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Ethnic and racial disparities in education: psychology’s contributions to understanding and reducing disparities, executive summary.

Pervasive ethnic and racial disparities in education follow a pattern in which African-American, American Indian, Latino and Southeast Asian groups underperform academically, relative to Caucasians and other Asian-Americans.

These educational disparities

Mirror ethnic and racial disparities in socioeconomic status as well as health outcomes and health care. 

Are evident early in childhood and persist through K-12 education.

Are reflected in test scores assessing academic achievement, such as reading and mathematics; percentages of those repeating one or more grades; dropout and graduation rates; proportions of students involved in gifted and talented programs; enrollment in higher education; as well as in behavioral markers of adjustment, including rates of being disciplined, suspended and expelled from schools.

Psychological science offers an understanding of educational disparities and strategies to redress them. Developmental psychologists have identified how differences in early childhood education and childcare are associated with academic performance and school readiness for ethnic and racial minority children prior to their entry into K-12 schools.

Psychological science examining second language acquisition has produced important findings about how linguistic minority children function, identifying the resources they need to perform commensurate with their cognitive abilities. Psychological theory informs our understanding of how immigration is related to educational disparities and explains why some Asian-American groups do well educationally compared to Latinos, despite both groups having large segments born outside the U.S. and a home language that is not English.

The organization of schools and how students are engaged in their learning are of critical importance for the educational achievement of students across ethnic and racial groups. Educational disparities are evident in markers of low academic performance and graduation rates, as well as the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted and talented educational programs, and psychological theory speaks to how to cultivate academic talent across the range of students in schools.

The psychology of individual and group differences can inform our understanding of the educational implications of important forms of human difference and exceptionality in educational systems.

Recommendations emerging from the task force’s work include:

• Advocate for wider access to high quality, early childhood education programs, which have been shown to help redress disparities associated with poverty in early childhood.
• Empower immigrant families to be informed consumers of the U.S. educational system by providing information about how their children can be successful in U.S. schools, including prerequisite skills for elementary, middle and high schools, as well as in higher education.
• Promote expansion of access to high-quality bilingual education that provides linguistically competent education to children.
• Educate the public and policymakers about the consequences of increasing ethnic and racial segregation to the educational experiences of ethnic and racial minority children.
• Promote allocating resources for increasing the capacity of teachers to deliver evidence-based, gap-closing instructional and learning strategies.

Educational Practice

• Identify and promote the cultural competencies of service providers in early childhood education.
• Train and consult with educators to capitalize on the generally high educational aspirations and valuing of education that immigrant students tend to bring with them to school.
• Educate prospective and in-service educators about supports to ethnic and racial minority boys and to inoculate children against stereotyping.
• Introduce prospective teachers and in-service teachers on how culture, identity and context interact, and interventions that have been demonstrated to increase achievement in ethnic and racial minority students.
• Build on the social, cultural, linguistic, experiential and intellectual assets that students from diverse backgrounds bring with them into classrooms.
• Adopt a broad definition of educational disparities to include those differences that (a) overlap with social class; (b) reflect bias and differential treatment in the educational system; and (c) are based on different responses to the educational system.
• Study the significant challenges faced by children of parents who hold undocumented immigrant status in the U.S.
• Identify psychological factors associated with immigrant status that have contributed to academic success as well as educational factors associated with school environments that have been successful at cultivating academic achievement on the part of immigrant children and youth.
• Examine the factors that contribute to the success of ethnic and racial minority students who participate in selective academic programs.
• Investigate the teacher-student dynamics that are associated with discipline and academic achievement gaps.

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• Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Education: Psychology’s Contributions to Understanding and Reducing Disparities (PDF, 1.2MB)

Systematic Review of Theoretical Perspectives Guiding the Study of Race and Racism in Higher Education Journals

• Published: 06 January 2024
• Volume 49 , pages 247–269, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

• Gloria Crisp   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1645-910X 1 ,
• Luis Alcázar 1 ,
• Jeff Ryan Sherman 1 ,
• Joseph Schaffer-Enomoto 1 &
• Natalie Rooney 1  

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Our study provides a review of theories that were used to study race and racism between 2010 and 2019 in higher education. We conducted a content analysis to identify concepts, statements and models used in higher education studies focused on race and racism in the three most highly read United States higher education journals. We also identified salient characteristics of studies focused on race and racism that applied critical race theory (CRT) and other frequently used theories and frameworks. Across the 172 reviewed studies, over 130 concepts, statements and models were identified that can be taken up by scholars and equity-minded higher education practitioners. Findings also offer direct implications and suggestions for future research focused on race and racism.

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Exposing the chameleon-like nature of racism: a multidisciplinary look at critical race theory in higher education

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Although we used several terms in our search, the term Latinx is used throughout the remainder of this article to encompass a broad and inclusive spectrum of identities related to individuals of Latin American origin. The use of Latinx is intended to acknowledge and respect the diversity of terms and expressions embraced by this community. While Latinx is utilized as a gender-neutral alternative, we recognize the language and cultural complexities associated with the term (Salinas, 2020 ).

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Gloria Crisp had the idea for the article. Data collection (e.g., identification of articles) was performed by Gloria Crisp (lead), Luis Alcázar, Jeff Ryan Sherman, and Joseph Schaffer-Enomoto. The content analysis was performed by Gloria Crisp (lead), Luis Alcázar, Jeff Ryan Sherman, and Joseph Schaffer-Enomoto. Natalie Rooney served as the lead reviewer and editor for the paper. All authors contributed to the development of the first draft as well as subsequent versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript before it was submitted.

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Crisp, G., Luis Alcázar, Sherman, J.R. et al. Systematic Review of Theoretical Perspectives Guiding the Study of Race and Racism in Higher Education Journals. Innov High Educ 49 , 247–269 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-023-09694-1

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Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education

​The Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education project offers a data-informed foundation for those working to close persistent equity gaps by providing a comprehensive review of the educational pathways of today’s college students and the educators who serve them. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​In 2019, the American Council on Education (ACE) released Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: A Status Report , along with an interactive website   ​created in collaboration with RTI International . In 2020, ACE released a second report, Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2020 Supplement . Most recently, ACE released Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2024 Status Report .

The reports examine over 300 indicators and draw data from several principal sources, including the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, and nonfederal organizations. These data provide a foundation from which the higher education community and its many stakeholders can draw insights, raise new questions, and make the case for why race still matters in American higher education.

Visit equityinhighered.org to: 

• Download the full reports
• Download individual report chapters from the 2019 Status Report , 2020 Supplement ,  and 2024 Status Report
• Access downloadable figures and data tables
• Learn from additional ideas and insights exploring the themes of the Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education project
• Browse an extensive collection of resources pertaining to race and ethnicity in higher education 

​​​​The racial and ethnic makeup of the United States has undergone dramatic changes in just the past 20 years. That diversity comes with a host of benefits at all levels of education and in the workforce. Moreover, the current and future health of our nation—economic and otherwise—requires that the whole of our population have equitable access to sources of opportunity.

Chief among such sources of opportunity is higher education. It is therefore imperative that educators, policymakers, community leaders, the media, and others have access to timely data on one of the most salient predictors of higher education access and success in this country: race and ethnicity. 

​This work was made possible through generous funding provided by the Mellon Foundation.​​

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Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education

Subscribe to governance weekly, linda darling-hammond ld linda darling-hammond.

March 1, 1998

• 13 min read

W.E.B. DuBois was right about the problem of the 21st century. The color line divides us still. In recent years, the most visible evidence of this in the public policy arena has been the persistent attack on affirmative action in higher education and employment. From the perspective of many Americans who believe that the vestiges of discrimination have disappeared, affirmative action now provides an unfair advantage to minorities. From the perspective of others who daily experience the consequences of ongoing discrimination, affirmative action is needed to protect opportunities likely to evaporate if an affirmative obligation to act fairly does not exist. And for Americans of all backgrounds, the allocation of opportunity in a society that is becoming ever more dependent on knowledge and education is a source of great anxiety and concern.

At the center of these debates are interpretations of the gaps in educational achievement between white and non-Asian minority students as measured by standardized test scores. The presumption that guides much of the conversation is that equal opportunity now exists; therefore, continued low levels of achievement on the part of minority students must be a function of genes, culture, or a lack of effort and will (see, for example, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White).

The assumptions that undergird this debate miss an important reality: educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Despite stark differences in funding, teacher quality, curriculum, and class sizes, the prevailing view is that if students do not achieve, it is their own fault. If we are ever to get beyond the problem of the color line, we must confront and address these inequalities.

The Nature of Educational Inequality

Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely. The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement. On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.

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Even so, educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. As William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche noted in a 1991 report to Congress: Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter-state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra-state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts which fare the worst in educational expenditures (or) in rural districts which suffer from fiscal inequity.

Jonathan Kozol s 1991 Savage Inequalities described the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs. Contrast MacKenzie High School in Detroit, where word processing courses are taught without word processors because the school cannot afford them, or East St. Louis Senior High School, whose biology lab has no laboratory tables or usable dissecting kits, with nearby suburban schools where children enjoy a computer hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions and science laboratories that rival those in some industries. Or contrast Paterson, New Jersey, which could not afford the qualified teachers needed to offer foreign language courses to most high school students, with Princeton, where foreign languages begin in elementary school.

Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools. In combination, these policies leave minority students with fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum. Many schools serving low-income and minority students do not even offer the math and science courses needed for college, and they provide lower-quality teaching in the classes they do offer. It all adds up.

What Difference Does it Make?

Since the 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, another debate has waged as to whether money makes a difference to educational outcomes. It is certainly possible to spend money ineffectively; however, studies that have developed more sophisticated measures of schooling show how money, properly spent, makes a difference. Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has shown that four factors consistently influence student achievement: all else equal, students perform better if they are educated in smaller schools where they are well known (300 to 500 students is optimal), have smaller class sizes (especially at the elementary level), receive a challenging curriculum, and have more highly qualified teachers.

Minority students are much less likely than white children to have any of these resources. In predominantly minority schools, which most students of color attend, schools are large (on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities); on average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall (80 percent larger for non-special education classes); curriculum offerings and materials are lower in quality; and teachers are much less qualified in terms of levels of education, certification, and training in the fields they teach. And in integrated schools, as UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes described in the 1980s and Harvard professor Gary Orfield’s research has recently confirmed, most minority students are segregated in lower-track classes with larger class sizes, less qualified teachers, and lower-quality curriculum.

Research shows that teachers’ preparation makes a tremendous difference to children’s learning. In an analysis of 900 Texas school districts, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson found that teachers’ expertise—as measured by scores on a licensing examination, master’s degrees, and experienc—was the single most important determinant of student achievement, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the measured variance in students’ reading and math achievement gains in grades 1-12. After controlling for socioeconomic status, the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely due to differences in the qualifications of their teachers. In combination, differences in teacher expertise and class sizes accounted for as much of the measured variance in achievement as did student and family background (figure 1).

Ferguson and Duke economist Helen Ladd repeated this analysis in Alabama and again found sizable influences of teacher qualifications and smaller class sizes on achievement gains in math and reading. They found that more of the difference between the high- and low-scoring districts was explained by teacher qualifications and class sizes than by poverty, race, and parent education.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee study found that elementary school students who are assigned to ineffective teachers for three years in a row score nearly 50 percentile points lower on achievement tests than those assigned to highly effective teachers over the same period. Strikingly, minority students are about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers and twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective.

Minority students are put at greatest risk by the American tradition of allowing enormous variation in the qualifications of teachers. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future found that new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools (figure 2). Students in poor or predominantly minority schools are much less likely to have teachers who are fully qualified or hold higher-level degrees. In schools with the highest minority enrollments, for example, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher with a license and a degree in the field. In 1994, fully one-third of teachers in high-poverty schools taught without a minor in their main field and nearly 70 percent taught without a minor in their secondary teaching field.

Studies of underprepared teachers consistently find that they are less effective with students and that they have difficulty with curriculum development, classroom management, student motivation, and teaching strategies. With little knowledge about how children grow, learn, and develop, or about what to do to support their learning, these teachers are less likely to understand students’ learning styles and differences, to anticipate students’ knowledge and potential difficulties, or to plan and redirect instruction to meet students’ needs. Nor are they likely to see it as their job to do so, often blaming the students if their teaching is not successful.

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because a challenging curriculum requires an expert teacher. Research has found that both students and teachers are tracked: that is, the most expert teachers teach the most demanding courses to the most advantaged students, while lower-track students assigned to less able teachers receive lower-quality teaching and less demanding material. Assignment to tracks is also related to race: even when grades and test scores are comparable, black students are more likely to be assigned to lower-track, nonacademic classes.

When Opportunity Is More Equal

What happens when students of color do get access to more equal opportunities’ Studies find that curriculum quality and teacher skill make more difference to educational outcomes than the initial test scores or racial backgrounds of students. Analyses of national data from both the High School and Beyond Surveys and the National Educational Longitudinal Surveys have demonstrated that, while there are dramatic differences among students of various racial and ethnic groups in course-taking in such areas as math, science, and foreign language, for students with similar course-taking records, achievement test score differences by race or ethnicity narrow substantially.

Robert Dreeben and colleagues at the University of Chicago conducted a long line of studies documenting both the relationship between educational opportunities and student performance and minority students’ access to those opportunities. In a comparative study of 300 Chicago first graders, for example, Dreeben found that African-American and white students who had comparable instruction achieved comparable levels of reading skill. But he also found that the quality of instruction given African-American students was, on average, much lower than that given white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest-ability group in Dreeben’s sample was in a school in a low-income African-American neighborhood. These children, though, learned less during first grade than their white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the challenging instruction they deserved.

When schools have radically different teaching forces, the effects can be profound. For example, when Eleanor Armour-Thomas and colleagues compared a group of exceptionally effective elementary schools with a group of low-achieving schools with similar demographic characteristics in New York City, roughly 90 percent of the variance in student reading and mathematics scores at grades 3, 6, and 8 was a function of differences in teacher qualifications. The schools with highly qualified teachers serving large numbers of minority and low-income students performed as well as much more advantaged schools.

Most studies have estimated effects statistically. However, an experiment that randomly assigned seventh grade “at-risk”students to remedial, average, and honors mathematics classes found that the at-risk students who took the honors class offering a pre-algebra curriculum ultimately outperformed all other students of similar backgrounds. Another study compared African-American high school youth randomly placed in public housing in the Chicago suburbs with city-placed peers of equivalent income and initial academic attainment and found that the suburban students, who attended largely white and better-funded schools, were substantially more likely to take challenging courses, perform well academically, graduate on time, attend college, and find good jobs.

What Can Be Done?

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Last year the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future issued a blueprint for a comprehensive set of policies to ensure a “caring, competent, and qualified teacher for every child,” as well as schools organized to support student success. Twelve states are now working directly with the commission on this agenda, and others are set to join this year. Several pending bills to overhaul the federal Higher Education Act would ensure that highly qualified teachers are recruited and prepared for students in all schools. Federal policymakers can develop incentives, as they have in medicine, to guarantee well-prepared teachers in shortage fields and high-need locations. States can equalize education spending, enforce higher teaching standards, and reduce teacher shortages, as Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and North Carolina have already done. School districts can reallocate resources from administrative superstructures and special add-on programs to support better-educated teachers who offer a challenging curriculum in smaller schools and classes, as restructured schools as far apart as New York and San Diego have done. These schools, in communities where children are normally written off to lives of poverty, welfare dependency, or incarceration, already produce much higher levels of achievement for students of color, sending more than 90 percent of their students to college. Focusing on what matters most can make a real difference in what children have the opportunity to learn. This, in turn, makes a difference in what communities can accomplish.

An Entitlement to Good Teaching

The common presumption about educational inequality—that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what the school has to offer—continues to hold wide currency because the extent of inequality in opportunities to learn is largely unknown. We do not currently operate schools on the presumption that students might be entitled to decent teaching and schooling as a matter of course. In fact, some state and local defendants have countered school finance and desegregation cases with assertions that such remedies are not required unless it can be proven that they will produce equal outcomes. Such arguments against equalizing opportunities to learn have made good on DuBois’s prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

But education resources do make a difference, particularly when funds are used to purchase well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum and to create personalized learning communities in which children are well known. In all of the current sturm und drang about affirmative action, “special treatment,” and the other high-volatility buzzwords for race and class politics in this nation, I would offer a simple starting point for the next century s efforts: no special programs, just equal educational opportunity.

Governance Studies

Phillip Levine

September 3, 2024

Lydia Wilbard

August 29, 2024

Zachary Billot, Annie Vong, Nicole Dias Del Valle, Emily Markovich Morris

August 26, 2024

• Utility Menu

Jennifer L. Hochschild

H.l. jayne professor of government, and professor of african and african american studies.

Center for Government and International Studies 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Race, Ethnicity, and Education Policy

Publisher's Website

Race and Education Policy

Jennifer L. Hochschild and Francis X. Shen

March 4, 2009

For Oxford Handbook on Racial and Ethnic Politics in America , edited by Mark Sawyer, David Leal and Taeku Lee. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010.

            A complex mix of new and old race politics shapes contemporary education policy.  The growing presence of Asian and especially Latino children and parents in multiethnic schools and districts will shape education policy in the 21 st century (Clarke, et. al. 2006)., but these new actors will act within the contours of the United States’ history of (often failed) reform efforts on behalf of African-American students. This combination of history and innovation suggests that the already tense arena of schooling is poised to become even more fraught – and possibly also more dynamic and successful.

            Although racial and ethnic politics pervade education policymaking, so do nonracial narratives and explanations. Thus making the distinctive role of race clear is a delicate as well as important task for scholars and policymakers. To date, a racial lens has done a better job of raising important questions about the efficacy and purpose of education policies and governance structures than it has in answering them.  Research results conflict on everything from bilingual teaching methods to the appropriate subgroups in the federal law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB); the field needs better data, improved methodologies, and less tendentious scholarship. In this chapter we review some of the most critical debates for scholars and policymakers.

Opportunity and Achievement: How Are Race and Ethnicity Associated with Schooling Outcomes?

Attainment:   Racial and ethnic disparities in schooling outcomes begin with the simplest and perhaps most important measure of success – years of schooling.  In 2007, 91 percent of non-Hispanic Whites, compared with 83 percent of Blacks and only 60 percent of Hispanics over age 25 had at least a high school degree.  The proportion of adult Americans with B.A. or higher degrees followed a similar pattern: 32 percent of non-Hispanic Whites, 19 percent of Blacks, and only 13 percent of Hispanics.  Data for other groups come from the 2000 census so are not quite comparable; as of 2000, 80 percent of adult Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 71 percent of American Indians/Alaska Natives held a high school degree or more.  The comparable figures for a B.A. or higher degree are 44 percent and 12 percent. [1]

            In short, Asian Americans are by far the best educated group in the United States, followed by Anglos, Blacks, American Indians, and Latinos, in that order.  These outcomes result from a complex interaction of residential location, recency of immigration, family socioeconomic status, personal preference, discrimination or biased treatment, and quality of schooling. Educational attainment and race are clearly related, but not in any simple causal way.

The Achievement Gap: Minority students’ access to high-quality education and achievement improved over the past few decades; as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the black-white test score gap narrowed between the early 1970s and 2004 in both reading and mathematics for students at all three ages tested (age 9, 13, and 17). [2] Nevertheless, the gap remains sizeable and pervasive (Magnuson and Waldfogel 2008).

Not surprisingly, researchers have struggled to explain the persistent racial achievement gap, and to identify policies that will ameliorate it. Explanations range from racial bias in testing (Jencks 1998) to discrimination or segregation in schools and classrooms (Farkas 2003), socioeconomic disparities of families and communities (Magnuson and Votruba-Drzal 2009; Lleras 2008), differences in familial interaction (Lee and Bowen 2006), teachers’ perceptions and treatment of students (Ferguson 2003),  Black students’ hesitance to “act white” (Ogbu 2002, 2004), and overall school quality (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006).  Each explanation has been criticized (for example, see Spencer et. al. 2001 and Ferguson 2001 on acting white; Fryer and Levitt 2006 on observable teacher and school characteristics; Campbell et. al. 2008 on income inequality). So far, no attempt to adjudicate among these explanations has persuaded most researchers, educators, or policy-makers.

Analysis of achievement gaps now extends to Latinos (Valenzuela 2005). The Hispanic-Anglo gap has also narrowed since the mid-1970s, but remains sizeable and has in fact increased in some age groups since 1999. [3] Explanations include not only those listed above for the Black-White gap, but also focus on language facility and bilingual education programs, the disruptions of immigration, and possibly cultural differences with regard to schooling (Reardon and Galindo 2008, Ryabov and Van Hooka 2007; more generally, see Baumann et. al. 2007).

NAEP scores are a good example of the ways in which issues of race and ethnicity are inevitably entwined with other dimensions of social life.. The gaps between students whose parents have a college degree or more, and those whose parents have less than a high school education are now larger than the gaps between Blacks or Hispanics and Anglos. They have also declined less since the earliest years of testing. [4]   Of course, Blacks and Latinos are a disproportionate share of students with low socioeconomic status, so these results are not independent of race.  But the majority of low status students are still non-Hispanic Whites, so it is important to remember that class disadvantages may play a role separate from racial or ethnic disadvantages (Berliner 2006).

Other issues are more specific to race and ethnicity. For example, several times during the past few decades, debates over bilingual education have been especially heated (Schmidt 2000); as immigrants and their children become an ever larger share of students, these debates may reemerge. As with the achievement gap, scholars have produced dueling studies and meta-analyses about the efficacy of various forms of bilingual education (Greene 1999; August and Hakuta 1998).  In our judgment, the primary issue is not whether bilingual schooling works or which program works best, but rather how to attain high quality teaching in any program. Good teaching enables students to learn in English; bad teaching does not (Hochschild and Scovronick 2003).

            Considering education through the lens of race and ethnicity raises a more fundamental question: what outcomes should a school system focus on?  Do schools succeed if English Language Learners become competent in academic English, or should they also help students maintain their native language? How much attention should schools pay to multicultural reading lists and curricular offerings, as compared with the traditional canon? Does Afrocentrism warrant a place in public schooling (Hochschild and Scovronick 2003; Binder 2004)?  Will students learn more from teachers who focus on improving mathematical and literacy skills, or from teachers who share the background, values, and identity of their students?  

School Choice:  Of the many proposals to address achievement disparities, public school choice through charter schools and voucher programs has sparked some of the most contentious debate.  Some argue that choice does or will raise student performance, perhaps especially for minority populations (Howell and Peterson 2002).  Others fear that choice produces more racial stratification in schools, distracts educators and parents from what they really need to work on, and – for privatized voucher programs -- undermines the highly desirable publicness of public schools (Hochschild and Skovronick 2003).

            The empirical evidence on choice suggests that its effects are not strong enough to warrant passion in either support or opposition.  Voucher schools are occasionally associated with small improvements in students’ test scores, and more often with increased parental satisfaction (Rouse and Barrow 2009; see also Jacob and Ludwig 2009).  But achievement has changed little, many students leave their chosen school, most people do not really know what a voucher system is (Moe 2001), and vouchers have always been rejected in referenda and almost always in state legislative processes.  Only a few hundred thousand students, in the most generous definition of individual school choice, are involved in these programs and there is little reason to expect many more to be.

            Charter schools are more significant, since over a million students now attend them (out of 49 million students in K-12 schools).  The number of charter schools is growing, and their structure and organization seems to be stabilizing.  Some are lauded as the best hope for poor Black and Hispanic children (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003), but others worry that charter schools openly (Dee and Fu 2004, Wells 1998, Bulkley and Fisler 2003), or implicitly (Weiher and Tedin 2002; Lacireno-Paquet 2002) reinforce racial stratification (for counterevidence, see Forman, Jr. 2007). To sound the same theme one more time, the research literature is mixed on whether charter schools do or do not improve academic outcomes (Jacob and Ludwig 2009).

No Child Left Behind:  However educators design future school reform efforts, they must act within state and federal accountability frameworks. Currently the framework results from the federal NCLB’s emphasis on schools’ “adequate yearly progress,” determined by standardized tests devised by each state. NCLB requires that, with a few exceptions, schools break out their performance by racial or ethnic subgroup, and show adequate yearly progress for each group (Kim and Sunderman 2005, Darling-Hammond 2007)

            Schools with high proportions of poor and nonAnglo students often have special difficulties in making adequate yearly progress; getting educators to focus on this problem was the reason for requiring these subgroup measures . Whether this type of accountability will improve student performance, however, remains an open question (Darling-Hammond 2007). Schools may expend more energy finding ways to reduce the number of students in a particular category or otherwise gaming the system than actually doing the hard work needed to improve struggling students’ level of achievement.  Students who do poorly on the state tests, a high proportion of whom are minorities, may drop out or be pushed out of school (Orfield and Kornhaber 2001). 

            Nevertheless, some scholars provide evidence that schools’ responses to accountability mandates do in fact help at least some minority students.  Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond (2005: 298-9) point out that the effects of NCLB cannot be separated from the effects of states’ own new accountability systems, but that together they “lead to larger achievement growth than would have occurred without accountability.  The analysis… supports the contested provisions of NCLB that impose sanctions on failing schools…. Hispanic students gain most from accountability while African Americans gain least.  [To address the issue of schools gaming the system,] we analyze the rate of placement into special education across states but find no evidence of reaction in this dimension.”  Carnoy and Loeb (2002) even find gains for all students, including Blacks and Hispanics, in states with strong accountability systems. They too find no harmful effects on retention or progress toward graduation (although some uncertainty about Hispanics remains on that score).

Reflecting the continued uncertainty about the effects of NCLB, some civil rights groups and liberal politicians strongly favor its continuance after some revision (Kahlenberg 2008; Jacob and Ludwig 2009), while others equally strongly support its abolition (Wiley and Wright 2004).  Sorting out those issues is not only a matter of race and ethnicity – among other things, students’ class, urbanicity, immigration status, or personal behaviors and preferences may matter just as much.  But in the arena of American schooling, racial and ethnic politics will inevitably play a role in trying to resolve disputes over what constitutes a good education and how we can provide it.  

Representation and School Governance: How Are Race and Ethnicity Associated with Power?

Not only outcomes but also processes of education have racial and ethnic inflections – along with other explanatory factors such as class, region, or individual actions and views.  In this arena also, researchers are much better at posing questions and defending their own chosen answers than at generating a set of explanations compelling to most analysts.  

Urban School Politics: The biggest problems in American schooling lie in large urban school districts. [5]   Fully 71 percent of the students in the 100 largest school districts are non-Anglo (compared with 44 percent in all school districts), and over half are poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-price lunches (compared with two-fifths in all districts). [6]  Thirteen percent of urban students have Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs), meaning that they are in some sort of special education; 14 percent are in English Language Learner programs.  Over 40 percent of eighth graders in large central city schools read at a level “below basic,” compared with a quarter in suburban and rural schools. The comparable figures for math are 50 and 29 percent. [7]   About 70 percent of first year students in these high schools graduate within four years, but the graduation rate in New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and elsewhere hovers around 50 percent or lower. This is a challenging set of students to teach, even under the best circumstances – which are seldom obtained in urban schools. Urban students’ lower test scores reflect the difficult circumstances of their schooling.

It should be no surprise by now to realize that scholars differ on the salience of race in determining policies for improving urban education.  If “race is a fundamental component of personal identity and perception,” then race-based coalitions seem essential for meaningful education reform in cities, and racial cleavages should be a central concern of reformers.  Conversely, if race is a more “vestigial and spurious variable,” such that the “significance of race can be expected to decline” as an explanation for schooling processes and outcomes, then reformers should emphasize economic development of the city and its residents, and should orient the inevitable political bargaining around material incentives (Henig et. al. 1999, 18).  Although education politics often remains racialized (Stone 2001; Henig and Rich 2004),  election of Black mayors and elevation of more Blacks to positions of civic power have not necessarily helped Black students (Orr 1999; Thompson 2005).  In fact,some White mayors or school superintendents have arguably been more effective in improving graduation rates or achievement levels.

In any case, the traditional Black-White binary is no longer sufficient for analyzing or producing efforts toward reform because emerging Latino, and in some cases Asian, electorates are making new demands on schools and their children are bringing new needs and talents into classrooms (Clarke et. al. 2006). Minority political actors who are neither White nor Black also make coalitional possibilities both more flexible and less stable (Clarke et. al. 2006; Sidney 2002; Vaca 2004).  In keeping with work on coalitions more broadly (Kaufmann 2004, Hochschild and Rogers 2000), rainbow coalitions in urban education policy are difficult to form or sustain under pressure (Rocha 2007).

School Boards:   Elections to the local school board provides an opportunity for coalitions or contestation over urban school reform.  Blacks and Latinos have attained increased descriptive representation over the past forty years. Not surprisingly, variation in school board representation is associated with variation in minority population across the states, so that Black representation is greatest in the South and Hispanic representation greatest in the West and Southwest (Marschall 2005). In addition, most scholars find that single-member electoral districts make Blacks and Latinos more likely to be elected to school boards (Leal, et. al. 2004), although a few have found at-large elections to be just as effective, at least for Latinos (Fraga and Elis 2009). 

However achieved, greater Black or Latino power in educational decision making leads to more non-Anglo district administrators (Fraga, et. al. 1986, Leal et. al. 2004, Fraga and Elis 2009). But evidence that descriptive representation on boards has any relationship to students’ educational outcomes remains elusive (Pitts 2007).

            Largely out of frustration with the apparent ineffectiveness of directly elected school boards (Howell 2005), some of the United States’ largest school districts such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland have returned to an older model of mayoral-appointed school boards (Wong et. al. 2007).  The theory is that mayors with direct control over the school district can do more to promote reform and can be held accountable for their success.  Either state legislative actions or citywide referenda have introduced this innovation, in each case with prominent and contentious racial and ethnic politics (Henig and Rich 2004). Opponents argue that handing over control of the school board to a mayor would deprive Black voters of hard won rights to deliberate and choose their own representatives (Chambers’ 2006); supporters argue that what would mostly be lost are patronage jobs and cronyism in contracting that have no legitimate place in efforts to improve student achievement. Empirical analysis lends support to both sides: mayoral control may lead to significant, positive gains in achievement, but it still makes little dent in the district’s achievement deficit (Wong et. al. 2007).  To understand why this deficit has become so large we must return to considerations of race, class, immigration, and history.

The Courts: Desegregation: As the issue of choosing school boards implies, improving schools is a matter of identifying not only the right strategies for reform but also the right location in the policy stream for issues to be decided.  Under some conditions the courts, as well as legislatures, mayors and boards, have the power to change education policy (Lucas and Paret 2005).  The federal courts’ most visible policy has been racial desegregation (Ogletree 2004; Clotfelter 2004; Bell 2005).  In the state courts, the comparable issue has been school finance (Bosworth 2001; on both see Hochschild and Skovronick 2003).

The Supreme Court has come almost full circle on school desegregation in roughly a century.  The 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson , which legitimated “equal but separate” accommodations, was implicitly overturned in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education .  A period of more or less energetic desegregation of schools followed, but was largely halted by the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community  Schools v. Seattle School District. That decision invalidated voluntary race-based student assignment policies in Seattle and Louisville, thus renewing questions about whether and how the Constitution allows the public school system to consider race in student assignment (Fischbach, et. al. 2008). 

Are students still impermissibly segregated?  Some argue that policymakers still need to “continuously acknowledge the vast, interlocking structural barriers to equal opportunity… [including] discrimination and government policy [and] segregated neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage” (Ogletree and Eaton 2008: 298).  In this view, the educational system continues to demonstrate racial and, increasingly, ethnic separation within classrooms, schools, districts, and states  (Orfield and Lee 2007).  Others, however, offer a more optimistic interpretation of the history and future of school desegregation:

Because desegregation was so strongly legitimated in the decades after the Brown

decision, court mandates were no longer a necessary condition for race conscious

district policies in the 1990s, when these mandates were being withdrawn. [S]chool patterns observed in 1970 represented a “regime of segregation” that was replaced by 1990 and 2000 by a very different “regime of desegregation” (Logan et al. 2008: 1614).

Logan and his co-authors find that the level of primary school segregation between districts rose from an average score of 49 in 1970 to 55 in 2000.  However, Black-White segregation within school districts declined more, from 79 in 1970 to 50 in 2000. Thus overall levels of school segregation have decreased considerably (Logan et al. 2008: 1627-1629).  Whether those declines in segregation survive Parents Involved , or whether they accelerate as more Blacks enter the middle class, more Latinos and Asian Americans move away from gateway cities, and/or more people identify themselves or their children as multiracial, remains to be seen.

The Courts: School Finance:  In the state courts, the interrelated nature of race, class, and schooling has played out in decades of school finance litigation (Bosworth 2001). Since the 1970s, all fifty states have implemented policies for school finance equalization or equity (Hoxby 2001).  While no state has adopted an overtly race-conscious funding strategy, the strong correlation between high-poverty and high-minority school populations means that equity policies have significantly affected the resources available to minority students.  

            Are more resources associated with greater student attainment and achievement, particularly of students at the lower end of the educational distribution?  As usual, scholars differ (Burtless 1996).  Some argue that “the small gains [in NAEP scores for 12 th graders since 1971] do not represent significant progress. They are certainly trivial compared to the magnitude of the increase in education spending over the same period” (Greene 2005: 11).  More precisely and usefully, “pure resource policies that do not change incentives are unlikely to be effective” (Hanushek 2006: 865).  Most researchers agree with that formulation, but many insist that resources have in fact changed incentives and opportunities sufficiently to warrant claims on even more, well-targeted, support for low-achieving students.  One set of experts, for example, calculate that even if districts became 15 percent more efficient, federal funding for poor students or districts “will have to more than double in urbanized states with relatively high student proficiency rates… and increase five to ten times in states with low proficiency rates… to meet a 90 percent proficiency target” as mandated by NCLB (Duncombe et al. 2008: 20). [8]

            As states collect more and more systematic data through their accountability systems, analysis of the use and impact of resources will move to the student and classroom level. Research will be better able to identify patterns of resource allocation across racial and ethnic groups (Rubenstein et. al. 2007). That will, in turn, lead back to questions of implementation and effectiveness.  Court-ordered reallocations of school finance leave districts with much autonomy to allocate resources.  How should those resources be allocated, for example in weighing programs for gifted and talented students against programs for students needing remedial aid? How should race or ethnicity be weighed against class, recency of immigration, and other factors in making these decisions?  How can incentives for teachers, administrators, and students be aligned with each other and with appropriate goals – and who should set the goals? How much should community deliberation weigh compared with expertise or political clout?  Once again, more conclusive research might help to connect institutional rules, educational practices, and schoolhouse outcomes.

Revisiting Race and Ethnicity

Most of the scholarship just reviewed rests on two assumptions that require revisiting. Researchers and policy actors usually assume that racial or ethnic groups have discrete boundaries and accepted definitions, and that there is a unitary “Black”, “Latino,” “Anglo,” or “Asian” interest to be ascertained and advanced. We challenge both assumptions.

            Building on the efforts of legal scholars, critical race theorists in the field of education question whether race is useful as a category of analysis or politics (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; see also Villenas 1999).  Racial classifications are fluid across individuals (Parker and Lynn 2002; Hochschild and Weaver 2009), and across institutions and time (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Williams 2006).  The race and ethnic classifications introduced in 2007 for collecting data to be reported to the federal Department of Education were so confusing that the Department published an aptly titled 90-page explanatory report, “Managing an Identity Crisis” (2008).  

Typically, either students choose a race (or their parents choose one for them) when they first enter a school, or teachers identify students based on skin color and appearance (Feldon 2006). States vary in whether students may identify with more than one race, and in the categories used for identification. States also vary in the number and array of immigrant students who do not understand themselves in terms of conventional American racial or ethnic labels.  These variations are more than a statistical annoyance, since NCLB’s emphasis on subgroup accountability makes categorization inevitable and high stakes.  Affirmative action policies and anti-discrimination policies also rest on an assumption that applicants and employees can be unproblematically sorted into groups -- and if that assumption is wrong, these policies need to be appropriately adjusted.

            Defining a “Black interest,” “Asian interest,” or “Latino interest” in education policy is even less straightforward.  For example, while LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) both oppose school voucher programs and other privatization efforts (Scott, et. al. 2008), multivariate analyses controlling for income and education show that many Black and Latino parents, especially in urban school districts, support them (Moe 2001). The older civil rights organizations may have different interests than the younger parents of children in failing schools.  Similarly, the category of “Asian American” must be disaggregated in order to recognize the differences in attainment and achievement across nationality groups.  Some nationalities -- Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians – are typically at the top of educational attainment measures, while others – Laotians, Hmong, Cambodian, and Vietnamese – are at the bottom (National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education  2008). Two-fifths of California’s voting Latinos supported Proposition 227, while others, including nonvoters, passionately denounced it as an attack on immigrants, minorities, and Spanish language and culture.  Middle class Blacks leave inner city schools almost as quickly as middle class Whites do, given the opportunity to enroll their children in a better school system.

            In short, scholars and policy makers alike need to remember that groups may not have a coherent interest in the arena of education policy and practice, beyond the powerful but anodyne desire for better schooling for their children.

Most questions raised in this chapter have no clear answers, and many important issues have barely been explored. Nevertheless, it is at least clear that race and ethnicity are central to understanding and evaluating education policy and practice in the United States.  On average, Anglos and Asians attain more years of schooling and achieve more in school than do Blacks and Latinos.  Non-Anglos are disproportionately enrolled in urban school districts, whose resources, political dynamics, and policy choices differ considerably from those of non-urban districts.  The ruling federal legislation requires schools to categorize and evaluate students by race and ethnicity, even while the government recognizes that labeling students is much more difficult than it initially appears to be.

As if this brief summary were not sufficiently daunting, a recent Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE) called for shifting “the research framework beyond a narrow focus on… ‘acting White,’… ‘stereotype threat,’ the ‘achievement gap… or quick-fix school reforms” to a more “transformative agenda” (King 2005: 349).  It is right; there is plenty of work to be done, both in schools and in examining schools.

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[1] National Center on Education Statistics. 2007 Digest of Education Statistics : Table 8 (for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics); Table 12 (for Asians and Indians). http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_008.asp ; http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_012.asp  

[2] Institute of Education Sciences. The Nation’s Report Card. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-reading-race.asp; http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-math-race.asp

[3] Institute of Education Sciences. The Nation’s Report Card. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub_reading_race2.asp; http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub_math_race2.asp

[4] http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-reading-pared.asp

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/sub-math-pared.asp

[5] Schools in poor rural communities and Indian reservations can also be very problematic, but they affect fewer students and are much less well studied, so we cannot consider them in this short chapter.

[6] Except where noted, data in this paragraph are from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/100_largest_0506/tables.asp

[7] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/section2/table.asp?tableID=257

[8] The authors recognize that “such increases are… unrealistic,” which leaves them with the conclusion that NCLB’s standards for students’ improvement are both “unfair’ and “ineffective” for “states and districts serving large populations of disadvantaged students” (Duncombe et al. 2008: 20).

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Bar Standards Board consults on revised proposals to promote equality, diversity and inclusion at the Bar

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has today launched a public consultation  on new rules to promote equality, diversity and inclusion at the Bar. Despite improvements in diversity in recent years, there remain significant challenges for the Bar in promoting access to the profession, in retaining qualified practitioners and in addressing bullying, discrimination and harassment. The regulator is therefore asking for a further step change in the profession’s approach to equality, diversity and inclusion.

The consultation document seeks views on a number of proposals. In particular, a change to Core Duty 8 would place a positive obligation on barristers to “act in a way that advances equality, diversity, and inclusion” when providing legal services, The BSB also proposes to take a more outcomes focused approach to these equality rules, but to retain prescriptive requirements where necessary for transparency and accountability. These proposals have been informed by engagement activities with the profession, the Inns, the BSB Race Equality, Disability, and Religion and Belief Task Forces , as well as through research and data on the current inequalities within the profession and the extent to which the current rules have had an impact on tackling inequalities.

In addition to the wider public consultation on these proposed changes, the BSB plans to engage separately with those stakeholders who are likely to be impacted by these proposals through a series of targeted engagement sessions, including, for example the Inns of Court and Circuits across England and Wales, the specialist Bar Associations, and equalities groups who represent those who face barriers at the Bar. The public consultation will be open until 5PM on Friday 29 November and you can access the full consultation document here and you can respond to the consultation questions here .

Commenting on the launch of the consultation, BSB Director General Mark Neale said:

“We want to ensure that the Bar is as inclusive as possible and that it is truly representative of the society it serves. Regulation alone cannot achieve that, but regulation can help by supporting barristers to challenge practices which work against diversity and inclusion.  We hope that you will take this opportunity to share your views with us, so we can ensure our proposals are fully informed by your experience.”

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