TY - JOUR AU - Clotfelter, Charles T AU - Ladd, Helen F AU - Vigdor, Jacob L TI - The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8 JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12207 PY - 2006 Y2 - May 2006 DO - 10.3386/w12207 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12207 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12207.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Charles T. Clotfelter Sanford School of Public Policy Sanford 236 201 Science Drive Box 90245 Duke University Durham, NC 27708 Tel: 919/613-7361 E-Mail: charles.clotfelter@duke.edu Helen Ladd Sanford School of Public Policy Box 90245 Duke University Durham, NC 27708 Tel: 919-613-7352 Fax: 919-681-8288 E-Mail: hladd@duke.edu Jacob L. Vigdor Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance University of Washington Box 353055 Seattle, WA 98195 Tel: 206/616-4436 Fax: 206/543-1096 E-Mail: jvigdor@uw.edu AB - Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on successive cohorts of students who stay in the state's public schools for all six years, and study both differences in means and in quantiles. Our results on achievement gaps between black and white students are consistent with those from other longitudinal studies: the gaps are sizable, are robust to controls for measures of socioeconomic status, and show no monotonic trend between 3rd and 8th grade. In contrast, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress through these grades. Looking beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps in math between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while racial gaps between high-performing students have widened for black and American Indian students. ER -