A nationwide study revealed that US public education segregation has concentrated minority children into high-poverty schools with few resources.
The study conducted by the Stanford University Graduate School of Education showed that minority students in the US are concentrated in high-poverty schools with few resources, leading to a difference in academic achievement between minority and white students.
As part of the research, Professor Sean Reardon and his team analyzed hundreds of millions of standardized test scores from every public school in the US from 2008 to 2016. Their findings were in line with previous studies that poverty linked to segregation plays a big role in racial disparities in academic achievement.
Presenting the findings of the study, Reardon said “If we want to improve educational opportunities and learning for students, we want to get them out of these schools of high-concentrated poverty. Part of the reason why we have a big achievement gap is that minority students are concentrated in high-poverty schools, and those schools are the schools that seem systematically to provide lower educational opportunities."
African-American and Hispanic students have a tendency to score lower on standardized tests compared with white students and bridging this gap has been challenging to educators.
The researchers found that the school attended by the average black student in New York City over the past eight years had a poverty rate 22 percentage points higher than that of the average white student, who performs 2-1/2 grade levels above black students on average.
Meanwhile, in Fulton County, Georgia, the average black student attended a school with a poverty rate 52 percentage points higher and had an achievement gap of four grade levels.
Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles and not affiliated with the Stanford study, argued “It’s really misleading to talk about whether race or poverty is most important, because a lot of the poverty is caused by race, and that’s something that people need to keep in mind.”
