Racial Segregation and Test - Score Gaps :

Introduction Among the most vexing and persistent issues in American education are the racial segregation of students and the achievement gap between black and white students. With the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, de jure segregation of schools was prohibited. Nonetheless de facto segregation remains, and recent growth in the nonwhite student population has exacerbated the problem, especially in large urban areas. In 2000, for example, more than 70 percent of black students attended majority nonwhite schools (Clotfelter, 2004). Potentially related to the racial segregation of students is the achievement gap between black and white students. Although this gap decreased by half during the 1970s, it has been widening since the late 1980s (Perie, Moran & Lutkus 2005). Given their salience, it is not surprising that these issues of racial segregation and achievement gaps are part of the public debate about expanding parental choice of schools. Opponents of expanding school choice are concerned that, in the absence of provisions carefully designed to counter such trends, the more motivated and advantaged students will sort into high quality schools with other students largely like themselves, thereby concentrating less motivated, more disadvantaged students in lower quality educational environments. In stark contrast, proponents of school choice argue that expanding parental choice of schools is likely to reduce segregation and achievement gaps. They start with the observation that many disadvantaged students, particularly poor and minority students in urban areas, currently attend some of the most segregated and poorest performing schools in the country. By replacing dysfunctional bureaucratic control with market-like competition, choice proponents assert that policies that expand 2 parental choice among schools will push the underperforming schools that serve disadvantaged students to improve. Even in the absence of such competitive effects on productivity, expanded forms of school choice will allow many poor and minority students to find their way into less segregated, and higher quality, schools. Thus, at the very least, this argument concludes, disadvantaged students who take advantage of newly available schooling options are likely to benefit. conducted by Paul Peterson and his colleagues. These studies find that although access to vouchers did not improve the average test scores of the full set of participating students, African American students who used vouchers to attend a private school exhibited statistically significant positive gains in test scores (Howell et al. 2002; Howell and Peterson 2002). 1 In addition, a study by Derek …