A Diagnostic Analysis of Black-White GPA Disparities in Shaker Heights, Ohio

This quantitative case study explores how race, family background, attitudes, and behaviors are related to achievement disparities among middle school and high school students in Shaker Heights, Ohio. ¹ The purpose is to inform the search for ways of raising achievement and reducing disparities. Until recently, well-to-do suburbs have escaped the spotlight of research and journalism about disparities in achievement among racial groups. Now, however, high-stakes testing and the standards movement are forcing school leaders to acknowledge that, even in the suburbs, students of color are underrepresented among high achievers and overrepresented among students who get low grades and score poorly on standardized exams.

Shaker Heights is an inner-ring suburb on the east side of Cleveland and widely regarded as a model community. Residents have worked over several decades to maintain a relatively stable mix of whites and African Americans as well as a school system that is reputedly among the best in the nation. Graduates go to college in large numbers, many to elite institutions. Even so, as the national movement to raise standards has gained momentum, Shaker Heights, like other districts, is confronting achievement gaps. At one extreme, black and white students in Shaker Heights achieve top scores on college entrance exams. At the other extreme, students are at risk of failing the exam that Ohio now requires for high school graduation. The latter group is disproportionately black.

The focal measure of achievement in this study is the student's grade point average (GPA) from the most recently completed semester. ² Black and white students have both high and low GPAs. Nonetheless, the black-white GPA gap equals roughly one letter grade. The mean GPA is in the neighborhood of C+ for blacks and B+ for whites.

Overview

The data for the study come from a survey developed by John H. Bishop at Cornell University, called the Cornell Assessment of Secondary School Student Culture. Virtually all seventh through eleventh graders in Shaker Heights completed the survey at the end of the spring semester in 1999 and are represented in the data for this study. Often, quantitative studies in education use very small data sets constructed for very narrow purposes. Other times, they use large national data sets that include only a small sample from any particular school, and the contextual differences between-schools can make it difficult to interpret findings about within-school processes. Because Shaker Heights has only one middle school and one high school, all students in each grade attend the same school. Therefore, no between-school effects confound the analysis. The sample is large and complete enough to allow for analyses of subgroups, and the questions in the survey are richly textured enough to capture a variety of important distinctions.

The data have a standard set of limitations. First, they are self-reported by students. Therefore, some measures are less reliable than if the data had come from official records or from observations by trained, objective investigators. Second, methodological requirements (for example, longitudinal data and exogenous sources of variation) necessary to distinguish causal relationships from mere correlation could not be met. Therefore, to be cautious, the text will usually say that the explanatory variables "predict" grade point averages, as opposed to "cause" them. Finally, while some of the issues may deserve separate analyses for different grade levels, the analysis of grade-level differences is beyond the scope of this paper.

Six key findings and interpretations resulted from analysis of the data. First, the characteristics of black and white youth in Shaker Heights that predict black-white GPA differences implicate skills, much more than effort, as the main reasons for the GPA gap.

The analysis of the GPA gap in this paper uses a number of explanatory variables as predictors of GPA in a standard statistical procedure called...