@techreport{NBERw14213,
 title = "Trends in the Black-White Achievement Gap:Clarifying the Meaning of Within- and Between-School Achievement Gaps",
 author = "Lindsay C. Page and Richard J. Murnane and John B. Willett",
 institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research",
 type = "Working Paper",
 series = "Working Paper Series",
 number = "14213",
 year = "2008",
 month = "August",
 URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w14213",
 abstract = {We decompose black-white achievement gap trends between 1971 and 2004 into trends in within- and between-school differences. We show that the previous finding that narrowing within-school inequality explains most of the decline in the black-white achievement gap between 1971 and 1988 is sensitive to methodology. Employing a more detailed partition of achievement differences, we estimate that 40 percent of the narrowing of the gap through the 1970s and 1980s is attributable to the narrowing of within-school differences between black and white students.  Further, the consequences for achievement of attending a high minority school became increasingly deleterious between 1971 and 1999.},
}