Over the past few decades, African American students across the nation have made real gains in academic achievement. Yet, too many African American students still are not getting the quality education they need and deserve, and the performance of African American students lags far behind that of white students. These gaps in achievement are driven by gaps in opportunity — African American students receive fewer of the within-school resources and experiences that are known to contribute to academic achievement.
In this brief, we’ve gathered the best available national data on African American student achievement and attainment in both K-12 and higher education, as well as on the unequal opportunities that contribute to these outcomes. We hope that these data will be used to spark conversation — and more important, action — about how to accelerate improvement and raise achievement for African American students across the nation.
Explanation:
African American students make up a substantial proportion of enrollment nationwide. About 15 percent of all public school students — or about 7.9 million students — are African American. And in some states, African American students make up a far larger portion of public school enrollment: Half of students in Mississippi and 45 percent in Louisiana are African American. About a third of students in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, and South Carolina are African American. Opportunity and achievement for African American students matter for all types of communities and schools. While many African American students, 46 percent, attend urban schools, more than half, 54 percent, now attend schools in suburbs, towns, or rural areas. And while about half of African American students attend schools where the majority of students are African American, 26 percent attend schools where most students are white.
In both fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math, performance among African American students has risen dramatically in recent years, and gaps between African American and white students have narrowed. It’s important, of course, to look at student performance across subjects and grades, but these two measures are especially critical. Research shows that without solid reading skills honed in elementary school and a firm grasp of math by the end of middle school, it is difficult for students to do well going forward.
Between 2003 and 2013, scale scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rose faster for African American students than for white students in both fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math.
And these gains reflect real improvement in skills and knowledge. Over the past two decades, the percentage of African American eighth-graders who lacked even basic math skills on NAEP has fallen from 81 percent to less than half. Students at that level struggle with things like applying arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and with using diagrams, charts, and graphs to help solve problems. In fourth-grade reading, the percentage of African American students without even basic skills — those who have trouble locating information in a passage, identifying the main idea of a text, or interpreting what a word means — has fallen from 69 percent to 50 percent.
During the same time period, the percentage of African American students performing at a proficient or advanced level more than doubled in fourth-grade reading and has increased sevenfold in eighth grade math. Far too few African American students are performing at these levels — but the changes represent marked improvement over past performance.
These improvements are encouraging. However, too few African American students demonstrate the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in school and in life. And despite gap-narrowing, African American students still lag far behind their white peers on NAEP.
In both fourth-grade reading and eighth grade math, African American students are about two and a half times as likely as white students to lack basic skills and only about one-third as likely to be proficient or advanced.
African American students are increasingly taking the steps necessary for success after high school. Over the past five years, the number of African American high school graduates taking the ACT rose by 22 percent, and the number taking the SAT rose by 12 percent. What’s more, the number of African American graduates taking at least one AP exam more than tripled between 2002 and 2012, outpacing the growth in the number of African American graduates.
But despite these gains, there’s still a long way to go. African American students remain underrepresented among AP test-takers: 15 percent of graduates in the class of 2013 were African American, but African American students made up only 9 percent of those who took AP tests. And even fewer — 5 percent — of those who passed an AP exam were African American.
