Cohort racial composition: the impact on student achievement

Abstract

I examine the effect racial composition of a classroom has on student achievement. Utilizing a first differencing approach to perform adjacent cohort-to-cohort comparisons, I can allow for randomness of births within a given community to produce variation of racial composition, while indirectly controlling for school and community level variables by utilizing cohort-to-cohort comparisons. I find that racial composition does influence student achievement, but many are potentially practically insignificant, although, a high concentration of Black students may be beneficial for their own math scores, and White students may have English scores that are negatively affected if the percentage of Black students increases. Overall Asian students benefit from a higher percentage of students that are Asian.