The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8

Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on cohorts of students who stay in the state's public schools for all six years. While the black-white gaps are sizable and robust, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress in school. Beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps in math between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while those for high-performing students have generally widened. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.