The Inequality of Separation: Racial Composition of Schools and Academic Achievement

Using multilevel modeling, this study examines the effect of African American concentration in Louisiana public schools on the academic achievement of African American and White students. The authors consider this question as they control for a variety of individual and school-level sociodemographic factors, including socioeconomic status and student race. African American concentration is defined as the percentage of the student body that is African American. Student achievement is a factor score derived from the three 10th-grade components of the Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination. The data are drawn from the 1990 test results of 42,000 students from 342 secondary schools. The study finds that, controlling for all variables, African American concentration still has a negative effect on student achievement. However, the percentage of minority students only begins to have a significant negative effect at relatively high levels of concentration. These findings suggest that to resegregate African American students could have negative academic outcomes for those students.