Abstract
The achievement gaps among different racial and socioeconomic groups have been a dilemma for K-12 educators for decades. Although complex and insolvable the issues seemed, the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) gave a momentum to creating equity and racial equity policies that addressed academic disparities in school districts during the 2000s. Equity policy and racial equity policy continue to spread today despite the absence of our knowledge on the policy outcomes: how effective have the policies been in closing academic disparities? Did the policies make a difference to large-disparity groups over the years? This quantitative study examined the trends of districtwide test scores, racial disparities, and socioeconomic disparity from 2004 through 2017 at 93 school districts in 14 states. Using descriptive statistics and ANOVA, this study compared the trends at district level between the districts that adopted equity or racial equity policy, and the districts that did not adopt such policy. The three disparity groups studied were Black-White, Hispanic-White, and Socioeconomically disadvantaged (ECD)-White disparity. The study period needed to be divided into two periods of 2004–2014 and 2004–2017 due to a confounding factor in 2015. The results from the 11-year period showed that policy districts far outperformed non-policy districts and the differences were statistically significant in all variable groups. The test results of the 14-year period were found to be skewed too severely from the confounding event to provide meaningful data. The overall results led to conclusions and recommendations that may be useful to educators and policy makers who are currently implementing or planning to implement equity policy in the future.
Keywords: equity policy, equity policy outcomes, racial equity, racial equity policy, educational equity, education policy, education policy outcomes, academic achievement, achievement gap, racial gap, racial disparity, socioeconomic disparity, equity policy implementation, education policy effect, district size, test score trend, disparity trend, district leadership, equity leadership, distributive leadership