Racial Diversity and School Performance

This particular article is a detailed study of the effects of racial diversity among public schools. Taking into account racial diversity, school performance, and school location, the data of this study is based on public-school fourth graders in the state of Georgia for the 2011-2012 school year. The article goes on to explore the positive correlation between achievement scores and peer-effects. As stated in the article, racial peer-effects mean that low achieving peers gain more by being exposed to high achieving peers than high achieving peers lose by being exposed to underperforming peers.

However, it then goes on to explain that there is a negative correlation when it comes to racial diversity and achievement scores, which could be the result of schools with insufficient provisions. The article is separated in a total of 7 sections, following the research data accordingly. Section 1 is a simple introduction to the study, while the second section focuses on the local spillover effects and student mobility in Georgia public schools. Section 3 looks at the microeconomic background. It goes on to elaborate that they follow de Bartolome (1990) model since its analytical approach fits the paper for 3 specific reasons.

First, de Bartolome’s model considers a public educational system at the local level where communities express their preferences on school inputs. Second, the model considers two nearby communities where the mobility patterns are determined by peer effects and school quality. Third, de Bartolome shows how perfectly integrated, mixed, and perfectly segregated communities can be present. Fourth, his model will be useful in interpreting our results. The following part introduces the main points of de Bartolome’s model. Section 4 examines the school-level variables which were collected from the Georgia Department of Education, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (2015), and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES,2015) which only covered the 2011-2012 academic school year.

The article goes on to explain the empirical strategy and estimation approach in section 5 which bore the results that come along in section 6 and conclusions of section 7. Based on the evidence and data provided in this paper, the results showed a positive correlation when it came to both racial diversity and achievement score in the Georgia public schools. If racial integration represents a winning strategy to stimulate the achievement score, this study suggests that it should be implemented where the total effect is stronger, that is, in suburban and town schools.

The study conducted in this article concluded that racial diversity does, indeed, play a role when it comes to academic achievement in the case of the students in the Georgia public schools.ReflectionAs a Hispanic student who went to public school in a low-income neighborhood for most of my early years, I was quite interested in this article. However, I personally believe there should be more in-depth research on how racial diversity affects students academically, especially in this day and age where there is an influx of minorities in the United States. It’s important that students are not segregated, but instead taught together in one classroom so that they may interact with children from all types of cultures and backgrounds. Essentially, racial diversity in classrooms depends on location.

In the 2011-2012 school year, 52 percent of the Georgia elementary public schools were white majority, 40 percent African-American majority, 7 percent Hispanic majority, and 1 percent Asian majority. Some locations are predominately white with few ethnic students. For example, a small town in Utah might not exactly have a racially diverse classroom. Whereas in southern Florida, there is a wide range of ethnic backgrounds in a classroom. This article specifically decided to look at the public school students in the state of Georgia. African-American majority schools are mostly distributed in urban and suburban areas and in particular in the southern part of the Atlanta Metropolitan Area.

Despite the data only pertaining to Georgia fourth graders, racial diversity and academic achievement applies to all classrooms and grade levels nationwide. If racial integration represents a winning strategy to stimulate the achievement score, this study suggests that it should be implemented where the total effect is stronger, that is, in suburban and town schools. As previously mentioned, I believe that perhaps there should be more studies that deal with racial diversity, especially in suburban and town schools in order to get more accurate data.