New Report: Are High Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap?

Posted by on November 23, 2009

Empirically assessing HCZ

A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looks at the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a program run by Geoffrey Canada in New York City that combines community investments with reform-minded charter schools. Calling it “one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of our time,” the report provides the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward the long-standing debate over whether schools alone can eliminate the racial achievement gap or if the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators to overcome. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies in the research lead the authors to conclude that the Harlem Children’s Zone is effective at increasing achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value, the program’s effects in middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics, and reduce it by nearly half in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects. The authors end by presenting four pieces of evidence that show high-quality schools or high-quality schools coupled with community investments generate lasting achievement gains, and that community investments by themselves cannot explain these results.

See the report ($5 fee): http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15473