Academic Fragmentation and Its Correlates Across 50 States and DC: Evidence From 2022 NAEP

• In Event: Appraising Equity in Education With The Nation’s Report Card and Beyond

Abstract

Academic split, also referred to as “academic segregation” (Drake, 2017), or “vertical segregation” (Willms, 2010) in the literature, is observed in school systems where high achieving and low achieving students are concentrated in separate schools, leading to higher levels of between school variability in student achievement. Therefore, academic split can be operationalized as the percentage of variance in achievement scores between schools in relation to total variance (intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC). While some within-school variance in student achievement is expected, as not all students can perform at the same level in all subjects, an ideal system with comparable education quality across schools would minimize the between-school variance. Therefore, we argue that academic split is an indicator of the degree of equity in an education system.

Authors

• Enis Dogan, IES/National Center for Education Statistics

• Yifan Bai, American Institutes for Research

• Xiaying Zheng, American Institutes for Research

• Markus Broer, American Institutes for Research