Closing the achievement gap between high-poverty schools and low-poverty schools

We examine the achievement gap between low-income minority students in inner city (high-poverty) schools and their white high-income counterparts who attend suburban (lowpoverty) schools. Our data include the 4 and 5 grade math and reading scores for over 15,000 students in a large urban school district. We use a multilevel model to show that school resources do matter. We find that high quality teachers have a significant and positive effect on student test scores and that smaller class size, especially in low performing schools, contributes to higher student achievement. Although school resource variables do matter in our model, they are far less important predictors of student test scores than are the student background variables. Unfortunately, our results lead to the conclusion that schools, alone, cannot close the achievement gap although we do find that better schools raise reading and math scores for the average student in a low performing school by about 12%.