A Case Study: Racial Disparity in Education

-

There are ethnic and racial disparities in education often showing that African-American, American Indian, Latino and Southeast Asian groups underperform academically, relative to Caucasians and other Asian-Americans. These disparities are reflected in test scores, rates of dropout and graduation, proportions involved in gifted/talented programs, enrollment in higher education, percentage of repeating one or more grades, rates of disciplined/suspended/expelled.

This case study is a practice to investigate the racial disparities for students taking advanced placement (AP) courses in Atlanta regional public schools. The Atlanta region includes Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry and Rockdale counties, and the city of Atlanta. The data used is from Civil Right Data Collection (CRDC) and the year of the data is 2015. 

To illustrate the disparity, the proportion of students to participate in AP courses in each racial group were calculated, and the ratio of the proportions of compared racial groups were calculated. The ratio, which is the relative risk (RR), compares the likelihood or chance of taking AP courses between the two racial groups. The proportions of taking AP courses for White and Asian students are statistically significantly higher from Black and Hispanic students at the p<0.05 level, while the proportions of taking AP courses for Hispanic students are not statistically significantly different from Black students at the p<0.05 level. The table blow is the Tukey's HSD (honestly significant difference) test, showing the pairwise difference between means of the proportion of taking AP courses among racial groups. 

  
 
  
(Boxplot of the proportion of taking AP courses among racial groups, the red dots are means)

This study is an analysis practice in education disparity. Racial disparity is a critical issue in education. It is worth to mention that the comparison is done within the same school, meaning all students have same levels of AP course availability and other in-school resources. This racial gap is likely due to other factors, such as poor academic behaviors.  
 
As discussed in the post of The Effect of Academic Behavior on Learning Outcomes, academic behaviors can affect the learning outcome significantly. Black and Hispanic students have worse performance in test scores and less likely to participate in gifted/talent programs comparing with Asian and White students. On the other hand, Black and Hispanic students are also more likely to be suspended due to disruptive behaviors, have higher rate of dropouts and lower graduation rates. "Learning is liking rowing upstream, not to advance is to drop back."        


 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Person-Environment Fit

-
Image
Person-environment fit theories describe how the relationship of individuals and their environments affect work performance or relevant work/life satisfactions.  John Holland's (1985) Theory of Career Choice (RIASEC) classifies people into six personality types: realistic (R), investigative (I), artistic (A), social (S), enterprising (E), and conventional (C); and postulates that in choosing a career, people would like to work in an environment that are compatible to their personality type.   The Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA, 1984), also referred as the Person-Environment Correspondence (P-E-C) Theory, proposes that workers will continue to adjust themselves (such as knowledge, skill, attitude, or behavior) and the work environment to achieve the workplace professional equilibrium (such as fulfillment or job satisfaction). TWA summarizes six key work values: achievement, comfort, status, altruism, safety and autonomy, which determine the satisfaction levels of a worker when doing
Read more

A case study: Individual’s Efficacy Beliefs and Self-Determination with Health Information Seeking

-
Image
Seeking information is the beginning of learning that information. If a person wants to know something, he will seek that information, put it into actions. According to the self-determination theory (SDT), need fulfillment contributes to one’s motivation in actions. On the other hand, the self-efficacy theory (SET) exhibits efficacy beliefs (including self-efficacy and response efficacy), i.e. individual's beliefs in his or her capability to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments, are key determinants for executing the action.   Using the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS 4, Cycle 3), it found that low need fulfillment and low response efficacy over cancer prevention hinder people’s cancer information seeking, respectively, while confidence of getting needed information (high self-efficacy) stimulates people’s cancer information seeking. (The graph above shows the adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for the soci
Read more

HPI: Key Performance Indicators

-
Recall Gilbert's 2nd leisurely theorem , the potential for improving performance, PIP, provide a framework to measure performance deficiency. Use the actual state of performance, compare to the desire state of performance, the difference shows the "gap" in performance, then there is a "need" to fill this gap, i.e. to make performance improvement.   Performance is an abstract construct. The field has developed the concept of key performance indicators (KPIs) to facilitate performance measure and analysis. Key performance indicators are defined as quantifiable measurements that can reflect an organization, an individual, or any focused subject is successful, in meeting goals and objectives for performance. Below are lists of KPI examples.    Healthcare operational KPIs.  KPI Calculation Formula Notes Average hospital stay Average Hospital Stay  = Total Stay Duration / Total Number of Stays Grouped by treatment types
Read more