Decomposing ethnic achievement gaps across multiple levels of analysis and for multiple ethnic groups

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new mediation-based framework to decompose ethnic achievement gaps across multiple levels of the education system and among various ethnic groups, providing richer insights.

Contribution

It extends existing methods to analyze multiple ethnic groups and hierarchical levels, enhancing understanding of achievement disparities.

Findings

Reformulated decomposition approaches as mediation models

Applied extensions to Colombian high school data

Generated nuanced policy insights from multi-level analysis

Abstract

Ethnic achievement gaps are often explained in terms of student and school factors. The decomposition of these gaps into their within- and between-school components has therefore been applied as a strategy to quantify the overall influence of each set of factors. Three competing approaches have previously been proposed, but each is limited to the study of student-school decompositions of the gap between two ethnic groups (e.g., White and Black). The authors show that these approaches can be reformulated as mediation models facilitating new extensions to allow additional levels in the school system (e.g., classrooms, school districts, geographic areas) and multiple ethnic groups (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic, Asian). The authors illustrate these extensions using administrative data for high school students in Colombia and highlight the increased substantive insights and nuanced policy implications they afford.