Understanding Trends in the Black-White Achievement Gaps during the First Years of School

Understanding Trends in the Black-White Achievement Gaps during the First Years of School Richard J. Murnane Harvard Graduate School of Education John B. Willett Harvard Graduate School of Education Kristen L. Bub Harvard Graduate School of Education Kathleen McCartney Harvard Graduate School of Education [Comments] The gaps between the average academic achievement of black and white children have been persistent features of American life. Until quite recently, obvious differences in the school resources provided to children of different races explained substantial portions of these achievement gaps. For example, in 1920 more than one-quarter of the racial gap in children's literacy rates could be explained by differences in easy-to-measure variables such as the school year length and per pupil expenditures.1 Given the history of blatant discrimination in the school resources provided to American children of different races, it is understandable why the U.S. Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ordered the commissioner of education to conduct a survey to document "the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities by reason of race, color, religion, or natural origin in public educational institutions at all levels. . . ."2 In July 1966 the U.S. Office of Education published the survey results in a 737-page volume entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity. Better known as the Coleman Report, named after its lead author, the eminent sociologist James Coleman, this volume documented the substantial gaps between the average mathematics and reading [End Page 97] achievement of black and white children. However, to the surprise of many educators and civil rights activists, the report found no clear-cut pattern showing that white children attended schools with substantially more of the school resources measured in the survey than did black children. Moreover, school-to-school variation in resources explained very little of the school-to-school variation in children's mathematics and reading achievement. As Harvard government professor Seymour Martin Lipset summarized the results in a conversation with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "schools make no difference; families make the difference."3 The Coleman Report catalyzed the collection of new data that allowed researchers to challenge the report's findings. Many of the newer data sets provided information on school resources and on children's achievement at more than one point in time. These attributes have allowed researchers to demonstrate conclusively that students learn more in some classrooms and schools than in others. However, with a few exceptions noted below, the newer studies tended to replicate the Coleman Report findings that differences in conventional school resources, such as class size and teachers' educational attainments, do not explain much of the variation in student achievement nor do they explain much of the race-related achievement gaps.4 This background provides the context for two provocative papers recently published by Fryer and Levitt.5 These economists documented a number of patterns in the relative academic achievement of young black and white children. Their work, which focuses particularly on differences by grade in the black-white test score gap in reading and mathematics, is based on analyses of data on the kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 children who entered kindergarten in approximately 1,000 schools during 1998. Key findings of the two Fryer and Levitt papers include: at the beginning of kindergarten, the black-white achievement gap is approximately 0.40 standard deviations in reading and 0.60 standard deviations in mathematics; a parsimonious set of family background characteristics explains all of the black-white achievement gap in reading and more than 80 percent of the gap in mathematics; [End Page 98] the black-white achievement gap in both reading and mathematics increases by approximately 0.10 standard deviations during each of the first four years of elementary school (kindergarten through third grade); there are...

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