Chapter 7: Racial and Linguistic Achievement Disparities: Mathematics Course-Taking in Urban School Contexts

This chapter analyzes nationally representative quantitative data from the second (2004) wave of the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS: 2002–04) to examine the relationship between, schools’ urbanicity, teachers’ preparation, students’ racial-ethnic identification, degrees of English-language proficiency (ELP), mathematics course-taking measures and twelfth-grade mathematics achievement. Highlighting relevant literature on urban education achievement disparities and employing a hierarchical linear model (HLM) method to account for students’ clustering in specific schools, this chapter advances the argument that the effects of urban school contexts and students’ characteristics (primarily race-ethnicity), ELP, and course-taking opportunities are complex, systematic, and significant. Our findings revealed that while the concentration of low-income students within schools has a negative effect on achievement, higher proportions of students enrolled in college-preparatory courses attenuates that effect. Additionally, course-taking resulted as the most influential factor on achievement. Further, while ELP had a negative effect on the achievement of Latino and Asian linguistic minority students (LMs), relative to non-LMs, the effect of ELP on achievement was more pronounced for Latinos. Beyond increasing opportunities to learn, such outcomes suggest a reconsideration of urbanicity not only as an indicator of achievement disparities but also as a marker of specific pedagogical opportunities that have the potential to redress inequitable outcomes associated with urban schools.