Racial and Ethnic Achievement Gap Trends: Reversing the Progress Toward Equity?

TLDR

Racial and ethnic achievement gaps narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s but widened again in the 1990s, and conventional socioeconomic, cultural, and schooling factors explain only part of these trends, leaving variations largely unaccounted for. The article examines Black‑White and Hispanic‑White achievement gap trends over the past 30 years. The authors conduct a literature review and data analysis to identify key factors contributing to bifurcated achievement‑gap patterns. The preliminary analysis of covariations across large datasets suggests implications for future research on minority achievement.

Abstract

Racial and ethnic achievement gaps narrowed substantially in the 1970s and 1980s. As some of the gaps widened in the 1990s, there were some setbacks in the progress the nation made toward racial and ethnic equity. This article offers a look below the surface at Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gap trends over the past 30 years. The literature review and data analysis identify the key factors that seem to have contributed to bifurcated patterns in achievement gaps. The conventional measures of socioeconomic and family conditions, youth culture and student behavior, and schooling conditions and practices might account for some of the achievement gap trends for a limited time period or for a particular racial and ethnic group. However, they do not fully capture the variations. This preliminary analysis of covariations in racial and ethnic gap patterns across several large data sets has implications for future research on the achievement of minority groups.