The impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black achievement
Daniel Aaronson and
Bhashkar Mazumder
No WP-09-26, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Abstract:
The Black-White gap in completed schooling among Southern born men narrowed sharply between the World Wars after being stagnant from 1880 to 1910. We examine a large scale school construction project, the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative, which was designed to dramatically improve the educational opportunities for Southern rural Blacks. From 1914 to 1931, nearly 5,000 school buildings were constructed, serving approximately 36 percent of the Black rural school-aged Southern population. We use historical Census data and World War II enlistment records to analyze the effects of the program on school attendance, literacy, high school completion, years of schooling, earnings, hourly wages, and migration. We find that the Rosenwald program accounts for at least 30 percent of the sizable educational gains of Blacks during the 1910s and 1920s. We also use data from the Army General Classification Test (AGCT), a precursor to the AFQT, and find that access to Rosenwald schools increased average Black scores by about 0.25 standard deviations adding to the existing literature showing that interventions can reduce the racial gap in cognitive skill. In the longer run, exposure to the schools raised the wages of blacks that remained in the South relative to Southern whites by about 35 percent. For blacks the private rate of return to a year of additional schooling induced by Rosenwald was about 18 percent. Moreover, Rosenwald significantly increased Northern migration of young adult Blacks, with no corresponding impact on schoolage Blacks or young adult Whites, likely fueling further income gains. Across all outcomes, the improvements were highest in counties with the lowest levels of Black school attendance suggesting that schooling treatments can have a very large impact among those at the bottom of the skill distribution.
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publicati ... s/2009/wp2009_26.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement (2011) 
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:fip:fedhwp:wp-09-26
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().