Geographic Variation of District-Level Achievement Gaps Within the United States

• In Event: Patterns and Correlates of Gender Achievement Gaps in the United States

Abstract

This paper systemically analyzes gender achievement gaps within school districts across the nation and the local factors that vary with the gaps. We adopt a two-dimensional framework for characterizing patterns in reading and math achievement. The first dimension characterizes the gaps’ alignment with traditional gender stereotypes—that boys outperform girls in math and girls outperform boys in reading. The second dimension characterizes the extent to which both gaps, instead, tend to favor one gender over the other. These two dimensions of gender achievement differences can be visualized using a coordinate plane, where a district’s reading gap is plotted on the x-axis and its math gap on the y-axis.

The data used in this study comes from the EdFacts state accountability tracking system, which was provided via restricted license to our team by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The EdFacts data are provided as counts of students scoring at the state proficiency levels (e.g. “Below Basic,” “Basic,” etc.) disaggregated by district, gender, grade, subject, and year. The data are available for the 2008-09 through 2011-12 school years, for the third through eighth grades in mathematics and ELA.

To estimate the district-level achievement gaps from this coarsened data, we use the V-statistic (Ho, 2009; Ho & Haertel, 2006; Ho & Reardon, 2012). Among the roughly 9,400 districts in our sample, the average gender achievement gap in math is near 0, although there is considerable variation among districts. In contrast, the average gap in ELA favors girls. Again there is significant variation in the gaps; however, the gaps are nearly always in favor of females. Plotting these gaps, we find that there is considerable variation among districts along both the gender-favoring and stereotype dimensions.

Given the evidence of variation in the size (and direction, in the case of math) of achievement gaps among school districts, we conduct a descriptive analysis to investigate whether gender gaps are associated with demographic characteristics of the population. Our reasoning here is that gender gaps may, in part, be a product of local norms and expectations that are shaped both by socio-demographic characteristics and gender roles.

We consider four different categories of correlates: 1) socioeconomic differences between males and females residing in the district; 2) average socioeconomic characteristics of all residents in the district; 3) school district racial and economic composition; and 4) district-level male-female differences in behavioral outcomes. These covariates account for most of the variation along the stereotype dimension, but little of the variation along the gender-favoring dimension. Moreover, we find that communities with more stereotypical gender gaps tend to be more white, higher income, and more educated.

This district-level study provides critical insight into the variation of gender achievement gaps in the U.S., as well for understanding how correlates that are proximal to the students, rather than the more distal climate measures at the state or regional level used in prior literature, are associated with different patterns in the gaps.

Authors

• Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University

• Erin Michelle Fahle, Stanford University

• Demetra Kalogrides, Stanford University

• Anne Podolsky, Learning Policy Institute

• Rosalia Zarate, Stanford University