- Students in schools with high proportions of poor blacks are negatively selected on achievement, but the causal relation is neutral or positive, not negative. Enhanced option schools, which bring extraordinary resources to the challenges of teaching students in high-poverty, racially isolated schools, do add additional value to mathematics achievement scores as compared with attendance zone schools. However, the added value is small compared to the size of the persisting achievement gap.
- With respect to causal effects, find positive consequences of entering racially isolated but not high -poverty schools, and this advantage, importantly, is not explained by enhanced option schools, which exhibit a positive but non-significant coefficient.
- Find that the combination of racial isolation, poverty concentration, and enhanced option schools add more to test scores than a racially mixed school without compensatory resources. Thus, results suggest that resources may be a more potent strategy than racial mixing for reducing achievement inequality. But the amount of value is quite small compared to the size of the gap.
- The authors found that achievement scores for all students increased but achievement gaps remained relatively the same with a slight reduction in inequality in reading. They concluded that resources do help reduce the achievement gap, the value added was small compared to the size of the gap.