Dynamics of the black–white gap in academic achievement

Abstract

The black–white test score gap remains a measurable phenomenon in the United States. Up to this point the literature has primarily focused on the black–white achievement gap without taking into account the underlying mobility patterns of individual students as they progress from one grade to the next. However, the degree to which policy makers and educators should be concerned about the black–white test score gap should be tied to how mobile the two groups of students are through the distribution of test scores from one grade to the next. In this paper I apply two nonparametric estimators of distributional mobility to data on test scores and track black–white differences in mobility across the entire distribution of achievement. When compared to whites, blacks tend to be less upwardly mobile and more downwardly mobile for both math and reading. This pattern is particularly prominent for reading in the very early years of schooling.