Compositional Effects, Segregation and Test Scores: Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress

  1. Controlling for ethnicity, free lunch students scored about 21 points lower than full-price lunch students.
  2. Controlling for subsidized lunch status, black students scored on average about 27 points lower than white students; Hispanic students scored about 19 points lower, American Indian students about 16 points lower, and Asian students about 6 points higher.
  3. Controlling for peer economic level, the percentages of black and Hispanic students in a school had a positive relationship with grade 8 adjusted school mean test scores, while the percentage of Asian/ Pacific Islander students had a decidedly negative relationship with those scores. Only the percentage of American Indian/ Alaskan Native students failed to demonstrate a significant composition effect.
  4. With all other factors held constant, a nationally average grade 8 student in a 100% subsidized-lunch had an expected math score 24.9 points lower than the same student in a 100% full-price lunch school.
  5. Projection of the data suggests that if the nation’s schools were completely desegregated economically (but not at all ethnically), the test-score gap between free lunch students and students paying full price for lunch would decline by 25 %.
  6. Ethnic compositional effects for black, Asian/Pacific Islander (API), and Hispanic students were reversed from their within-school effects, with positive effects for students in schools with larger proportions of Black and Hispanic students and a strong negative effect for students in schools with larger proportions of Asian/Pacific Islander students.