Race/Ethnicity and Geographic Disparities in Learning- Adjusted Years of Schooling in the United States, 2009-2016

Abstract

Learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) is a metric of education that tracks both schooling completion and schooling quality. It has been used to rank the development of countries, especially as it relates to human capital. Though it can also be used to track smaller units of geography, until now it has found no such use. In this paper, I create metrics of years of schooling, learning quality, and learning- adjusted years of schooling for all school districts in the United States, school years 2009-2010 through 2015-2016. These metrics are further disaggregated by race/ethnicity, grade, and subject area where applicable. I also aggregate metrics to create state rankings and race/ethnicity comparisons in digestible formats. Most states have increased their average LAYS across the timespan observed in this paper. However, I find that large disparities in learning persist, across all states and between races/ethnicities, while disparities in school completion are comparatively smaller. Additionally, I find that Black-White gaps are growing in most states, while Hispanic-White gaps are staying relatively constant. This descriptive dataset is well-suited for analyses of policy impact at the local level, state- and county-level comparisons when aggregated, and for analyzing spatial disparities in other key social dimensions in future studies.