The Achievement Gap: Visualizing Racial Inequalities in the American Education System

7 min readMar 9, 2021

This post and project was co-created with Richard Locarni.

Historically, the American education system has seen racial inequalities as a result of historically racist policies such as redlining and segregation, the effects of which can still be seen in the modern education system. Additionally, contemporary policies, such as education spending being proportionate to property taxes, continue to perpetuate this educational divide.

This post originated as part of the MQM: Business Analytics Spring 2021 Data Competition. Our goal for the project was to visualize the racial education gap on a national level and then connect it to policies such as redlining. We used New York as a case study of what is happening on a national level. Check all visualizations in Tableau Public!

To accomplish our task, we used publicly available education data on both national-level and on a city-wide level for New York City. The data for national analyses was obtained from many sources including the United States Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics. The data for New York City was obtained from the New York City Department of Education and the New York State Department of Education. Data sources will be linked at the end of the article.

The data cleaning phase consisted primarily of cleaning up tables and joining them so they could be used in Tableau visualizations.

The National Education Gap

On the national level, the education gap has lessened over the last several decades, but the effects of historically racist policies are still apparent. One metric analyzed is the high school dropout rate among white and Black students over the last 50 years (see below).

In 1967, the national dropout rate for white high school students was 18%, compared to 35% of Black high school students. The large width of this gap can be attributed to many racial-based policies of the era, including redlining and education spending. This gap has steadily lessened since the late 60s, with white high school students in 2019 dropping out at a 5% rate while 6% of Black high school students had dropped out. The same is also true for the high school graduation rate gap which has lessened over the past decades.

Figure 2: High school graduation rates. Blue line represents Black students and orange line represents white students.

These trends have some positive aspects as a lessening of the dropout-rate-gap may lead to improvements in the economic outcome gaps and the generational nature of poverty and wealth. However, there is still a great deal of work to be done in terms of racial equality in the American education system.

Figure 3: High school students enrolled in college. Blue line represents Black students and orange line represents white students.

For instance, we also analyzed the rates of college attendance among white and Black students over the last 50 years (above). In 1967, 35% of white high school students continued to college, compared to 24% of Black students. This gap has as also narrowed over the last 50 years, but not to the same degree as high school dropout rates. In 2019, 45% of white high school students attended college compared to 42% of Black students. Although this metric seems to be trending in a positive direction, the bachelor’s degree completion rate paints a more troubling picture.

For the 10 years between 2000–2010, only 14.19% of Black Americans completed a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education. This is a stark contrast to the 26.12% of white Americans that completed a bachelor’s degree. Potentially, there may be some remaining barriers in higher education that limit the success of Black undergraduate students.

Another disparity exists in public vs private schooling metrics. Only about 8.5% of Black Americans are enrolled in a private institution compared to 16.1% of white Americans (below). This is another important gap to pay attention to as private schools generally offer higher levels of education compared to public schools.

Figure 5: Percent of student population enrolled in private schools.

A very consequential result of the education gap is evidenced by test scores. Black students consistently under-perform white students in both math and reading as shown in Figure 6. This might actually be the reason fewer Black students are enrolled in undergraduate degrees.

Figure 6: Math and reading scores for white and black students.

A New York Analysis

We decided to use New York City (NYC) as the city-based case analysis for our study because of both the size and the demographic nature of the city. The effects of redlining can still be observed across the five boroughs. In many cases, the most heavily red-lined districts are still some of the most economically disadvantaged in the city today.

Figure 7 below shows a side-by-side representation of the redlining maps, percent of students living in poverty, and percent of students who identify as Black by school district. There is a strong connection between red-lined districts and poverty. The same is true if you compare the percent of minority students and NYC’s Economic Need Index as shown in Figure 8. The “Economic Need Index” is a statistic generated by the NYC Education Department that incorporates variables such as students in public housing and students on government lunch plans to showcase more in-detail economic need than just poverty rate. It appears that simply repealing historical redlining laws has not been enough to lift these communities out of poverty. There remains much more to be done.

Figure 8: Minority student percentage and economic need index.

How does the redlining in NYC connect to the education gap in the city? During our analysis, we found a statistically significant positive correlation between percentage of minority students in a district and economic need in that district. For every 1% increase in the minority population of a community, the community’s poverty level increases, on average, by 0.39% as seen in the correlation below. Poorer students will face greater barriers in their educational attainments than more well off students.

Figure 9: Correlation between minority students in district and levels of poverty and economic need.

For instance, school districts with higher levels of poverty have lower math test scores on average. This was one of the most stark findings about New York City. For the New York State math test, a 1% increase in the level of poverty in a district leads to, on average, a 0.79 decrease in test score.

Figure 10: Correlation between poverty, economic need, and average math scores in school districts.

In this model, 71% of the variation in test scoring can be explained by a community’s level of poverty (Figure 10). There is also a strong correlation if math scores are tested against the Economic Need Index (0.57). Therefore, improving the economic well-being of families in disadvantaged communities may have a large impact on the educational outcomes of minority students.

New York City seems to be working on this issue. Schools with higher levels of economic tend to receive higher levels of funding per student. However, the r-squared of this regression is rather low at 0.13 and there are many schools with high levels of economic need that fall below the average city-wide spending per school.

Figure 11: Correlation between economic need and funding in NYC.

Spending in disadvantaged schools is highly important as a way to provide more resources to students who are staying behind. However, that is not sufficient to end the achievement gap. As we have seen in NYC, highly segregated and redlined communities still hurt from those policies in many aspects of life, including education. To improve the student outcomes in these disadvantaged communities, cities, states, and the nation as a whole need to also acknowledge and work to mitigate the vast socioeconomic gap resulted from redlining. This will improve the standing of minority students, allowing them to take full advantage of their education and see improvements on their post-high school outcomes.