Critically measuring equity in high schools and its impact on African American students

The challenge to serve the educational needs of marginalized and underserved communities in a system that historically oppresses them through the protection and maintenance of institutional racism is a pervasive conundrum. Reforms that are seemingly concerned with school inequalities are ultimately perfunctory as the goal to provide a quality education to all students is undermined by a largely uncritical discourse that fails to adequately identify, acknowledge, and address the ways that education systematically fails African Americans and other marginalized students. Rather than focus on inequities, this research critically frames and defines equity to explore the extent that schools, not students, are of quality. This research utilized a Critical Race Theory framework and Critical Quantitative methodology to understand the relationship between equity and student outcomes in the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS). Three questions guide this research: How can equity be critically operationalized in the HSLS dataset? What is the relationship between equity in schools and student outcomes? Does access to equitable education experiences predict racial disparities? Findings suggest that the publicly available HSLS data set does not include school characteristics that describe equity in ways that account for student outcomes. Student characteristics such as race, gender, SES, are more predictive of student outcomes than school characteristics. In the discussion section the limitations of data, definition of equity, and implications of data are critically addressed