Trajectories of economic disadvantage and the black-white high school completion gap

• In Event: 3503 - Educational Inequality and Segregation: New Findings

Abstract

While the gap in high school completion between black and white students narrowed during the 1970s and 1980s, progress has since stagnated. Some aspects of black-white inequality are driven by race-specific institutional context and practice, but these mechanisms are difficult to parse from other factors correlated with students’ family socioeconomic background. This study adopts a trajectory-based approach to evaluate the role family economic disadvantage plays in explaining black-white high school completion gaps. Using detailed student administrative data from Michigan between 2002 and 2016, we evaluate the extent to which student eligibility for subsidized lunch each year between kindergarten and eighth grade varies by race and, accordingly, whether this explains a substantial share of the black-white high school completion gap. We validate our trajectory measures using an independent student sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, testing how the timing and duration of disadvantage correlates with detailed measures of economic hardship and family structure that are rarely available in administrative data. Our combined analyses illustrate that even with limited information about family background, a trajectory approach recovers substantial nuance. We show that using longitudinal measures of student background explains over 70 percent of the black-white gap in high school degree completion, much greater than the 47 percent of the gap explained by using a cross-sectional measure. Additional analyses suggest that school enrollment and peer composition are primary components of the residual black-white gap in high school completion.

Authors

• Katherine Michelmore

• Peter M. Rich, Cornell University