The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8

Charles Clotfelter (), Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor

No 12207, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on successive cohorts of students who stay in the state's public schools for all six years, and study both differences in means and in quantiles. Our results on achievement gaps between black and white students are consistent with those from other longitudinal studies: the gaps are sizable, are robust to controls for measures of socioeconomic status, and show no monotonic trend between 3rd and 8th grade. In contrast, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress through these grades. Looking beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps in math between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while racial gaps between high-performing students have widened for black and American Indian students.

JEL-codes: I21 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-sea and nep-ure
Note: ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Charles T Clotfelter & Helen F Ladd & Jacob L Vigdor, 2009. "The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 91(2), pages 398-419, October.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12207.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12207

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12207

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().