Test-score data show that both low-income and racial-minority children score lower, on average, on states’ elementary-school accountability tests compared with higher-income children or white children. While different levels of scholastic achievement depend on a host of influences, such test-score gaps point toward unequal educational opportunity as a potentially important contributor. This report explores the relationship between racial and socioeconomic test-score gaps in New England metropolitan areas and two factors associated with unequal opportunity in education: state equalizing school-aid formulas and geographic segregation of low-income students. The underlying methods do not allow a strict causal interpretation; however, both aspects are strongly related to test-score gaps, with poverty segregation between school districts especially important in New England.

The report first explores the degree to which state school aid is progressive, that is, distributed disproportionately to districts with high fractions of students living in poverty; more progressive distributions are associated with smaller test-score gaps in high-poverty metropolitan areas. All U.S. states distribute some state revenue to support local school districts, but the extent to which such aid is focused on districts with greater concentrations of poverty varies considerably. The relationships estimated in the empirical analysis suggest that New England metro areas with high average district poverty in states with more progressive aid distributions, such as Springfield, Massachusetts, should see somewhat smaller racial and socioeconomic test-score gaps than metro areas with lower district poverty in states with less progressive school aid, such as Burlington, Vermont; that predicted difference in white-Black test-score gaps amounts to about one-quarter of the actual difference between Springfield’s gap and Burlington’s gap.

The second factor explored is poverty segregation; test-score gaps are larger in metropolitan areas where, compared with white children or higher-income children, minority children or lowincome children go to school with, or are in school districts with, more students from low-income families. Partly because school districts (and cities and towns) are relatively small geographically in New England, poverty segregation in the region’s metropolitan areas is most pronounced between districts, not between schools within school districts. The sizes of the estimated relationships suggest that metro areas with the highest between-district poverty segregation, such as BridgeportStamford-Norwalk, Connecticut, should have markedly larger test-score gaps than metro areas with moderate poverty segregation between districts, such as Manchester-Nashua, New Hampshire; those predicted differences amount to 60 percent to 90 percent of the actual test-score gap differences between the Bridgeport and Manchester metro areas.

The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) is part of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University (https:\edopportunity.org), an initiative aimed at harnessing data to help scholars, policymakers, educators, and parents learn how to improve educational opportunities for all children. SEDA includes a range of detailed data on educational conditions, contexts, and outcomes in schools, school districts, counties, commuting zones, and metropolitan statistical areas across the United States. Available measures differ by aggregation; see Sections I.A. and I.B. for a complete list of files and data.

By making the data files available to the public, we hope that anyone who is interested can obtain detailed information about U.S. schools, communities, and student success. We hope that researchers will use these data to generate evidence about what policies and contexts are most effective at increasing educational opportunity, and that such evidence will inform educational policy and practices.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, researchers and policymakers have paid close attention to trends in school segregation. While Brown focused on black-white segregation, we review the evidence regarding trends and consequences of both racial and economic school segregation. In general, the evidence regarding trends in racial segregation suggests that the most significant declines in black-white school segregation occurred at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s. Although there is disagreement about the direction of more recent trends in racial segregation, this disagreement is largely driven by different definitions of segregation and different ways of measuring it. We conclude that the changes in segregation in the last few decades are not large, regardless of what measure is used, though there are important differences in the trends across regions, racial groups, and institutional levels. Limited evidence on school economic segregation makes documenting trends difficult, but in general, students are more segregated by income across schools and districts today than in 1990. We also discuss the role of desegregation litigation, demographic changes, and residential segregation in shaping trends in both racial and economic segregation.

One of the reasons that scholars, policymakers, and citizens are concerned with school segregation is that segregation is hypothesized to exacerbate racial or socioeconomic disparities in educational success. The mechanisms that would link segregation to disparate outcomes have not often been spelled out clearly or tested explicitly. We develop a general conceptual model of how and why school segregation might affect students and review the relatively thin body of empirical evidence that explicitly assesses the consequences of school segregation. This literature suggests that racial desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s was beneficial to blacks; evidence of the effects of segregation in more recent decades, however, is mixed or inconclusive. We conclude with discussion of aspects of school segregation on which further research is needed.

Publication: Community Investments: Summer 2012

Almost fifty years ago, in 1966, the Coleman Report famously highlighted the relationship between family socioeconomic status and student achievement. Family socioeconomic characteristics continue to be among the strongest predictors of student achievement, but while there is a considerable body of research that seeks to tease apart this relationship, the causes and mechanisms of this relationship have been the subject of considerable disagreement and debate. Much of the scholarly research on the socioeconomic achievement gradient has focused largely on trying to understand the mechanisms through which factors like income, parental educational attainment, family structure, neighborhood conditions, school quality, as well as parental preferences, investments, and choices lead to differences in children’s academic and educational success. Still, we know little about the trends in socioeconomic achievement gaps over a lengthy period of time.

The question posed in this article is whether and how the relationship between family socioeconomic characteristics and academic achievement has changed during the last fifty years, with a particular focus on rising income inequality. As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low income families also widened? The answer, in brief, is yes. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier.