Tulane’s National Center for Research on Education Access & Choice Receives Funding to Study Inequality in K-12 Education System

The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) at Tulane University received $340,757 in funding from the William T. Grant Foundation to support a three-year research project to understand whether state policy can support equity in advanced course-taking. The goal is to learn how state course-level graduation requirements affect overall advanced course offerings, advanced course-taking, and graduation rates and whether these policies affect patterns of equity in advanced course-taking for Black and Hispanic/Latinx students. 

Launched in 2018 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, REACH is one of the premier research centers in the country focused on school choice policies and educational inequality. The center specializes in applied econometric work on the causal effects of a variety of public policies on improving educational access for disadvantaged students.

Research on racial and ethnic inequality in K-12 schools typically focuses on the gap in test scores between white, Black, and Hispanic/Latinx students. However, test scores alone do not provide reliable information about how a student will perform in life beyond high school. Advanced coursework in high school is a key element of education that structures work lives, civic engagement, and health later in life. And persistent gaps in advanced course-taking by race/ethnicity and gender contribute to lifelong inequalities.

According to REACH Associate Director of Research and Principal Investigator Jamie Carroll, “Our school system has a long history of excluding Black and Hispanic/Latinx students from advanced coursework and of separating students’ pathways by gender. We hope to shed light on how state policy can reduce intersectional gaps in advanced course taking so all students can be successful later in life.”

This project will build directly upon the center’s prior work, expertise, and data collection measuring inequality in public schools. Specifically, it will add measures of intersectional inequality in advanced course-taking by race/ethnicity and gender from the Office of Civil Rights to its National Longitudinal Schools Database, which includes information on all public and private schools in the U.S. from 1990 through 2020. Throughout the grant funding period, the center will translate its findings into reports to be shared with the public. This work will provide a better understanding of structural inequalities and potentially change the course of inequality in the education system in the U.S. 

Dr. Carroll is a terrific scholar and I'm glad to see her talent and expertise in student access to educational opportunity being recognized by the W.T. Grant Foundation," said REACH Director and Tulane economics professor and chair, Douglas N. Harris. "This is a very important project." 

The William T. Grant Foundation works to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in the academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes of young people ages 5-25 in the United States. Through its grant programs, like the Reducing Inequality program that funded this project, the Foundation aims to reduce inequality in the lives of young people in the U.S.