The racial and
socioeconomic test score gap is also far smaller in Department of Defense schools than it is in most states.
We caution, however, that our analysis is correlational rather than causal, so these patterns of findings are merely suggestive that
socioeconomic test score gaps persist relatively unabated regardless of the degree of socioeconomic integration at the school level, and are far from definitive.
Not exact matches
Just occasionally are they less equivocal, as when they observe that aggressive integration policies helped black children during the 1970s, that mounting
socioeconomic inequality after the late 1980s contributed to the subsequent widening in the
test -
score gap, and that inequality in the preschool environment plays an important role in determining later educational outcomes.
This indicates that while there are many reasons why school districts and states might want to seek to integrate relatively advantaged and relatively disadvantaged students within the same school, it appears unlikely that a policy goal of reducing the
test score gap between students in these groups will be realized through further
socioeconomic integration (at least once there gets to be the degree of
socioeconomic integration necessary to be part of this study to begin with).
These findings make clear that while we can learn a tremendous amount by comparing school districts in terms of their racial, ethnic, or
socioeconomic gaps in
test scores, there is a large degree of variation within school districts in their outcome
gaps as well.
Racial and
socioeconomic achievement
gaps often come to educators» attention in
test scores, but they don't start there.
Thus adjusting the data for the effects of
socioeconomic status reduces the estimated racial
gaps in
test scores by more than 40 percent in math and more than 66 percent in reading.
This is clear in a project called the Schools of Opportunity, launched a few years ago by educators who sought to highlight public high schools that actively seek to close opportunity
gaps through research - proven practices and not standardized
test scores (which are more a measure of
socioeconomic status than anything else).
And it's true that standardized
tests have played an important role in pointing out the
gap in
test scores between
socioeconomic and ethnic groups.
The size of the
gap varies by country, as does the median
test score, but there is a strong correlation overall between students»
socioeconomic status and their performance on standardized
tests.