Oh wait. Black districts are getting more money than white districts because of school financing reforms. And in hundreds of districts where black families are actually more prosperous than white families in their districts the whites and asians still outperform the blacks at school. In fact there are no black districts at all that outperform white districts scholastically.
In other words, there is no school district in the United States that serves a moderately large number of black or Hispanic students in which achievement is even moderately high and achievement gaps are near zero.
Why not?
Occam’s Razor would suggest that this near-universal racial pattern has something to do with, you know, race, with who your parents and grandparents were and the nature and nurture they gave you.
But Professor Reardon is aghast at Occam’s suggestion:
That is, unless one posits large innate racial differences in academic potential (a position supported by no credible theory or evidence; for a review, see Nisbett et al. [2012]), differences in average test scores must be understood to represent local racial differences in the average availability of opportunities to learn the tested material.
And hence he wields Occam’s Butter Knife to come up with a complex, if still admittedly incomplete, rationalization.
First, though, Reardon admits it’s not because black and Hispanic students are short of tax spending on their schooling:
As a result of state school financing reforms enacted by state legislatures or ordered by courts, per-pupil revenues are now modestly positively correlated with districts’ enrollment rates of poor and minority students within most states (Cornman 2015). This means that in most states—conventional wisdom notwithstanding—poor and minority students are enrolled in districts with higher per pupil spending than white and middle-class students….
Second, while socioeconomic status likely contributes to racial gaps, the Stanford database includes a few hundred locales where blacks appear to be better off on average than whites:
For white-black gaps, nearly 11% of districts (with 7% of the black public school population) have racial/ethnic socioeconomic disparities that are less than or equal to zero (though many of these districts are small or have small numbers of black families, so that their white-black SES differences are imprecisely estimated).
And yet there are no districts in which blacks outscore whites.
Another pattern Reardon observes is that racial gaps are largest not in poor, backwoods districts rife with racism, but in wealthy, sophisticated school districts.
This has long been known as the Shaker Heights Effect, after the liberal Cleveland suburb that is home to numerous affluent families, black and white, but in which the white-black gap is a full four grade levels.
