For much of the 1970 and 80s, the educational future for black students looked bright: The gap between white and black students’ graduation rates was closing rapidly, dropping from 9.2 to 4.4 percentage points over nineteen years (and due mostly to a rise in black attainment). Had this rate of convergence continued, the black graduation rate would have been level with that of whites by the mid-1990s. But everything changed in 1986. Why? Authors of this recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper blame the “stalled progress” on one social phenomenon: the proliferation of crack-cocaine markets. The authors examine the impact of crack-cocaine markets in fifty-seven metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on the black-white achievement gap, with a specific focus on the male achievement gap. Crack markets, the authors find, account for between 40 and 73 percent of the decline in achievement among black males by catalyzing a higher murder rate, a greater chance of incarceration, and more opportunities for employment outside of the “formal” sector (reducing the value of their education). Why, then, have achievement gains among black males not rebounded after the decline in crack cocaine-related violence in the early 2000s? The authors speculate that there may now exist a perverse relationship between prison-intake rates and lower educational attainment: while the former originally caused the latter, the latter could now be driving the former by pushing students to crime due to lack of opportunity. Heady research, fodder for much debate, and another example of the social constraints that schools and teachers face.
SOURCE: William N. Evans, Craig Garthwaite, and Timothy J. Moore, “The White/Black Educational Gap, Stalled Progress, and the Long Term Consequences of the Emergence of Crack Cocaine Markets” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, October 2012).
