Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award (2022) Lecture. Inequality in U.S. Mathematics Education: The Roles Race and Socioeconomic Status Play

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Previous studies have shown the strong influence that SES, together with its relationship to the curriculum (opportunities to learn), has had both directly and indirectly on student achievement in mathematics across the world. For the US, the results indicated that approximately 1/3 of the SES inequality in the US is produced by the indirect relationship that SES has through its relationship to students’ opportunities to learn mathematics. Reardon, has suggested through his studies of 328 metropolitan US school districts, that SES may be more strongly related to performance than race (Reardon, 2015; Reardon, Weathers, Fahle, Jang, & Kalogrides, 2019). This was especially true in segregated school districts where he found that the gap in performance was more strongly related to the SES of the schools and not the racial composition. Numerous other studies have provided evidence that race is also strongly related to student performance.
This paper, using five different sources of data examines the question; what relationship do each of race and SES have directly on student performance as well as on the various components of schooling at both the system level and the classroom level. Such relationships suggest the possibility of indirect effects on student performance. The system level components are those defined at the school level, the neighborhood of the school, and the district of the school.
The results show variation as to the presence of the relationship of SES or race to the components of schooling as well as directly to student performance. They are striking as, in some cases, both SES and race are related to particular components of schooling producing indirect effects to performance. In other cases, however, only one of the two has a relationship to other schooling components. As to whether each is influenced more by Race or SES, the results will challenge many preconceived notions and suggest that the answer to the question posed in the title is that it depends on the component of schooling in question.

Sub Unit

• AERA Sessions

Chair

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Stanford University

Presenter

• William H. Schmidt, Michigan State University