TY  - JOUR
AU  - Page, Lindsay C
AU  - Murnane, Richard J
AU  - Willett, John B
TI  - Trends in the Black-White Achievement Gap:Clarifying the Meaning of Within- and Between-School Achievement Gaps
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14213
PY  - 2008
Y2  - August 2008
DO  - 10.3386/w14213
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14213
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14213.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Lindsay C. Page
School of Education
University of Pittsburgh
230 South Bouquet Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Tel: 617/216-6369
E-Mail: lpage@pitt.edu

Richard Murnane
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University
6 Appian Way - Gutman 469
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-4820
Fax: 617/496-3095
E-Mail: richard_murnane@harvard.edu

John Willett
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University
6 Appian Way - Gutman 412
Cambridge, MA 02138
E-Mail: John_Willett@harvard.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -