Research Panel 1: Resource Issues
"Would Smaller Classes Help Close the Black-White Achievement Gap?"
Alan Krueger and Diane Whitmore, Princeton University

This paper examines the effect of reducing class-size on student achievement, with particular attention to differential effects by race. A review of the literature suggests that low-income and black students tend to benefit more from attending a smaller class than white students. We extend the literature by providing new results from a long-term follow-up of students who participated in Tennessee's Project STAR. Project STAR was an experiment that randomly assigned 11,600 elementary school students and their teachers to a small class (target of 13-17 students), regular-size class (22-25 students) or regular-size class with a teacher-aide. The experiment began with the wave of students who entered kindergarten in 1985, and lasted for four years. After third grade, all students returned to regular-size classes. We analyze the effect of past attendance in a small class on standardized test scores through the eighth grade, on whether students took the ACT or SAT college entrance exam, on performance on the ACT or SAT exam, on criminal conviction rates, and on teen birth rates. The results indicate that, while students are in small classes, average test scores increase by 7-10 percentile points for black students and by 3-4 percentile points for white students. After all students are returned to regular-size classes in 4th grade, the gains from having attended a small class fall to about 5 points for black students and 1.5 points for white students, and persist at around that level. If all students were in a small class in grades K-3, we estimate that the black-white test-score gap would fall by 38 percent in grades K-3, and by 15 percent thereafter. Combining estimates of the effect of small classes on 3rd grade test scores from the STAR experiment with national trends in the pupil-teacher ratio for black and white students since 1971, we find that historical movements in the pupil-teacher ratio can account for almost all of the narrowing of the black-white test score gap as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam.

We also find that having attended a small class compared to regular-size class raises the likelihood that black students take the ACT or SAT college entrance exam from 31.8 to 41.3 percent, and raises the likelihood that white students take one of the exams from 44.7 to 46.4 percent. As a consequence, if all students were assigned to a small class, the black-white gap in taking a college entrance exam would fall by an estimated 60 percent. In addition, we find that past attendance in a small class raises the average score on the ACT or SAT exam by 0.15-0.20 standard deviation for black students, and by 0.04 standard deviation for white students.

Lastly, we find evidence that criminal conviction rates are 20 percent lower for black males who were assigned to a small class than for black males assigned to a regular-size class, and maximum sentence rates were 25 percent lower, although both of these effects are not statistically significant. The teen birth rate was one third less for white females who were assigned to a small class compared to those assigned to a regular-size class, and the fatherhood rate was 40 percent lower for black teenage males assigned to a small class than for those assigned to a regular-size class. The effect of class size on teenage births for other groups was not statistically significant.

"The Role of Federal Resources in Closing the Achievement Gaps of Minority and Disadvantaged Students"
David Grissmer and Ann Flanagan, RAND

The nation's minority students live primarily in central cities or in the south-east and south-west. These areas are also the poorest making spending per-pupil usually below the national average. Average achievement scores are lowest in the central cities, and average or below in the southeast and southwest. The highest scoring areas are the suburban and rural areas of the mid-west and north-east where average scores are far above the national average. Students in these areas—about one-third of the nation's students—score at internationally competitive levels. For the nation as a whole to be among the top performing countries in the world, it will require lifting the scores of students in central cities and the suburban and rural areas of the south and south-west. We argue that the federal government has an important role to play in raising scores in these areas- the poorest areas of the nation. Any expansion of the limited federal role in education should occur only where there is a clear comparative advantage. We argue that there are three areas where that advantage exists: research and development (R&D), addressing inter-state inequality of funding and federal initiatives to improve the quality and distribution of teachers. We argue that addressing these issues would narrow the achievement gap between minority and white students.

Research Panel 2: Program Issues
"Reducing the Gap: Success for All and the Achievement of African-American Students"
Robert Slavin, Johns Hopkins University

The persistent achievement gap between African-American students and their White peers is perhaps the most important problem in American education. The gap in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) diminished in the 1970s, but since the early 1980s it has remained virtually unchanged.

Evidence from several directions is beginning to suggest that African-American students may benefit more than other students from improvement in educational quality. For example, class size effects and effects of attendance at high-quality private schools have been greatest for African-American children.

This paper focuses on the effects of Success for All, a widely used comprehensive reform model for elementary schools, on the achievement of African American children, and the gap in performance between these children and White children. Studies have focused on two means by which Success for All (SFA) might reduce the gap. One set of analyses focuses on use of SFA in schools serving many African-American students, where main effects in these schools have the effect of reducing the gap with respect to White students in non-SFA schools. The second set of analyses addresses the question of interaction effects, differential impacts of SFA on students in integrated schools. Evidence for effects of both types is presented. In many studies in many locations, Success for All has been found to significantly reduce pre-existing minority-majority gaps in reading performance. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

"Track Assignment and the Black-White Test Score Gap: Divergent Evidence from Analyses of 1980 and 1990 Sophomores"
Samuel Lucas, University of California, Berkeley

This paper reassesses Gamoran and Mare's (1989) claim that the net black-white achievement gap is smaller under current tracking systems than it would be in the absence of tracking, and the Lucas and Gamoran (1991) finding that this result is sensitive to the dimension of tracking measured. A weakness of the 1989 study was its reliance on self-reported indicators of students' track locations. Lucas and Gamoran (1991) used a tracking indicator created from coursework indicated in students' high school transcripts (Lucas, 1990). We use both a self-report and the coursework indicator to study the experience of 1990 high school sophomores, and directly compare our findings to the previous studies. We find substantial change between 1980 and 1990, leading to higher incidences of high track course-taking, a racial convergence in the relation between the measures of tracking, and a decline to zero in the association between race and social-psychological track location. Further, we find no evidence of track effects on achievement, even as we find no direct effects of race on achievement in the tracks. Thus, not only do we find cause to question the Gamoran and Mare finding, but also we find support for a general reassessment of research on tracking which utilized self-reports for racial comparisons, and which routinely finds positive effects of college track placement. Given our findings, racial inequality in test scores of earlier cohorts may be understood as linked to socioeconomic factors that affect track placement and are linked to race, but no direct effect of race is evident. And, racial inequality in test scores for more recent cohorts may be unrelated to track placement, for track placement seems not to matter for achievement.

Research Panel 3: Systemic Issues
"Exploring Explanations for Ethnic Differences in Voucher Impacts on Student Test Scores"
Paul Peterson, Harvard University, and William Howell, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This paper reports the effects of school vouchers on student test scores in three randomized field trials conducted in New York City, Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, DC. We find that after two years African Americans who switched from public to private school gained, relative to their public-school peers, roughly one third of a standard deviation on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. We then focus on the New York City program to assess possible explanations for why vouchers improve the test scores of African Americans, but not Latinos. We find that language needs no not explain the differential race effects. We do find that vouchers had a larger impact for African Americans on class size, school size, parent-school communications, and school disruptions, but that adding these measures to the test-score models does not diminish the observed treatment effect.