Florida Study Shows Achievement Lags for Racially Isolated Schools in the State

More than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, a new Florida study shows that the racial composition of schools still matters when it comes to scores on student-achievement tests.

The study, published last month in the American Educational Research Journal , is based on analyses of test scores and other data from elementary, middle, and high schools in Florida’s 67 public school districts.

All other things being equal, the researchers found, schools with high enrollments of African-American students tend to score lower on state mathematics and reading tests than integrated...