Reardon found some of the largest black-white achievement gaps in the U.S. in the college towns of Berkeley, California, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Charlottesville also displayed a significant black-white achievement gap.
Reardon hypothesized that low-income black students in college towns are adversely affected by the level of academic competition in these communities, where many children have highly educated parents.
“The pattern is even more striking and evident in these data, but I think people knew before that this was a problem in some of those places,” Reardon said.
Reardon acknowledged a flaw in his Virginia testing data — he said he did not know middle-school students take different math assessments in seventh and eighth grades, depending on what level of math they take in those years. He said these assessments soon would be removed from the dataset.