Quantitative Research and Inequality Narratives: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Quantitative studies of educational inequity, or inequality, often perpetuate troubling, deficit-based ideologies that have a disproportionate impact on discourse around racism in public education. In this review, we systematically analyze 52 quantitative studies of racial inequity or inequality from high-reach journals to understand how methodological, theoretical, and rhetorical decisions form narratives that shape a collective understanding of racism and racial inequity in education. We find that the prevalent use of inequality narratives, coupled with methodological tools like the use of decontextualized race and ethnicity variables, the consistent use of whiteness as a reference category, and the use of “color-evasive” theoretical frameworks that lack attention to structural forms that sustain racism, work together to undergird white centering narratives within education policy research. We call for an improvement in the measurement of structural sources of inequity to aid researchers in identifying system-level motivations for racial achievement disparities.