The statistics behind our nation’s disparities in educational attainment can be shocking. For example, half of all Black 12th graders scored below the basic level in reading in the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam in 2019. And nearly 4-in-10 Hispanics also scored below basic level. That’s compared to 21% of whites.

Researchers say closing these gaps is critical to narrowing overall racial disparities. That’s because education is a key source of what researchers call “human capital” – the skills and knowledge that increase a person’s capacity to earn more money. But no one really knows how to do it.

Researchers caution against a search for “silver bullets,” saying it can detract from fundamentals like ensuring schools have well-trained teachers. They also find hope in how well students respond when they get a chance to perform.

JAY LINDSAY:

What is “a sharecropper’s education?”

Well, it’s simply an inferior education. It leads nowhere. It’s just adequate enough to enable its recipients – often Blacks and poor whites – to preserve a bleak status quo.

The late civil rights leader Bob Moses saw the real thing when he was organizing Black sharecroppers to vote in 1960s Mississippi. Then, he saw it again in other forms, plaguing schools all over the country, feeding our country’s racial educational disparities.

To help fight it, he started a math literacy program for low-income and minority students. The Massachusetts-based initiative is called the Algebra Project. Here’s its executive director BEN MOYNIHAN:

BEN MOYNIHAN:

Current versions of sharecropper education translate into dilapidated school buildings, a lack of curriculum, under-prepared teachers – if teachers are present at all – and really just the lack of quality in K-12 education in some places in the nation.

In a sense, it's the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement. With the movement, we got Jim Crow out of public accommodations, more or less out of the right to vote, but not out of education.

JAY LINDSAY:

I’m Jay Lindsay, and this is Six Hundred Atlantic, a podcast produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. We’re looking at racial disparities this season, which is based on the Boston Fed’s economic conference on the same topic.

Racial gaps in education are apparent at all levels. And they aren’t closing. Here’s Sarah Reber, a UCLA professor who studies the economics of education:

SARAH REBER:

The differences across racial and ethnic groups are not really narrowing very much and the test score gaps have even widened a little bit in recent years.

JAY LINDSAY:

The statistics behind these disparities can be shocking. Here’s one of them:

In 2019, half of all Black 12th graders scored below the basic level in reading in the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. And nearly 4-in-10 Hispanics also scored below basic level. That’s compared to 21% of whites.

Researchers say closing these gaps is critical to narrowing overall racial disparities. That’s because education is a key source of what researchers call “human capital” – the skills and knowledge that increase a person’s capacity to earn more money.

But no one really knows how narrow the gaps.

Today’s versions of a sharecropper’s education are difficult to combat. The decades have proven more money can’t do everything. And where is that money best directed? Is kindergarten too early? Is college too late?

The gaps themselves have evolved in ways that defy easy diagnosis. For instance, Black girls are now more likely to attend college than both Black and white boys.

Reber warns against the search for fast solutions.

SARAH REBER:

Honestly, I don't think there is a silver bullet or one weird trick that's going to solve this problem. In fact, education policy world has been maybe a little bit too focused on the search for silver bullets, and that can lead to harmful policy churn or distract from a focus on the fundamentals like making sure schools have well-trained and well-supported teachers and staff, a strong curriculum, adequate supplies, reasonable class size, all that kind of stuff.

JAY LINDSAY:

Boston Fed economist Jeff Thompson, who organized the Bank’s conference, said today’s Black-white racial education gaps are plainly rooted in historical racism. But Thompson said they won’t be closed if we don’t focus on the present and the future.

JEFF THOMPSON:

Conditions that we confront clearly tied in very direct ways to some of our worst elements of our racist past, but we have to solve those problems in the here and now.

JAY LINDSAY:

Differences in academic achievement across racial groups are consistent among students of every age.

More results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress test show 35% of Black and 27% of Hispanic 4th graders scored below basic level in mathematics in 2019. That’s compared to 11% of whites and 7% of Asians.

At the other end of the school-age spectrum, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that the college graduation rate for enrollees in 2016 was 54% for Hispanic students and 40% for Black students. Meanwhile, it was 64% for whites and 74% for Asians.

But Esteban Aucejo, an expert in the economics of education from Arizona State, says some progress is hidden in the numbers. He notes college enrollment rates for Blacks and Hispanics have climbed sharply in the last 15 years

Still, the gaps in graduation rates have stayed relatively unchanged during that period. For example, about half of white males get a college degree, and it’s stayed at about a third for Black and Hispanic males.

ESTEBAN AUCEJO:

So, what this is telling us is that we have to do much more work in terms of making sure that many minorities are able to complete a college education.

JAY LINDSAY:

Another complication in closing racial gaps is that the economy sometimes shifts the goal posts.

For instance, the country has seen success in the decades-old goal of narrowing the racial gap in high school graduation rates, but it hasn’t had the expected impact. That’s because the relative value of a high school degree keeps dropping.

In 1980, a person with a college degree or greater was making about 40% more than someone with a high school degree or some college. But according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2020 the median earnings of those with a college degree were 63% more than those who completed high school. 

Here’s Cleveland Fed economist DIONISSI ALIPRANTIS:

DIONISSI ALIPRANTIS:

You know, if the economy were the same economy of say 1960 or 1970, I think we'd have a lot more racial equality now, based on the progress we've made in terms of educational attainment.

JAY LINDSAY:

Aucejo says efforts to help students accumulate “human capital” must begin by kindergarten and continue at every stage through high school.

ESTEBAN AUCEJO:

College may be too late. When you look at the literature, it's very difficult to find successful programs in college, that help to close gaps across racial groups.

JAY LINDSAY:

The evolution of the disparities themselves shows how hard they can be to understand.

One example is that Black girls are now more likely to attend college than white males, which wasn’t the case in 2005.

It’s unclear why this would be, given that many variables researchers consider – like neighborhoods, academic preparation, and family characteristics – are presumably the same for Black boys. But they did not make similar gains.

Eighteen-year-old Nakkhari Holmes thinks it might be about priorities.

Holmes lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. In the last school year, she was a senior at Coconut Creek High School, a majority Black school about an hour north of Miami.

She was involved with the Algebra Project and looking forward to college and eventually a career in marketing. She also noticed there weren’t a lot of boys in her Advanced Placement government class.

NAKKHARI HOLMES:

When I look around the room, there's mainly more girls than boys in the class. Maybe because they actually want to go to college and the other boys really focus on sports.

JAY LINDSAY:

Holmes talks about her parents when discussing her focus on academics. They expected her to get good grades, and she did not want to disappoint.

NAKKHARI HOLMES:

I feel like it's the motivation and really wanting to achieve, because if you weren't grown around people that actually wanted to go to school, then you will eventually grow up to be the same way. So, I feel like if you really have people that support education, then you would be more likely to want to go to school or maybe want to get an education.

JAY LINDSAY:

Reber says “out-of-school factors” – like Nakkhari’s support from her parents – are important but sometimes overlooked when considering racial disparities.

SARAH REBER:

I think that's something that everyone kind of knows, but sometimes we forget it a little bit and imagine that changing schools is the only way to improve education. First of all, parents and other caregivers are children's first teachers, and so that's part of it, things like parental education, how parents and caregivers interact with their children.

Even more important, the material conditions that children live in matter a lot for how much they can learn. And that's everything from income, to access to food and exposure to pollution or violence.

JAY LINDSAY:

Compared to these factors, money is far easier to track and control. And it may be the most talked-about tool in reform efforts. But its impacts haven’t proven to be as straightforward as “equal money means equal results.”

Thompson cites work by his Boston Fed colleague Bo Zhao which looks at per pupil funding in Connecticut. The state has nearly equalized per-pupil-funding across districts – they’re within a few thousand dollars of each other statewide.

JEFF THOMPSON:

Now, we would look at that situation, we would say, “That's great.” Is it enough? Well, that's another question entirely. In fact, the research that I'm citing by Bo Zhao would say that, in fact, different students may require different levels of resources to get them to the same level of performance. So, the state aid may equalize per pupil, but Hartford has a lot more students who have English as a second language, a lot more students who are in single-parent families, a lot more students who are in poor families. All of those are conditions that essentially make it harder for students to succeed.

JAY LINDSAY:

Reber says the evidence seems to indicate money matters, but it might not be game-changing.

SARAH REBER:

You can also look at the evidence about the effects of different educational inputs – so things like class size, teachers and other staff, curriculum, tutoring, other types of interventions. You know, just a whole range of things that schools can buy if they have more money. You'll find evidence that a lot of those things can be effective, but often, again, the magnitude of the effects is just not a match for the size of the racial and ethnic disparities.

JAY LINDSAY:

So, what can policymakers do?

Reber speaks of a variety of measures she believes could work, some seem obvious, some less so. They include more same-race teachers for students, which has shown to have positive impacts, especially for boys. Or upgrading H-VAC systems in schools. Disadvantaged students often attend schools with no air conditioning, and that affects learning. Or maybe developing culturally responsive approaches to teaching and curricula.

SARAH REBER:

I really think you just have to keep chipping away at the problem and try to implement well the things that we know work and try to do more research to understand what are potentially new promising things that we could be doing.

JAY LINDSAY:

Aliprantis, the Cleveland Fed economist, sees cause for optimism. During the last decade, he’s taught math to middle and high school kids as a volunteer for a Cleveland nonprofit called The Math Movement. He even wrote their textbook.

He says the experience has convinced him that closing racial education gaps is, in fact, possible. It’s the kids that give him hope.

DIONISSI ALIPRANTIS:

The potential is there. If we give kids the opportunity to perform, they will, they will. But we have to find a way to engage those kids. We have to find a way to give them those opportunities, and to get them excited about learning. And, once we do that, I think the sky is the limit.

JAY LINDSAY:

The country’s educational disparities are closely connected to its ongoing geographic segregation. And as with all of the nation’s racial disparities, history has played a major role, particularly in heavily Black areas.

First, slavery concentrated Blacks in particular states. Then, discriminatory practices kept Blacks in certain places and out of others.

But the sharp segregation that continues today may have a sociological phenomenon as a primary cause.

“Racial sorting” is the universal tendency of racial and ethnic groups to choose to live among each other. Research presented at the Boston Fed conference suggests it’s a major driver of our continued geographic racial segregation.

But researchers also say racial hostility may also be playing a role. Here’s Eric Esteves, a longtime resident of Boston’s heavily Black Roxbury neighborhood, giving one reason he doesn’t think he’ll ever leave it for a place with more resources, but fewer Blacks.

ERIC ESTEVES:

I don't want to be racially profiled in my own neighborhood.

JAY LINDSAY:

That’s next time on Six Hundred Atlantic.

JAY LINDSAY:

Thank you for listening to Season 3 of Six Hundred Atlantic. You can find interviews and our first three seasons and subscribe to our mailing list at bostonfed.org/six-hundred-atlantic. Listen and subscribe to Six Hundred Atlantic on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

The producers would like to thank our contributors for their time and insights. They are Dionissi Aliprantis, Esteban Aucejo, Nakkhari Holmes, Eric Esteves, Ben Moynihan, Sarah Reber, and Jeff Thompson.

This has been “Enduring Divides,” the third season of the Boston Fed’s Six Hundred Atlantic podcast.