“The Black-White Achievement Gap: Do State Policies Matter?” is available from the Education Policy Analysis Archives.
Most state-level efforts aimed at reducing the achievement gap between African-American and white students have had little effect since the late 1980s, a study suggests.
The study, published in Education Policy Analysis Archives, compares the policies of 10 states between 1988 and 1998. The researchers—from the Educational Testing Service, the Philadelphia public schools, Westat Inc., and the University of Pennsylvania—found that state policy corresponded only modestly with a reduction in the achievement gap in each state. Overall, the achievement disparity between black and white students in all the states remained constant, based on National Assessment of Educational Progress scores from 1992 to 2000, although both groups made progress on the tests during that period.
