Okay, update from the book I’m reading “Freakanomics”:
After controlling for just a few variables-including the income an education level of the child’s parents and the mother’s age at the birth of her first child-the (learning) gap between black and white children is virtually eliminated at the time the children enter school.
-The data reveals that black children who perform poorly in school do so not because they are black but because they tend to come from low-income, low-education households. A typical black child and white child from the same socioeconomic background, however, has the same abilities in math and reading upon entering kindergarden.
By the end of first grade, a black child is underperforming a statistically equivalent white child, and the gap continues to grow. Why? One answer may lie in the fact that the school attended by the typical black child is not the same school attended by the typical white child. The typical white child attends a school that is only 6 percent black; the typical black child, meanwhile, attends a school that is about 60 percent black. The typical black student’s school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators…..simply not conducive to learning.
Black students are hardly the only ones who suffer in bad schools. White children in these schools also perform poorly. In fact there is essentially no black-white test score gap within a bad school once you control for student’s backgrounds. Perhaps educators and researchers are wrong to be so hung up on the black-white test score gap; the bad-school/good-school gap may be the more salient issue.
Consider this fact: the data reveals that black students in good schools don’t lose ground to their white counterparts, and black students in good schools outperform whites in poor schools.