MRPG: Academic Achievement Post Brown v. Board

North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Greensboro NC

Investigators

Abstract

This project focuses on the issue of integrated versus segregated primary and secondary schools and their effects on academic achievement. The first objective of the study is to thoroughly document previous studies modeling academic achievement as a function of the school's racial composition. Preliminary investigation suggests that while there has been substantial research on academic achievement of the general population and on the white male population, little has focused on determinants of academic achievement of black students, and on the effects of racial composition on academic achievement. The second objective of this study is to use data from the National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) to empirically investigate the issue of the impact of school and neighborhood racial composition on educational achievement. This allows an indirect test of the effectiveness of actions stemming from the Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate schools. The NSBA data, however, lack one critical variable - school quality. Therefore, the third and final objective of this study is to determine a feasible method of collecting these data, to improve estimates of the impact of racial composition