Racial/ethnic achievement inequality: Separating school and non-school effects through seasonal comparisons

The stratification and education literatures have demonstrated a large and persistent achievement test score gap between black and white students. The gap is evident when students enter kindergarten and grows larger before students finish high school. One of the primary questions in the literature has been the role of schooling in the test score gap. However, the difficulty of empirically isolating the effect of schooling from that of family background is particularly challenging and has limited our confidence in findings from existing research. I utilize seasonal comparisons to better separate school effects from forces acting on students outside of school. By comparing the learning students experience during the summer to that which occurs during the school year, I more effectively examine the effect of schooling on the black-white test score gap. Extending previous seasonal comparisons research, I draw on the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and also examine the relative roles of school and non-school environments on the learning rates of Hispanic and Asian students in kindergarten and first grade. Results indicate that the black-white test score gap in both reading and math grows between the beginning of kindergarten and the end of first grade, and, contradictory to previous findings, the gap only grows during the school year yet remains constant over the summer break. Unlike black students, Hispanic students do not learn slower than white students during the school year. The achievement gap in reading between Hispanic and white students does not grow between the beginning of kindergarten and the end of first grade, and the math gap only grows over the summer break from schooling. Asian students begin kindergarten with higher achievement than white students, but by the end of first grade have fallen behind whites in both reading and math. The relative losses of Asian students to white students occur during the school year while Asian children possibly gain ground over the summer break. Other results implicate differences between schools in the black-white gap but not in the disadvantage Asian students experience at school.