In 2004, superstar economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt published a seminal paper, Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School. Using then-brand-new data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), they found:
In stark contrast to earlier studies, the Black-White test score gap among incoming kindergartners disappears when we control for a small number of covariates. Real gains by Black children in recent cohorts appear to play an important role in explaining the differences between our findings and earlier research. The availability of better covariates also contributes. Over the first two years of school, however, Blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races. There is suggestive evidence that differences in school quality may be an important part of the explanation.
To say the findings were “mixed” dramatically underplays how good the good news was and how bad the bad news was.
The good news was twofold. First, as the authors wrote, Black kindergarteners at the time were making strong gains over previous cohorts. Indeed, child poverty dropped dramatically in the 1990s, especially for Black children, and this was showing up in stronger readiness for school.
It was also good news—great, actually—that Fryer and Levitt could completely erase the racial achievement gap when controlling for “a small number of covariates.” These included some traditional measures of socioeconomic status (SES), such as family income and parental education levels, but also health-related factors, such as the child’s birthweight and births to teenage moms.
These findings are hugely consequential for America’s longstanding debates around racial inequality. They directly rebut the hateful arguments of white supremacists who posit that achievement gaps are a sign of Black Americans’ genetic inferiority. And they throw cold water on the claims by some on the far left that bigotry and racism in schools are at the heart of all racial disparities in student achievement in the U.S.
Instead, the explanation for racial achievement gaps is much more straightforward, though still tragic: Vast racial disparities in socioeconomic conditions and prenatal and early-life health experiences explain the achievement gaps we see between racial and ethnic groups, at least at school entry. That suggests that universal, race-neutral interventions designed to improve the academic, social, economic, and health conditions of the poor would lift all boats and would also narrow racial gaps. (Not that those interventions are easy or always obvious.)
But the bad news was really bad, too. Namely, once children entered school, Black students started losing ground, likely because the schools they attended were lower quality than the ones attended by White students, even after controlling for SES. Changing that fact has, of course, been a major focus of education reform.
That was twenty years ago, and those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute were curious to see if anything had changed. We knew that racial achievement gaps had continued to narrow until the early to mid-2010s. And we knew that the federal government had released a newer ECLS dataset, the ECLS-K: 2011. We wondered: Had the relationship between socioeconomic achievement gaps and racial/ethnic achievement gaps shifted? Was the Black-White gap still growing during elementary school? And how did all of this look for the White-Hispanic gap (also explored by Fryer and Levitt) and for subjects beyond reading and math?
To find out, we turned to the University at Albany’s Paul Morgan. Paul is one of the nation’s leading scholars on disparities in education and health care. He recruited Eric Hengyu Hu, another education policy researcher experienced in analyzing the two ECLS datasets. They got to work, diving into the data from the older and newer ECLS-K datasets. The result is our new study, released this week: Explaining Achievement Gaps: The Role of Socioeconomic Factors. What they found was largely consistent with Fryer and Levitt’s study, although they were able to add some new understandings as well.
Since we were most interested in understanding the relationship between socioeconomic status and racial achievement gaps, Hu and Morgan did not look at health-related covariates, such as child’s weight at birth or the age of the mother at first child’s birth, which Fryer and Levitt had included. As a result, the racial achievement gap did not “disappear,” as it had for Fryer and Levitt. But it did decrease significantly, just by controlling for the “SES-plus” factors.
Here’s what they found. (See the study for more details and lots of fascinating tables and charts.)
Taken together, family SES+ factors explain between 34 and 64 percent of the Black-White achievement gap (depending on subject and grade level) and between 51 and 77 percent of the Hispanic-White achievement gap.
Household income and mother’s education are the SES+ factors that best explain Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps.
Family SES+ indicators, and the extent to which they explain racial/ethnic achievement gaps, are stable over time (1998–99 and 2010–11).
The inclusion of family SES+ also helps explain racial and ethnic excellence gaps.
These findings are generally consistent with Fryer and Levitt’s study from two decades ago. Socioeconomic factors can explain a large proportion of racial achievement gaps. But the current study adds a great amount of detail and nuance to our understanding of the relationships at play while raising new questions:
1. How can we explain the different patterns for the Black-White achievement gap for reading, on the one hand, and math and science, on the other? First grade reading is an outlier, given that it’s the only subject and grade combination where we see SES explaining a majority of the Black-White gap (about two-thirds). What might explain that—especially when we combine that pattern with the finding that the Black-White reading gap continues to grow as students make their way through school?
Here’s one hypothesis: As scholars, including E.D. Hirsch, Jr., have long argued, initial reading skills are more closely correlated to family SES than are math and science ones. This is likely because parents play a larger role, especially in a child’s first five years, in transmitting language abilities than they do for math and science. That can occur via behaviors, such as reading to their children, but also through their own use of verbal language. The advantages of high SES—and disadvantages of low SES—thus show up more for students’ initial reading skills than for their math and science ones. As students get older and benefit from classroom instruction, their relative advantages and disadvantages start to matter less.
That’s good news from an equity perspective, but let’s not forget that the Black-White achievement gap (including in reading) continues to grow as students age through elementary school. Consistent with Fryer and Levitt’s paper, that likely means that we still haven’t closed the “school quality gap” between Black students and their White peers.
2. Why does SES explain so much more of the Hispanic-White gap than the Black-White gap? One explanation might be that Hispanic children being raised in Spanish-speaking families have latent potential that is obscured by their lack of English skills (which become stronger as the grade level increases).
It may also be helpful to ponder what might be included in the “not SES” category. As explained earlier, possibilities include health-related factors, such as low-birth weight and being the child of a teenage mom—factors related to poverty that affect Black children more than their Hispanic peers. It might also include various forms and effects of racism and bias, which might affect Black children at higher rates.
This might also be why the Black-White achievement gap grows over the course of elementary school—because of the greater challenges Black students face outside of school, but also because of their inequitable access to effective schools.
3. What’s the role of household structure in explaining the Black-White and Hispanic-White gaps? Hu and Morgan find that “family structure explains between 1 and 22 percent of the gaps, but is more important for explaining the Black-White achievement gap (10 to 22 percent of the gap explained) than the Hispanic-White achievement gap (1 to 4 percent of the gap explained).” That makes sense, given that Hispanic students are far more likely than their Black peers to live in two-parent families (74 percent versus 40 percent, respectively)—a rate much closer to that for White children (84 percent).
But these findings likely understate the role of family structure, especially for Black children, given the relationship between the number of parents in the household and household income. As shown in Table F-2 of the report, there’s a correlation of 0.32 between these two variables for the latest ECLS cohort, which is quite strong. On top of the many non-material benefits of growing up with two loving parents, it’s clearly the case that two incomes are usually better than one when it comes to boosting families out of poverty. And increasing the proportion of two-parent, two-income families in the Black community would thus help to narrow the Black-White achievement gap, as well.
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None of this lends itself to simple takeaways, but the authors’ recommendations in the report—especially their suggestions to invest in early childhood education and supplement families’ incomes, perhaps via an expanded child tax credit—deserve serious consideration.
As has been clear since the Coleman Report, when it comes to the interplay between race, poverty, and schooling, the honest read is that it’s complicated. What’s undeniable, though, is that much hard work remains, especially when it comes to providing effective schools to marginalized students, especially those who are Black. Let’s keep at it.
