Good night everybody,
Below is our revised abstract. Comments and criticisms are welcome.
Elena & Omar
It's not About Race at K:
Confirming and Extending Fryer & Levitt's Understanding of the
Black-White Test Score Gap
by Elena Llaudet and Omar Wasow* *
Although more than half a century has passed since the landmark /Brown
v. Board of Ed./ decision, black children continue to lag academically
behind their white peers. For decades, research comparing the test
scores of black and white students has consistently found a substantial
gap, even among four-year olds. Fryer and Levitt (2004), using data from
a nationally representative sample of students in kindergarten and first
grade, broke important ground when demonstrating that the disparity in
academic achievement between blacks and whites only begins after
students arrive in school, after controlling for a small set of
socioeconomic, family and health related characteristics. In this
article, we demonstrate the robustness of their results, expand their
analysis through fifth grade, and analyze the evolution of the gap in
the first six years of school with a model more appropriate for studying
cross-sectional and longitudinal data. We find that the divergence in
black and white test scores continues to grow after first grade,
although at a slower rate for math and at a similar rate for reading.