The achievement gap between black and white students is directly linked to the racial composition of their schools, a study by researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes.
“Racial Segregation and the Black-White Test Score Gap” is available from The National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study by the Cambridge, Mass.-based nonpartisan research group matched SAT scores from a third of test-takers in the country for the 1998 to 2001 high school graduating classes with information on the racial composition of their high schools and with family characteristics.
The results indicate that racial segregation had large, negative effects on black students’ test scores. When a city was more integrated, the gap in SAT scores between black and white students was 25 percent smaller than when races were separated in different neighborhoods, the researchers found.
