A Case Study: Racial Disparity in Education

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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."        


 

 

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