Abstract:
Large economic and racial/ethnic disparities in test scores, graduation rates, and college-going and -completion rates remain a stubborn fact in most countries and communities. These disparities reflect inequality in the educational opportunities available from birth through secondary school to children of different racial and economic backgrounds, including inequalities in their family resources, neighborhoods, pre-schools, and their elementary and secondary schools. In this talk, He will use population data from the US, including the results of 500 million standardized tests administered from 2009-2023, to describe the patterns of educational opportunity across 13,000 US school districts. I will also use data from international assessments to compare the patterns of inequality in the US to those in other developed countries. I will describe the main contributors to educational inequality—preschool opportunities, residential and school segregation, and income inequality—and will sketch out a general framework for thinking about the causes of, and potential remedies for, educational inequality.