By Thomas B. Edsall
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Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford, examines many of the same problems from a different vantage point, focusing in particular on the characteristics of schools and surrounding communities that correlate with test score gaps.
In a January 2017 paper, βThe Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps,β Reardon, Demetra Kalogrides, a sociologist at Stanford, and Kenneth Shores, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, determined that:
The strongest correlates of achievement gaps are local racial/ethnic differences in parental income, local average parental education levels, and patterns of racial/ethnic segregation, consistent with a theoretical model in which family socioeconomic factors affect educational opportunity partly though residential and school segregation patterns.
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