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  -