, black, and Hispanic populations, with patterns of residential and school segregation, and with local features of the educational system. We find substantial geographic variation in the magnitude of achievement gaps, ranging from nearly 0 in some places to larger than 1.2 standard deviations in others. A vector of economic, demographic, segregation and policy variables explains roughly three-quarters of the geographic variation in these gaps. The strongest correlates of achievement gaps are racial/ethnic differences in parental income and education, and racial/ethnic segregation. Nonetheless, even after adjusting for variation among places in racial socioeconomic inequality and segregation, many school districts and metropolitan areas have larger or smaller achievement gaps than predicted, suggesting that other forces are at work as well. #4813