Closing the Achievement Gap

A Special Issue of the journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk

Samuel C. Stringfield, Samuel C. Stringfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781135482374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Closing the Achievement Gap is made up of six articles. The first paper examines Cleveland's restructuring initiative in light of two theories on early adolescent development: person-in-environment theory and the focal theory of change. This is followed by a study that illustrates the difference in academic performance between low-income children and their peers, minority children and their classmates, and those schools that serve a majority of children from low-income families and those that serve a more advantaged population. The third article summarizes key findings of a study that examined the reform efforts of three large urban school districts and a portion of a fourth that had been successful in improving student achievement and reducing racial achievement gaps. It also discusses the implications for research and technical assistance. Next, survey data on 15, 800 high school students from three urban school districts is used to investigate the impact of school-level support for higher educational attainment and school racial composition on students' actual educational aspirations. The final article explores whether reading books during summer vacation improves fall reading proficiency and whether access to books increases the volume of summer reading.

School Racial Composition and Student Educational Aspirations: A Question of Equity in a Multiracial Society

John T. Yun
Graduate School of Education
University of California, Santa Barbara

Michal Kurlaender
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University

This article uses survey data on 15,800 high school students from 3 urban school districts to investigate the impact of school-level support for higher educational attainment and school racial composition on students’ actual educational aspirations. We examine students’ perceptions of school support for postsecondary participation and test alternative measures of school racial composition in order to account for the increasingly multiracial makeup of today’s urban high schools. We include both school-level and student-level characteristics in a multilevel logistic regression model to see if perceived school support for higher educational attainment differs by school racial composition. The results provide support for the hypothesis that school racial composition and school support have an effect on students’ reported educational aspirations, and that alternative specifications of school racial composition provide different interpretations of these important relationships.

Almost 50 years have passed since the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. The famous Brown decision of 1954¹ canonized the idea that separate but equal was inherently unequal when it came to the education of our nation’s youth. Since that time, the country has been embroiled in the controversy of how to deal with the separation of the races in American schools (Lagemann & Miller, 1996; Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Separation has come in many forms, including continued physical, racial, and ethnic segregation (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003; Orfield & Yun, 1999; Reardon & Yun, 2001), as well as differences in educational opportunities and outcomes, generally measured by school quality, educational attainment, and test scores (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). As the separation of students from different racial and ethnic groups remains controversial, it has also become more complex. A half-century ago, the consciousness of race extended almost exclusively to issues of Black and White differences (Reardon & Yun, 2001; Reardon, Yun, & McNulty, 2000), however, today many of our nation’s school districts are enrolling large numbers of students from very different racial-ethnic backgrounds. Thus, researchers, educators, and policymakers are forced to contend with the multiple issues of educational disparities between ethnic and racial groups; the difficulty in characterizing schools when there are multiple racial and ethnic groups present; and the likely differing interactions between school composition and policies for students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. For instance, it is entirely possible that students in a predominantly Black school will respond to a policy quite differently from students in a largely Asian or Latino school. Such questions have largely gone unexamined, possibly due to the difficulty in characterizing school racial composition, or simply due to a lack of interest in the question. Without recognizing this increasing complexity of the effect of school racial composition on students, researchers and policymakers are likely to make decisions using largely fallacious and outdated assumptions.

¹ Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

Today, 50 years after the beginning of school desegregation, educators, policymakers, and the public have some knowledge about the impact of racial integration on the educational experience of Black students, but very little on White students or students from different racial-ethnic groups. As districts are losing their ability to pursue race conscious policies to integrate schools, research to measure the impact of schools’ racial composition on all students is critical. This article moves toward addressing this issue by investigating a process for measuring the impact of multiracial schools on students from different racial-ethnic groups. Specifically, we examine alternative methods for measuring the impact of school desegregation on student outcomes across a more complicated landscape of racial composition in U.S. schools. We use two different measures of school-level diversity to explore how students of all racial groups are affected by different racial-ethnic compositions of schools.

We focus on a very traditional student outcome: student aspirations to attend a 4-year college or university. Although educational aspirations are not perfect predictors of whether students will actually go to college, this outcome may be a good indicator of the perceived opportunities by students within a school, across racial-ethnic groups, because schools that equalize educational opportunities for all students should demonstrate greater equalization of aspirations across racial-ethnic groups. These aspirations can be used as an indicator of perceived opportunity. We refer to this as the perceived opportunity hypothesis (Kurlaender & Yun, 2001).

Providing both concrete and social supports that directly lead to college applications is a policy that schools may pursue to reduce the differences between students’ of different racial-ethnic groups desire to attend college. Such supports could take the form of encouragement from a teacher or counselor to attend a 4-year college, or access to actual information provided by school personnel about college admissions tests or policies. Such support and access to information has been effective in increasing both educational aspirations and college attendance (Martinez & Klopott, 2002; McDonough, 1997). If a school provides support to all of its students to attend college, it is reasonable to assume that a greater proportion of students will consider it. However, if school policies are applied inequitably, instead of ameliorating differences between ethnic-racial groups, such policies may exacerbate the problem. In addition, there may be different interactions with the policy or levels of support offered in different types of schools. That is to say, in schools that are predominantly Latino, students may react to the support they get from the institution differently than they would from the same level of school support in a largely White, Black, or multi-racial school. Such knowledge is vital if school leaders wish to address differences in school support or differences in students’ desire to attend college. The only way to determine if such differential reactions exist is to explicitly test for them, taking into account the complex nature of current school enrollments.

To test this hypothesis, we introduce the perceived support (taken from student survey results) that a school provides to students to pursue higher education as a measure of school support, and examine whether or not student aspirations are associated with such support, and whether that association differs by school racial composition. Due to the complexity involved in measuring school racial composition, we do this in two ways. First, we chose a traditional measure of the percentage of White students enrolled in the school. This measure has the benefit of being both familiar and much easier to display. Second, we chose a more novel measure of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Restructuring Schools in Cleveland for the Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Development of Early Adolescents
• Closing the Achievement Gap: Lessons From Illinois’ Golden Spike High-Poverty High-Performing Schools
• Urban School Systems and Education Reform: Key Lessons From a Case Study of Large Urban School Systems
• School Racial Composition and Student Educational Aspirations: A Question of Equity in a Multiracial Society
• Summer Reading and the Ethnic Achievement Gap
• Mathematics Reform in a Minority Community: Student Outcomes
• Notes on Contributors