Closing the Achievement Gaps: What Doesn't Meet the Eye

What Doesn't Meet the Eye

Achievement Gaps in MSAN Districts

There are three achievement indicators in the MSAN Ed-Excel data, and all show racial gaps.¹⁰ First, the survey asks, "What was your grade-point average last term?"¹¹ The respondent chooses one option from among A, A-, B+, and so on, down to D+, D, and D-/F. Although self-reports can sometimes be misleading, comparisons of survey findings with official records for race-by-gender groups indicate only moderate inflation in the self-reports and the same basic rank ordering of grade-point average among groups.¹² A second indicator of achievement is the student's response to the following question: "What percentage of the time do you completely understand the teacher's lesson?" The forced-choice question offers five possible responses, ranging from "10% or less" to "90% or more." The third achievement variable is the student's answer to "How much of the material that you read for school do you understand very well?" The response options were "very little or none," "some," "about half," "a lot," and "all or nearly all of it."

Table 1 shows the answers for all three questions and each of five race/ethnic groups. In Panel A of Table 1, fully half of whites and Asians report grade-point averages of A or A-, while the same is true for only 15 percent of blacks and 21 percent of Hispanics. Conversely, 44 percent of blacks and 34 percent of Hispanics report grade-point averages of C+ or below while only 14 percent of whites and 15 percent of Asians do. In Panel B of Table 1, slightly more than 50 percent of blacks and Hispanics responded "about half or less" concerning how much (or how little) of school-related readings they "understand very well."¹³ The corresponding number for whites is 29 percent. For Asians and mixed-race students, the corresponding numbers are 42 percent and 43 percent, respectively. Panel C of Table 1 shows data for the percentage of the time that students "completely understand" the teacher's lesson. The distribution of answers is similar to Panel B. Almost half of black and Hispanic students indicate that they understand the lesson about half the time or less. The same is true for between one-quarter and one-third of whites and Asians.

Table 1

Racial Distributions for Three Achievement Gap Indicators

Numbers are percentages in each response category for each racial or ethnic group.

Panel A: What was your grade-point average last term?

	Black	White	Hispanic	Asian	Mixed Race
D+ or below	9	2	8	3	8
C- to C+	35	12	26	12	22
B- to B+	40	36	45	35	38
A- to A	15	50	21	50	32
Column Total	100	100	100	100	100

Panel B:* How much of the material that you read for school do you understand very well?

	Black	White	Hispanic	Asian	Mixed Race
About half or less	55	29	56	42	41
A lot	30	35	30	31	30
Almost all	15	35	14	27	29
Column Total	100	100	100	100	100

Panel C: What percentage of the time do you completely understand the teacher's lesson?

	Black	White	Hispanic	Asian	Mixed Race
About half the time or less	48	28	46	31	38
65% to 89%	36	44	36	38	38
90% or more	16	29	18	30	24
Column Total	100	100	100	100	100

* Two districts did not use the version of the questionnaire that included the question covered by Panel B, hence the number of respondents is smaller than in the other two panels. The number of respondents is smaller in Panel A than in Panel C because while 8 percent of students did not respond to the grade-point average (GPA) question, only 2 percent did not respond to the question in Panel C. By race, percentages not responding to the GPA question were 9.0% for blacks, 5.4% for whites, 10.3% for Hispanics, 6.4% for Asians, and 6.8% for mixed-race students. If responses were imputed for missing data, the distributions would change only slightly.

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