Racial Gap in Testing Sees Shift by Region
WASHINGTON — Historically, the achievement gap between America’s black and white students was widest in Southern states, where the legacies of slavery and segregation were reflected in extremely low math and reading scores among poor African-American children.
But black students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released Tuesday by the Department of Education.
As a result, the nation’s widest black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin, according to the federal data.
In interviews, top education officials in several states expressed disappointment at the magnitude of those gaps.
“This won’t be a total surprise,” said Roger D. Breed, Nebraska’s education commissioner, “but it’ll be a shock to Nebraskans that the gap here is as big as it is.”
Officials of the National Center for Education Statistics, which produced the report, told reporters in a conference call that the report offered no hypotheses to explain the evolution in black-white achievement, only statistical comparisons that could spur further research.
Experts said it was impossible to gauge from the report whether the federal No Child Left Behind Law, one of the main goals of which was to reduce the achievement gap, had had an impact.
The study plotted the evolution of average scores of black and white students on the series of federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress that were administered every two to four years in both math and reading from 1992 to 2007. Nationwide, the average math score in 1992 for white fourth graders was 227 on a 500-point scale, compared with an average score of 192 for black fourth graders that year, resulting in a black-white gap of 35 points.
By 2007, the most recent year included in the new study, the average math scores for white fourth graders had risen to 248, but the average scores for black students had risen to 222, thus narrowing the black-white gap to 26 points, about the equivalent of two and a half years of schooling.
By 2007, the state with the widest black-white gap in the nation on the fourth-grade math test (not counting the District of Columbia) was not in the deep South, but in the Midwest — Wisconsin. White students there scored 250, slightly above the national average, but blacks scored 212, producing a 38-point achievement gap. That average score for black students in Wisconsin was lower than for blacks in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or any other Southern state, and 10 points below the national average for black students, the study indicated.
Wisconsin was the only state in which the black-white achievement gap in 2007 was larger than the national average in the tests for fourth and eighth grades in both math and reading, according to the study.
Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group in Washington that works to close achievement gaps, said principals in Wisconsin were “stunned” when shown the results.
“Black kids in Wisconsin do worse than in all these Southern states,” and the reason, Ms. Haycock said, was that Wisconsin educators “haven’t been focusing on doing what’s necessary to close these gaps.”
Patrick Gasper, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Education, said, “We know that we have a pronounced achievement gap and that we have to continue focusing our efforts on eliminating it.”
The public schools in Milwaukee, the city with Wisconsin’s largest African-American population, have missed federal achievement targets for five years straight, Mr. Gasper said. Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s new education superintendent, delivered his inaugural speech on July 6 in Milwaukee instead of the state capital, Madison, to emphasize the urgency of new approaches, Mr. Gasper said.
In Nebraska, black student achievement is lower than anywhere in the old South, the federal report indicates. In eighth grade math, for instance, the average score among Nebraska’s black students in 2007 was 240 on a 500-point scale, compared with the national average for blacks of 259, according to the federal data. The average score for black eighth graders was 246 in Alabama, 251 in Mississippi, 258 in Louisiana, and 261 in Georgia.
The average score for white eighth graders in Nebraska in math was 291, almost exactly the national average, resulting in a black-white gap there of 51 points, far larger than in any other state, according to the report.
Mr. Breed said he and other Nebraska officials had gotten word about the findings several days ago.
“We’d kind of had a heads-up that it would not be good news for Nebraska,” he said. “It’s not great to be in the group that has a large gap, but it is what it is — and it’s not acceptable.”
Connecticut is another Northern state where achievement gaps are larger than in states across the South, the federal study shows. That is partly because white students in Connecticut score above the national average, but also because blacks there score lower, on average, than blacks elsewhere.
Warren T. Smith Sr., vice president of the Washington State Board of Education, expressed skepticism about regional variations in the achievement gap.
“I’ve been an African-American male for 60 years, and lived in nine different states, North, South, East and West,” Mr. Smith said. “Certain things are consistent: inequitable distribution of teachers, inequitable funding of schools, institutional racism. That is consistent across the board, so if you expect to find a different gap in North or South, you’re not going to find that.”
