Constructing an Index of Educational Opportunity: Examining Access Across Poverty and Place

• In Event: 41.083 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 41.083-9 - Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Educational Achievement Gaps

Abstract

This study examines access to seven indicators of school quality—including measures related to teacher quality, school counselors, advanced coursework, public preschool, and sports—across poverty and place using a data set of nearly all traditional Local Education Agencies (LEAs) in the US. We construct a composite measure—the index of educational opportunity—in order to synthesize trends found across individual measures. We find that poor, high minority, and urban LEAs exhibit large disparities in access to a number of the individual measures as well as lower average composite scores. These findings provide a much needed grounding to the debate over educational access, which until now has lacked a holistic, quantitative examination of schooling inputs across the nation.

Authors

• Douglas Gagnon, University of New Hampshire

• Marybeth J. Mattingly, University of New Hampshire