- Several school and non-school disadvantages accompany lower social class positions.
- Black students experience many of these disadvantages more often than do White students, even net of class.
- Non-school factors account for all of the class disparities in school-year learning but fail to fully explain why Black students lose ground to White students.
- Classroom and school factors alone explain 43 percent of the initial Black/White gap in both reading and math gains.
- Non-school factors primarily fuel class inequality in gains, while school factors primarily fuel black/white inequalities in gains.
- School appears to exacerbate Black/White disparities in learning even as they slow the growth of social class gaps (compared with what occurs over the summer).
- Because school factors appear to generate the Black/White gap more so than non-school influences, increased exposure to school speeds up the pace at which black children fall behind their white peers.
- Racial segregation seems to be the leading culprit that explains what is it about schools that widens the Black/White gap.
- When it comes to both housing and schools, race trumps class as the central axis upon which Blacks and Whites in the US are segregated.