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Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance

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Abstract

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students’ academic achievement during college. We examine the role of “just” placement into high school academic tracks, “just” access to high-quality teachers, and “just” assignment of secondary schools’ resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen’s grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that “unjust” assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students’ own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools’ institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.

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Notes

  1. This research is supported by a grant to the authors from the National Science Foundation’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) [Grant Number DUE-0969286]. All errors and interpretations are those of the authors. The authors are grateful to Scott Fitzgerald for his insights about distributive justice and incisive commentary on an earlier draft. Direct all correspondence regarding this manuscript to the third author at RoslynMickelson@uncc.edu. We employ the term (in)justice to problematize the concepts we investigate in this study. Doing so denotes our perspective that the distributional practices of the educational institutions in North Carolina may or may not contribute to just outcomes for the students they serve.

  2. Although public education is the responsibility of the 50 states and is guided by their state constitutions and laws, the US Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Section 2) establishes that the US Constitution, federal statues, and treaties are the “the supreme law of the land” and thus set the broader legal framework within which all states must operate their public schools.

  3. The plaintiffs in Leandro were families and school districts in low-wealth regions in North Carolina who wanted the state to provide sufficient funding to bring their school budgets in line with the higher-wealth districts. The decision did not go so far as to mandate funding equality across the state, but it’s ruling that all students have a right to a “sound basic education” set a floor for provision of opportunities to learn, thereby taking an important step toward ensuring that students in impoverished areas would receive adequate educational opportunities (Dorosin & Largess, 2015).

  4. Like other southern states, North Carolina’s public colleges and universities were once formally segregated by race. The legal segregation of North Carolina universities ended in 1955 (Breen, 2010). At present, there are proportionately more White students attending historically Black colleges and universities in North Carolina than there are Blacks attending many of the predominantly White colleges. This demographic mix is often the case in the HBCU’s professional and graduate programs.

  5. Hanushek and Woessmann (2006) compared differences in student outcomes between primary and secondary schools across European countries that did and did not track their students. They report early tracking increased inequality in student outcomes. Schofield (2010) synthesized European literature on the practice and its outcomes.

  6. There are other positions regarding what entails distributive justice such as: Equality of opportunity and luck egalitarianism, welfare-based principles, desert-based principles, libertarian principles, and feminist principles.

  7. While there were Latinos, Asians, and American Indians in the sample, their numbers were too small to analyze thus we focus only on Black–White comparisons. Using list-wise deletion and focusing on only Black and White youth reduced the working sample to roughly 14,000 students from the population of 21,000 NC high school graduates who matriculated to a UNC campus in 2004.

  8. We note that our analytic sample of college-bound students leaves out high school graduates that never attended college, attended private, out-of-state, or 2 year community colleges.

  9. We adjust for the fact that North Carolina State University gives 4.333 for an A+. See http://policies.ncsu.edu/regulation/reg-02-50-03.

  10. The End-of-Grade (EOG) examinations are mandated standardized tests that students in North Carolina take in middle school. They are intended to measure student performance on the goals, objectives, and grade-level competencies specified in the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. We recognize that the use of students’ scores on a standardized examination in 8th grade is a problematic measure of prior achievement because it already encompasses a number of limitations given the bias of standardized tests and the fact that 8th grade scores are themselves the consequence of many experiences of distributive (in)justice students have had in the past. Nevertheless, while acknowledging these limitations, we utilize this measure as our approximation of students’ previous achievement (merit).

  11. The average is 64 % of White students at high schools in our sample and 27 % of students are on free/reduced lunch, the available measure of poverty we employ.

  12. Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 present predicted probabilities of freshman performance because there is no way we can know what the actual GPAs would have been at different values of some of our distributive justice variables. Using our model of predicted coefficients for all variables, we create hypothetical situations and predict what the GPAs would have been at different values of our distributive justice values when the values of all other variables are held to their average values. We are not able to generate predicted probabilities of track placement or racial composition of schools.

  13. Several scholars have suggested that a just distribution of educational opportunity absent greater justice in race, gender, and class stratification across other social institutions, organizations, and cultural norms is unlikely to eliminate inequality more generally (Anyon, 1997; Jencks et al., 1972).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Public Policy Program, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Martha Cecilia Bottia, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, Elizabeth Stearns & Stephanie Moller

  2. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Jason Giersch

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Bottia, M.C., Giersch, J., Mickelson, R.A. et al. Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance. Soc Just Res 29, 35–72 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-015-0242-x

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