The Black-White-Other Test Score Gap: Academic Achievement Among Mixed Race Adolescents

  • The average achievement of individual biracial groups falls somewhere between the means levels of their component monoracial groups’ achievement, and that racial contexts, rather than ethnic identity explain the achievement of multi-racial youth.
  • The school achievement of multi-racial youth is most clearly related to the racial composition of the contexts they live in such as peer group, family, neighborhood, and school.
  • The racial/ethnic aspects of contexts are important factors in achievement among adolescents, particularly for biracial youth.
  • The school racial context variables (percent white in school, and school deviance) were significant predictors of biracial achievement, as were the peer crowd context variables of peer values and minority peer crowd membership.
  • The neighborhood is also important: biracial youth in higher SES neighborhoods have significantly higher achievement.
  • The racial composition of the neighborhood does not have an effect on achievement in any race group.
  • The hierarchy of achievement by race among multi-racial groups is comparable to one for monoracial groups: part-Black and part-Latino youth fare poorly compared to part-White and part-Asian youth.
  • Multi-racial students who self-identify as Black or Latino achieve less than those who identify as White or Asian.
  • Racial identity is not as strong a factor in explaining the achievement of multi-racial or mono-racial students. Only among Latino and White students is ethnic identity a strong factor and it has a positive relation to achievement.
  • Biracial youth respond to the dynamic of the contexts in which they live, particularly their neighborhoods and peer groups.
  • Subgroup analyses show that only Black-Whites and Black-Asians are significantly different from their respective monoracial component group.