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

  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.