Introduction
Educational opportunity in the U.S. varies greatly from student to student, and studies show trends correlated with numerous factors, including race, socioeconomic background, gender, and the highest education level of a student’s parents. In exploring data collected by The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, we sought to find explanations for the factors that contribute to the academic achievement gaps between students of White and minority ethnic groups. We chose to narrow our focus to the historical policies and events related to race, as they explain early and continuing influences that extend into other education-impacting factors, such as socioeconomic background. The quantitative data that our analyses and visualizations reference come from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). It is an aggregation of the plentiful public data from national standardized testing of Math and English Language Arts, from grades 3 through 8, from the 2008-09 through 2018-19 school years. It is not only comprehensive in combining the raw data of each school district in the U.S., but also includes statistics on achievement gaps based on race, gender, and economic disadvantage. These were particularly helpful in comparing how the most significant factors shape each group’s academic achievement differently. The particular dataset we analyzed from the archive is one that is pooled across all grades, years, and subjects, so that we can more easily identify patterns of significance across diverse populations and settings. We then used our analyses of this data to guide our literature review of studies that explain the various potential causes of the outcomes recorded by this data. Through our analysis, we observed that achievement gaps were particularly stark in districts with large populations of Black and Hispanic students, and that these gaps often correlated with economic disadvantage and regional disparities. Additionally, we found that some districts showed improvement over time, while others experienced a sharp decline in student achievement, especially among marginalized groups. These trends prompted us to further investigate the root causes behind such variations.
Literature Review
To better understand the patterns we discovered in the data, we turned to existing academic literature to contextualize and explain these disparities. The collective perspective accumulated across these academic scholars & their respective secondary literature/sources, which included but not limited to, Blatt & Votruba-Drzal (2021), Ladson-Billings (2006), Lee & Zhou (2017), Levine (2014), Murnane & Reardon (2017), Womack et. al (2024), Matheny et. al (2023), through the intricate examination on the fundamental, underlying causes and historical underpinnings of the concerning, yet prevalent & strikingly prominent, educational academic achievement disparities (gap) and their associated discrepancies, was of a comprehensive framework, that distinguished persistent structural, systemic inequities across the subcategories of race, gender, socioeconomic class status, and geographical/regional location as shaping the inaccessibility to equal educational academic opportunity, and therefore the inevitably flawed outcomes. There is ubiquitous consensus & consistent agreement among the secondary literature that emphasizes the notion that hierarchical, systemic inequalities spanning over categories of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and geographical location are the unequivocal root cause of the prevalent educational academic achievement disparities, widespread across the US. The fundamental theme present across the secondary sources is the concept that lack of educational resources/opportunities (unequal access) is the primary reason for discrepancy in student achievement outcomes, as opposed to the student’s ability itself. These discrepancies in racial and gendered divides in achievement are deliberately reinforced through ingrained regional, socioeconomic factors, causing, as Matheny et al. (2023) describes, drastic decline in achievement for certain districts over time. However, the central concept of “achievement gap” itself has received major skepticism & pushback, particularly by Ladson-Billings (2006) who instead suggests the incorporation of the “educational debt” ideology, in which consideration for the historical, systematic injustices that disproportionately target marginalized students, justifies the gradual burden received as a natural consequence. The rationale behind this argument is exemplified by Levine (2014) who indicates historical documentation directly supports the structural exclusion of Black students in educational systems from receiving access to equal opportunity in educational resources. A foundational contradiction that is inconsistent across the secondary literature is on the basis of the intersectionality surrounding race and socioeconomic status. Lee and Zhou (2017) demonstrate that contrary to the mainstream belief that social engineering & culture alongside socioeconomic status are correlated to academic achievement success within the Asian community, historical precedent indicates that highly-selective immigration policies are instead more likely to shape the achievement success. This is disputed however by the analysis conducted by Womack et al. (2024) in which a study that equalizes the opportunity to learn, results in the detriment of Asian Females specifically having the largest negative impact in the racial and gendered achievement gap. Regardless of these pertinent contradictions, the secondary literature demonstrates overarching agreement that historically structural, systemic educational inequities directly impede the educational academic achievement across various marginalized subgroups, particularly in the sectors of race, social class (socioeconomic status), gender, and geographical location. There is consistent understanding among academic scholars that establish the precedent that familial income level among geographic districts consisting of widespread “economically disadvantaged” students with heightened levels of poverty in the surrounding neighborhoods are unwavering in their consistent, wide education achievement gaps over time. Historical contexts and political environment accounts provided by Ladson-Billings (2006) alongside Levine (2014) reemphasize the dimension of the dominant structural educational systems that have negatively compromised these marginalized communities of students of color. One prominent question that remains unanswered is the insufficient contextual analysis behind learning rates (growth in student achievement), intended to measure the school/district effectiveness. Another central topic of exploration that hasn’t yet been categorically addressed is regarding achievement disparity trends by region. While the analysis conducted in the study of Murnane & Reardon (2017) recognizes the fundamental discrepancies in achievement gaps between public and private schools, the precise variation among instructional teaching methods surrounding each distinct school type (private vs public) has remained unresolved in the analysis, causing ambiguity on the uncertain, discrete effect of the school type temporally.
Significance
These insights from both data and literature reveal a troubling contradiction between the ideal of educational equality and the lived reality of many students. The American Dream is a concept that prides itself on the idea that anyone can achieve success and upward mobility through hard work and determination, no matter their background. It is founded on the belief that there is equal opportunity for everyone regardless of race. Yet, through our project, we see that educational disparity by race is highly prevalent in America. The playing field is unequal, and success is systemically harder for certain groups than others due to this academic disadvantage. Education is the bedrock of a thriving society, and equal educational opportunities are the roots that build an equitable future; there is much evidence to show that education is a strong predictor of future success. Addressing educational disparities is imperative to addressing inequity in all parts of society: economic, social, and political. However, addressing educational gaps between races requires an investigation behind its root causes. There is a plethora of education research and journal articles that cover growing trends in achievement gaps over the years, possible explanations as to why these certain gaps are widening (each owing the widening gaps to differing reasons, such as cultural, psychological, geographical, or historical). Our research project aims to investigate the patterns that we see directly from the dataset through our visualization, and corroborate these findings through a synthesis of various academic articles to determine which factors are stronger contributors to the educational disparities we see between races. Through a comprehensive review of scholarly articles, we hope to gain clarity behind this highly complex issue and identify the main causes that underpin educational inequity in America. We hope that this understanding can lead to the formulation of solutions that address not only short-term academic gaps but also the systemic barriers that have long hindered sustainable progress in education.
Research Questions
1. Observations
What main patterns or trends do we observe in racial achievement gaps in the US?
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2. Causes
What are the likely leading causes behind racial achievement gaps in the US?
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Observations
The 5 visualizations that consist of 4 bar graphs and 1 scatter plot, alongside the map establish concrete, consistent patterns & trends in achievement disparity gaps among the racial demographics across the geographic school districts nationwide in the U.S. The focal trend consistently being established is the frequent underperformance in terms of their achievement level of the Black students and the Hispanic students relative to their White counterparts. There was significant achievement disparity/discrepancy (gap) as a foundational theme across the visualizations with the White students outperforming the historically marginalized students, with the exception of Asian students.
The bar graph depicting disparities in achievement across the different subjects (Math – Reading Language Arts) averaged over the geographic school districts by race directly illustrates a significant positive discrepancy achievement gap for Asian students (+0.1521), intuitively demonstrating Asian students outperforming in Math as compared to RLA, meanwhile the opposite is true for the Black students in which a considerable negative discrepancy achievement gap for Black students (-0.0672) exists, directly demonstrating the Black students instead performing stronger/better in RLA as compared to Math. As these are opposing trends over the two distinctive races, this indicates that there are subject-specific discrepancies across races, with certain racial demographics being more inclined to perform stronger/better in one subject over the other. The variable that is employed to assess the subject-based achievement gap is cs_mn_mth_eb which ranges from -0.0672 to +0.1521, representing the number of standard deviations above/below the national average. The other three racial demographics of Hispanic, Native American, and White students generally seemed to perform just as well in both subjects, with the minuscule discrepancy in achievement that is relatively centered around 0 (no considerable difference), directly demonstrating that these racial demographics of students were just as strong/weak in Math as compared to RLA. One potential reason for this significant distinguishable discrepancy evident within the Asian community of students, could potentially be related to socioeconomic class status with certain immigration policies (i.e Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) performing a preferential hyper-selection, directly favoring highly educated Asian immigrants, leading to these affluent families having more access to resources, and further widening & upholding the racial achievement gap.
When comparing racial achievement disparities across states, more distinctly emphasizing the top 15 states with the highest mean achievement discrepancies across racial demographics averaged among the geographic school districts within each state collectively, the overwhelming majority of states exhibit perpetual consistency in the magnitude of the discrepancy in achievement, generally ranging from approximately 0.4 to 0.6 across the differing races of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian (all compared with White), with the sole outlier exception of DC, in which there is an elevated, highlighted discrepancy in achievement across the racial demographics in a more prominent manner. This widespread, universal, persistent educational achievement disparity gap among the different races is not isolated/relegated in select regions/states such that the exceptional racial achievement discrepancy is concentrated within pronounced geographic school districts within the state, and instead generally tends to be dispersed roughly evenly nationwide. The insinuation, as a byproduct of the extensive yet consistently pervasive racial achievement disparities nationwide, is one that is reflective of the deeply-entrenched, structural & systemic inequities that are immensely prevalent within the educational system on a national scale, rather than the misconception of discrete localized, regional/geographic specific issues being the primary cause of concern. Despite the bar graph approaching the racial achievement disparity gap from a macro lens, due to the achievement disparities quantitatively being representative of the cumulative average of the geographic school districts within that state, the shared commonality in the magnitude of the racial achievement gaps, overwhelmingly indicates the impact of oppressive root-causes with the contextualization of the historical underpinnings behind these persistent structural disadvantages & discriminations, which include but are not limited to, decreased access to resources and a lack of consistently equivalent school funding, which intrinsically exacerbate these historically marginalized, minority students nationally. The outlier exception of DC with it’s considerably elevated, significantly heightened positive achievement discrepancy gaps between each of the racial demographics, even more distinguishable in the White-Black and White-Hispanic achievement gaps, can potentially be attributed to being associated with the centralized political climate hub due to its proximity to the capitol building, coupled with the predominantly white demographic representation among the residents alongside the federal workers.
The map of the states in the US averaged over the geographic school districts within each state is able to give a glimpse into the distinguishable regional trends in achievement disparities across race, in which consistently the racial achievement gap between the white students and all the other marginalized races results in the white students outperforming in comparison, with the exception of the asian students conversely performing better/stronger than the white students. This pattern is consistent across the states, however the magnitude of the disparity in achievement varies by region. Notably, there are wider racial achievement gaps in both the South & Midwestern regions, with less of a discrepancy in the Western regions, especially for the White-Black and White-Hispanic racial achievement disparity.
Interestingly enough, the scatterplot directly indicates that the total number of tests which is reflective of the number of students in that geographic school district, is not considerably correlated with the average achievements, however there are some fascinating developments such that there are a large majority of clusters at the lower end of the amount of tests with a high amount of variance, whereas progressing further along the scale as the number of tests increase, the variance drops instantaneously with most of the points centered around 0. The insinuation is there is a higher likelihood of skewness and outliers when the number of students/tests is small because there isn’t a large enough sample size to receive a more accurate, representative depiction of the average achievement in that geographic school district.
This horizontal grouped bar chart shows average achievement levels (Cs Mn Avg Eb) across racial subgroups. The White-Hispanic (whg: 3,104) and White-Black (wbg: 3,098) gaps are the largest, meaning White students score much higher than Hispanic and Black students on average. In contrast, the White-Asian gap (wag: –883) and Native American (nam: –763) scores are negative, suggesting that Asian and Native American students often outperform White students in some districts. This contrast points to complex racial patterns in academic achievement, possibly shaped by cultural strengths or regional differences in opportunity.
Furthermore, when comparing the racial achievement disparities with the socioeconomic achievement disparities between not economically disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged students, this racial achievement discrepancy is even further highlighted as a prominent concern, particularly with the White-Black achievement gap being about twice as large alongside the White-Hispanic achievement gap being considerably larger, compared to the socioeconomic achievement disparity gap. This notably emphasizes the notion that the race-based achievement gap remains persistent as its own separate dimension of disparity among students of the distinct races regardless of their socioeconomic class status.
Cumulatively speaking, these visualizations as a whole describe the racial achievement disparity gap consistently negatively impacting the Black, Hispanic, and even Native American students (to a lesser extent) in a disproportionate magnitude compared to their White counterparts.
Causes
General Discussion
Distracted by the Wrong Metric? – A Macro Look at Educational Inequity in the U.S.
Before delving into the various potential causes for the patterns that we see in achievement gaps within the U.S., as highlighted by our visualizations, it is important to take a step back and fully understand the persistent issue of educational inequity. Gloria Ladson-Billings sought to put the crisis into perspective in a journal article, using an analogy which compared the national debt to what she terms the education debt in the U.S. Each year, economists may talk about national budget for the year or some set period, and whether or not it is in surplus or deficit (usually the case). However, that is of lesser importance once you take a step back to look at the larger problem that is the looming national debt, which is composed of multiple years of budget deficits. It rarely matters if a specific year had a national budget surplus, because what is of real concern, and will result in severe consequences, is the national debt crisis.
Ladson-Billings likens the national budget to the achievement gap, a term that has become one of the most common phrases in education literature, producing more than 11 million citations on Google (Ladson-Billings). Countless educational research studies have focused on achievement gaps and what can be done to narrow these gaps. Ladson-Billings argues that the focus on achievement gaps is an incorrect approach and that, like the national debt crisis, education researchers and policy makers should instead be focused on the education debt, which has accumulated from years of achievement gaps. Merely focusing on achievement gaps will only lead to short-term results that will not make long-term improvements to the disparities that are present, and that looking at the “gap from year to year is a misleading exercise” (Ladson-Billings).
She characterizes the education debt as something that has accumulated as a result of historical (the oppression and systemic discrimination against certain populations in U.S. history), economic (the difference in funding between public and private schools, and more funding going towards schools with more White students), sociopolitical (the exclusion of communities of color from the civic process, and engaging with decision makers on education policies), and moral (the disparity between what is believed to be right, and what is actually done). All of this is to say that racial educational inequity in America is a highly complex issue with many interconnected factors (i.e., historical decisions and events have permeated through time, shaping economic outcomes across generations). There is no one underlying cause of the educational disparity in the country, and various causes are likely correlated with each other. In addition, we are aware that much of the literature focuses on achievement gaps. With this concept of education debt in mind, we hope to read the literature through a different lens, to try to parse out the underlying contributors to this long-term crisis in the U.S.
Private School Enrollment Disparities
One potential reason across all minorities (Black, Hispanic, Native Americans, and Asians) for the disparity in educational outcomes may be due to private school enrollment. Private schools are often viewed as an alternative to public schools, with the opportunity to have more tailored curricula, better academic programs, instruction in a certain religion or value system, etc. However, it is often a privileged alternative due to its high cost of tuition, which has prevented many from considering the option. This means the exclusion of many families from minority populations who generally have lower incomes and lack the funds to send their children to these private schools.
A study by Murnane and Reardon (2017) sought to track the long-term private elementary school (1st to 5th grade) enrollment based on family income from 1968 to 2013, to see if they could reveal any notable trends. Some trends in enrollment potentially explain the persistent academic gaps that we see within our dataset. Firstly, they found that the gap in private school enrollment rates between families at the 90th and 50th percentiles (high and medium-income families, termed in the paper as the 90-50 gap) substantially grew between these five decades. This is largely due to a considerable drop in the private school enrollment rate of middle-income families, compared to a stable enrollment from high-income families. The article states that this stability in high-income enrollment masks a shift from religious to non-sectarian private schools, whilst middle and low-income families have reduced overall enrollment in Catholic private schools. This story is not just one of private versus public schools, as even within the private school sector, there are differing levels of teaching quality. Reardon, Cheadle, and Robinson (2009) found that, using data from 1998 to 2004, by fifth grade, Catholic school students have math skills 3 to 4 months behind those of socioeconomically similar public schools who started kindergarten at the same initial skill level. Thus, a shift to non-sectarian private schools by high-income families may possibly have improved academic ability. It is also worth noting that these non-sectarian private schools were on average twice as expensive, on average, as religious schools (Baker, 2009). Due to this variability in quality within the private school sector itself, it is difficult to ascertain if the private school enrollment trends by family income have contributed to increased gaps in educational outcomes by family income. However, Murnane and Reardon note that if “average student per expenditure is an indicator of instructional quality, this may be the case”. The reason is that whilst some lower-income families still enroll their children in private schools, these schools tend to be lower priced than the high-priced schools that high-income families enroll their children in, which are perhaps less effective in educating.
The larger and more concerning takeaway is the troubling implications this has for the segregation of low-income students, which is often highly associated with minority populations. As a result of this growing residential segregation, low-income families are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. In these areas, one quarter of the high-income families choose to enroll their children in private schools, but a smaller and decreasing proportion of middle and low-income families in urban areas do so, due to rising tuition. High-income families either live in the suburbs or enroll their children in private school within the urban areas, where they are more likely to be expensive nonsectarian schools than was the case four decades ago. Due to this phenomenon, both urban public and private schools have less socioeconomic diversity today than they did decades prior. It is important to note that this study only focuses on elementary school enrollment, whereas our SEDA data focuses on a larger sample size. However, it is not unlikely that this trend persists in later grades as well. Despite this, the underlying cause of the concern is that there is an increased segregation occurring between low and high-income students in general, which may be widening the academic gap in the U.S.
The White-Asian Academic Achievement Gap
Hyper-selectivity of Highly Educated Asian Immigrants
Contrary to the typical patterns seen across the other academic achievement gaps between White and ethnic minority students, the SEDA data showed that Asian students generally outperformed White students. Typically, systemic inequalities intertwine minority racial groups and lower socioeconomic backgrounds to result in fewer opportunities for educational attainment. However, researchers Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou examine the paradox that, regardless of socioeconomic status in the U.S., Asian students make up a disproportionate amount of the students in prestigious universities — as much as 40% of students at the University of California, Berkeley. This academic achievement has often been stereotyped to be attributable to Asian values in education and hard work. However, the generalization about Asian cultural attitudes toward education may not be the sole reason, because the proportion of Asian immigrants to the U.S. who are highly educated is drastically different from the population of Asians in their country of origin. For instance, the proportion of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher in the U.S. versus their country of origin for Koreans is 56% to 36%, for Vietnamese adults is 26% to 5%, and for Chinese adults is 51% to 4%.
Further analysis finds that U.S. political factors are overlooked in determining the causes of the achievement gap (Lee and Zhou). That is, namely, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allocated residence visas based on a system that gave preference to those who have close family ties to U.S. citizens or legal residents and those who have the skills or occupations needed to fulfill U.S. labor force needs. This system was intended to be more neutral, replacing the previous quotas from the 1920s that discriminated against certain races. The outcome was a “hyper-selectivity” for Asian immigrants who were already highly educated. This has led to the importation of a “success frame” mindset that is specific to the hyper-selected class of Asian immigrants, but it cannot be accurately generalized to the Asian race as a whole.
It is important to consider that that these studies focused on University students, whereas our dataset contains information about 3rd to 8th graders. However, the hyper-selectivity could still have applied for Asian immigrants, who eventually decided to settle in the U.S. and start a family, with the children contributing to the patterns that we see in the SEDA dataset. Furthermore, this policy may have just been one of the attributing factors to the White-Asian achievement gap that we observe in the data.
The White-Black & White-Hispanic Academic Achievement Gap
History of Black Education for Gradual Improvement
Since Black students were first able to attain education in the U.S., the White-Black academic achievement gap has persisted, but it has also been narrowing as both White and Black students are generally showing improvement (Levine and Levine). This is largely explained by the systemic inequality inflicted upon Black people since the beginning of slavery.
The history of Black education begins with Black people unable to attain education at all. Since the early 17th century, when the majority of the Black population was enslaved, it was illegal to educate slaves. The small portion who received any amount or form of education was granted in the owners’ interest, so that slaves could perform skilled operations on plantations, which also increased their value when sold to other owners. Alternatively, teaching slaves to be literate so that they could read the bible was done in hopes that they would adopt Christian beliefs, which slave owners believed would make slaves more obedient. As slaves increasingly were able to buy themselves out of slavery and descendants were born as free Blacks, Black education grew with primarily private funding to improve their skills in low-wage jobs, however, not to advance themselves socially. With the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, the “separate but equal” doctrine was introduced that allowed Black children to attend school, yet they still experienced unequal treatment. Later, the 1954 Brown v. Board decision overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine and allowed Black teachers to teach in white schools.
While this is just a snapshot of the historical events that influenced Black educational attainment, it demonstrates a few of the setbacks that have had a rippling impact that persists to today’s students. Due to these racial inequities, data shows that Black students have lagged behind in many of the benchmarks of learning examined by researchers, including the length of the school year, attendance, attainment, and illiteracy (Levine and Levine). Despite the delayed start to education in the U.S. and spillover effects on aspects such as socioeconomic status, the gap is gradually narrowing while both groups improve. For instance, “In 1870 about 10% of Black children and 54% of White children were enrolled in school; by 1991, 93% of each race was enrolled” (Levine and Levine). In the states where 85% of Black people lived, the average number of school days for Black students was 101, versus White students’ average of 128 days; in addition, Black students attended 76% of their shorter school year compared to White students’ attendance of 86% of their longer school year. Furthermore, illiteracy applied to 80% of the Black population versus 11.5% of the White’s in 1870, but both declined to below 2% by 1979.
With this insight into the history that inhibited Black education, Levine and Levine assert that we should continue to strive for improvement in academics and the educational system, but not be discouraged by any “failures” for quick solutions to decrease the gap rapidly. Given the magnitude of historical hindrances, it should be expected that the improvement in trends would occur more gradually. This is in line with what was mentioned about the education debt in the U.S. It is not about addressing the short term achievement gap, but rather about tackling the larger issue.
District-Level School Choices Influencing Ethnic Score-Gaps
In addition to the disparities that we see between public schools and private schools, researchers Blatt and Votruba-Drzal investigated how the expansion of public school choices – particularly in the form of magnet and charter schools – are associated with a widening of the White-Black and White-Hispanic achievement gaps in the U.S. Using the same SEDA dataset, in addition to the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data, the authors have found that this expansion has led to negative implications for structural education inequity, as it has disproportionately favored White students whilst undermining Hispanic and Black students. Blatt and Votruba-Drzal found that a higher enrollment in charter schools was correlated with larger White-Black test score gaps for both Math and English Language Arts (ELA). Furthermore, a similar trend was found for higher enrollment into magnet schools for the White-Hispanic test score gaps.
The reason for this relationship was identified to be linked to a greater increase in segregation when there is an expansion of charter and magnet schools (but with a stronger and more consistent association for charter schools). Thus, when a charter or magnet school is created, there is increased segregation between White and minority populations. This could be attributed to a number of reasons, such as self-selection (White parents wanting to go to charter or magnet schools that have better performance), minority students wanting to attend schools with similar racial profiles, etc. Thus, the expansion of these different public school systems has resulted in an increase in segregation, which has, in turn, resulted in a widening of the achievement gaps.
As a point of critique, the authors are aware that whilst the evidence is strong for how the White-Black achievement gaps will be influenced, the results are less robust for how the White-Hispanic achievement gap will be affected, as it only showed significant effects for certain statistical models that were explored. Despite this, however, it is not difficult to see how increased segregation can have detrimental impacts on educational outcomes for specific groups of people.
Conclusion
Based on the literature, one thing is certain. The education debt in the U.S. has no singular cause. The issue is a multi-faceted, multi-layered issue that cannot be distilled to a single problem that can be fixed with a single solution. However, based on the literature that attempts to explain these academic gaps, there is a common theme that appears to link them. Many of these explanations point to an increase in segregation of racial populations (between the white and minority populations) either directly or indirectly (in the form of income segregation). This segregation combines many theories that attempt to explain the academic gap. Segregation will result in behavioral influences being perpetuated within their circle, a lack of positive spillovers being allowed to benefit lower performing students, less funding going towards lower performing or minority-majority schools, the hyper-selection of highly educated Asian immigrants going towards specific states, etc.
It is interesting to consider that for many of these minority populations, an initial segregation (preventing access to education or forcing certain groups to have a certain type of education) was what has caused the education debt to accumulate in the first place. Despite years of progress and policies that have sought to overturn or rectify the effects of history, segregation still exists, causing the education debt to prevail. Policies should thus aim to target factors or areas that increase segregation within school districts and communities. It is important to identify what is increasing segregation, since it can be due to a plethora of reasons.