Adjusting for academic preparedness when estimating enrollment disparities in advanced high school coursework

Abstract

Whether racial disparities in enrollment in advanced high school coursework can be attributed to differences in prior academic preparation is a central empirical question in sociological research, with important implications for education policy. However, the regression-based approaches to this question that are predominant in the literature suffer significant methodological limitations by implicitly assuming that students are similarly prepared if and only if they have similar values on a selected set of academic background measures. Here, we provide a general technique to estimate enrollment disparities in advanced coursework between similarly-prepared students of different races that is less vulnerable to these limitations. We introduce a novel measure of academic preparedness, a student's ex-ante probability of "success" in the course, directly adjust for this single measure in a regression model of enrollment on race, and assess the robustness of estimated disparities to potential unmeasured confounding. We illustrate this approach by analyzing Black-White disparities in AP mathematics enrollment in a large, urban, public school system in the United States. We find that preexisting differences in academic preparation do not fully explain the under-representation of Black students relative to White students in AP mathematics, and contrast our results with those from traditional approaches