2016 - Exposure to School and Classroom Racial Segregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg High Schools and Students’ College Achievement

Attribution: Giersch, Jason, Bottia, Martha C., Mickelson, Roslyn A., & Stearns, Elizabeth
Researchers: Elizabeth StearnsJason GierschMartha C. BottiaRoslyn A. Mickelson
University Affiliation: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Email: jgiersch@uncc.edu
Research Question:
1) Do the effects of school racial segregation extend into early college outcomes among students graduating from CMS schools and entering the UNC system? 2) Is minority representation in the upper-track classes related to students' first year college achievement? 3) Do the levels of within-school segregation due to tracking exacerbate the negative effects of attending a segregated black high school?
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Educational Policy Analysis Archives
Journal Entry: Vol. 24 No. 32 Pp. 1-28
Year: 2016
Findings:
  1. Both Black and White students do better in college if they have not attended Black segregated high schools.
  2. College GPA’s of black freshman are inversely related to the percentage of black students in their high schools’ advanced-level classes; that is, the more black students in their high schools’ honors classes, the lower their freshman GPA’s in college.
  3. Black students who are concentrated in majority-Black schools perform worse with regard to the grades they earn in the first year of college compared to Black students attending diverse or majority-white schools.
  4. Black students are concentrated in advanced classes as well, the benefit in achievement that is typically associated with upper-track learning opportunities weakens.
  5. With only one exception, segregated black high schools had students with the lowest EOG scores.
  6. Any benefits of seeing Black students in advanced classes are outweighed by the negative consequences that accompany attending a racially isolated class or a racially isolated school.
  7. Segregation among schools and among classes within schools compromises college achievement for students of color while offering no significant benefits to white students’ college achievement.
  8. The harm done by concentrating racial minorities in schools cannot be undone by recruiting those racially-isolated students into advanced-level classes. At segregated-black high schools, the greater the gap between the percentage black in the school and the percentage black in advanced track classrooms, the better the students from those high schools do in their freshman year of college.
  9. Black students who are concentrated in majority-black schools perform worse with regard to the grades they earn in the first year of college compared to black students attending diverse or majority-white schools. And when those black students are concentrated in advanced classes as well, the benefit in achievement that is typically associated with upper-track learning opportunities weakens.
Scholarship Types: Journal Article Reporting Empirical ResearchKeywords: Academic AchievementCollegeNorth CarolinaRaceRacial CompositionSecond-generation SegregationSegregationTrackingRegions: North CarolinaMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary Survey DataAnalysis Methods: Descriptive StatisticsMultilevel Models Sampling Frame:North Carolina Students
Sampling Types: PopulationAnalysis Units: SchoolStudentData Types: Quantitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:
  • Roots of STEM Success. This dataset contains the population of 2004 North Carolina high school seniors who matriculated into one of the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina University system. This dataset followed students starting in middle school. The 1,440 students in the sample all graduated from 14 of the 21 CMS high schools.
  • The sole college-level variable in the models is the competitiveness of the campus attended and is a three-category measure based on the average SAT scores and grade point averages (GPAs) of the students in our dataset who attended each of the campuses.
  • The dependent variable in the analyses is student GPA in the first year of college. This was calculated by dividing the total number of quality points by the total number of credit hours attempted in the first year of college.
  • The main independent variables are school-level measures. High school racial segregation, classifies schools into three categories, including segregated Black schools, diverse schools, and segregated white schools. Classroom racial segregation is the second school level variable and it measures the proportion of students in advanced math and science classes (including honors, AP, or IB) at the school who are Black. The third school-level variable is the difference between the proportion ofstudents in the school who are black and the proportion of students in the advanced math and science classes who are black. The fourth school level variable is the proportion of students in the high school enrolled in advanced classes.
  • Several independent variables are also measured at the student level, such as gender, race (a dummy variable indicating Black versus non-Black), first-generation college student, free or reduced lunch, Pell Grant recipient (a need-based scholarship), and previous academic achievement (a total of the student’s middle school standardized test scores). An additional student-level independent variable is academic track, which is measured by the proportion of state-assessed courses the student took at the honors, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate level.
  • The authors also included the variable Total EOG, which refers to the average total score in the middle school reading and math tests of students entering each high school who went on to attend one of the UNC system schools. The last variable reflects the average college freshman GPA earned by the students from each high school who went on to a UNC system college or university.
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:Factors Related to STEM Readiness
Archives: K-16 STEM Abstracts