Social Background, Educational Attainment, and the Power of Performance: How Much Does the Test Score Gap Matter?

There have long been substantial and well-entrenched socioeconomic inequalities in educational achievement and attainment. Recent evidence suggests that class-based gaps emerge early in life and have been increasing over time. Scholars have demonstrated that class-based performance gaps are in place by the time children enter kindergarten, and that those gaps persist as children progress through the school years. Still others have shown that the class-based test score gap has increased substantially over time while the black-white test score gap has declined. Given these findings, and that measures of achievement such as these predict a host of later life outcomes, what are the implications for the life trajectories of individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds? And because college access and completion provide a major avenue to upward mobility, and test scores are highly associated with these educational attainments, how are test score gaps related to inequalities in educational outcomes? If these gaps have increased over time, what does this mean in terms of college for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially for more recent cohorts? Professor Michelle Jackson will explore these areas, elucidating the extent to which educational outcomes, defined as attending and completing college, are primarily explained by test score gaps and whether this might be changing over time. She intends to focus on three key questions. First, to what extent can test score inequalities explain income and race inequalities in access to selective and non-selective colleges? Second, can the variation by socioeconomic status in college admission and completion over time be attributed to the changing test score gap? Finally, if factors other than test scores are generating inequalities in educational attainment, which factors are most important? Jackson notes that if test score inequalities do not translate into college outcomes, or are now playing a less important role, policies that are exclusively designed to mitigate test score gaps as a means of improving college outcomes are likely to leave other inequality-generating mechanisms untouched.