The Black-White Education-Scaled Test-Score Gap in Grades K-7

Timothy Bond and Kevin Lang

No 19243, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We address the ordinality of test scores by rescaling them by the average eventual educational attainment of students with a given test score in a given grade. We show that measurement error in test scores causes this approach to underestimate the black-white test score gap and use an instrumental variables procedure to adjust the gap. While the unadjusted gap grows rapidly in the early school years, particularly in reading, after correction for measurement error, the education-scaled gap is large, exceeds the actual black-white education gap and is roughly constant. Strikingly, the gap in all grades is largely explained by a small number of measures of socioeconomic background. We discuss the interpretation of scales tied to adult outcomes.

JEL-codes: C18 I24 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Timothy N. Bond & Kevin Lang, 2018. "The Black–White Education Scaled Test-Score Gap in Grades K-7," Journal of Human Resources, vol 53(4), pages 891-917.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19243.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Black–White Education Scaled Test-Score Gap in Grades K-7 (2018)
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:19243

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19243

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 ().