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2000 - School Desegregation, Academic Attainment and Earnings

Attribution: Rivkin, Steven
Researchers: Steven Rivkin
University Affiliation: Amherst College
Email: sgrivkin@amherst.edu
Research Question:
Whether desegregation programs have raised lifetime earnings for blacks, through interracial contact or improvements in school quality.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: The Journal of Human Resources
Journal Entry: Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 333-346
Year: 2000
Findings:
  • Average test score gain of non-Blacks provides a measure of school quality, and Blacks perform better in higher quality schools.
  • School quality is a much more important determinant of future labor market success than school racial composition.
  • Raising school quality is likely to be much more efficient than the reallocation of students among schools as a means to improve academic and labor market outcomes for Blacks.
  • Results show that the academic acheivement and earnings of Blacks are strongly related to the cognitive achievement gains of their non-Black schoolmates.
  • Little evidence of a systematic relationship between the three outcomes and school racial composition.
Keywords: Academic AchievementContact TheoryDesegregationEarningsLong Term OutcomesSchool QualityRegions: NationalMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary Survey DataAnalysis Methods: Regression Sampling Frame:Students from large public school systems
Sampling Types: RandomAnalysis Units: IndividualData Types: Quantitative-Panel Data
Data Description:
  • Men and women taken from the sophomore cohort of the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Survey (HSB). First in 1980 then follow up survey, 3rd in 1991.
  • Administrative data from school on school racial composition and school resources.
  • Information on school desegregation efforts taken from Welch and Light (1987).
  • Students in the sample are around 28 years old at the time earnings are measured.
  • Sample sizes are 393 in the analysis of twelfth-grade achievement; 164 in the analysis of years of schooling attained; and 121 in the analysis of earnings.
  • DV: Twelfth grade achievement, years of schooling, and the log of the monthly earnings.
  • IV: Pupil/teacher ratio, school characteristics, South, parental education, family income, gender and school percentage Hispanic.
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts
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