Faculty Honored for Research on Minority Student Test Score Gaps

By Robert Polner

In an era of “No Child Left Behind,” one trend stood out for a trio of NYU scholars – persistent race gaps in students’ test scores. They wondered how much individual schools can do to reduce the achievement disparities, or how they can do better by their non-white students. Professors Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz, and Ingrid Gould Ellen distilled their evidence in a recently published article in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, entitled “Disentangling the Racial Test Score Gap: Proving the Evidence in a Large Urban School District.” And on Feb. 7 the article won the first annual L. Douglas Wilder Award for Scholarship in Social Equity and Public Policy.

      The Standing Panel on Social Equity of the Washington, D.C.-based National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), a 40-year-old organization of graduate schools, honored the article at the Social Equity Leadership Conference at Arizona State University. The judges termed the work a substantial contribution to social equity, selecting it from a field of 15 manuscripts.

      In their study, the professors measured the size and distribution of the racial and ethnic gaps in performance in New York City’s elementary and middle schools. The data allowed them to explore, more thoroughly than previous researchers, the role of many factors at the school and classroom level in shaping racial disparities. They were able to explain variations within and between schools, using a complete census of students.

      The researchers complemented their analyses of the black/white test score gaps— standard in the research literature— with a wider focus that also compared whites with Hispanics and Asians. Stiefel, Schwartz, and Ellen teach at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, while Schwartz, who also teaches at Steinhardt, directs the Institute for Education and Social Policy, a partnership of Wagner and Steinhardt.

      In the end, they found that inequities in classroom resources within schools play little role in producing the test score gaps. Differences in student characteristics, such as poverty, appeared to play some role, as did school-wide characteristics, suggesting that school size matters and small schools may be helpful. “In addition, the trade-off between the size and experience of the teaching staff in urban schools may carry unintended consequences for within-school race gaps,” they added.

      The research does not point to a simple solution to the race test score gaps and does not indicate that schools can do the job alone.

       “More research and experimentation is clearly needed to understand how and why scores on standardized tests and improvements in those scores continue to differ significantly for students of different races in the same schools and even the same classrooms,” they write. “Perhaps, as some have suggested, teachers have systemically different expectations about minority and white students and treat them differently in turn. Or perhaps meaningful reductions ultimately call for strategies that are beyond the scope of schools and school policies.”