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For years, Wisconsin has held a troubling distinction in American education: the largest racial achievement gap in the nation. On the 2024 fourth-grade reading assessment from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap between white and African American students in Wisconsin was 45 points.
The scale of the disparity has fueled intense debate. Some policymakers argue the gap is primarily the result of systemic racism or unequal school resources. But does the data back up this notion? Recently, I conducted a deep dive to try and determine what factors are truly driving this gap in the Badger State.
This new analysis of Wisconsin’s statewide Forward Exam indicates that a significant share of the gap is driven not by racism, but by factors strongly correlated with race: especially poverty, disability status and family stability. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but in reality it is key for figuring out how best to address the problem.
Common policy solutions often focus on skin color as the driver of disparities. For instance, when he was state superintendent, now Gov. Tony Evers said that one cause of the racial achievement gap is that too many people who work in schools “look like me.” Current Superintendent Jill Underly has said that “culturally responsive teaching” and diversification of the education workforce are among the keys to addressing the achievement gap.
But it’s not clear those steps are the right approach. Using data from the 2022-23 edition of the state’s Forward Exam, I conducted what is known as a mediation analysis. Mediation analysis attempts to figure out how or why something causes an effect by identifying the middle step —the “go-between” factor — that explains the relationship. The results of one such mediation analysis with poverty as the go-between is shown below.
The direct pathway shows that as the percentage of African American students in a school goes from 0 to 100 percent, the proficiency rate on the Forward Exam would be expected to decline by about 39%. However, there is the “behind the scenes” path to consider as well. A school with 100% African American students would be expected to have poverty rates 69% higher than a school with no African American students, and high poverty is in turn correlated with about a 41% reduction in proficiency rates. The analysis shows schools with higher percentages of African American students also tend to have far higher poverty rates, which then play a major role in academic outcomes.
Decades of research show that economic disadvantage strongly affects academic performance. Students growing up in poverty often face barriers that can hinder learning, from unstable housing and food insecurity to limited access to books, educational materials and early learning opportunities. In Wisconsin, poverty rates among African American families are particularly high. More than 27% of African American residents in the state live below the poverty line, placing Wisconsin among the highest in the nation on that measure.
New Report Explores Role of Race and Socioeconomics in Achievement Gaps
Another factor influencing achievement gaps is disability identification. African American students are identified for special education services at higher rates than their white peers in both Wisconsin and the nation as a whole, particularly in categories that rely heavily on subjective judgment, such as emotional disturbance or intellectual disability. Students receiving special education services on average score lower on standardized tests and have lower graduation rates than students without disabilities.
The Forward Exam analysis found that disability status explains a smaller but still measurable portion of the achievement gap. About 3.6% of the relationship between race and proficiency was mediated by differences in disability rates.
Some influences on student outcomes cannot be directly measured in the school-level data that we have access to. One of the most significant is family structure. Research consistently finds that children raised in two-parent households tend to experience stronger academic outcomes and fewer behavioral challenges. Two parents simply have more time and resources to devote to a child’s development, from supervising homework to reading together at home.
In Wisconsin, however, the rate of married African American adults is the lowest in the country—about 22.6%, well below the national average of 31% for African Americans nationwide. Although the precise impact cannot be quantified in school testing data, decades of social science research suggest family stability plays a meaningful role in shaping educational outcomes.
Survey data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2020 — the most recent year for which there was a large enough sample size for each group in Wisconsin — shows that African American families in Wisconsin are less likely to read regularly to young children than white or Hispanic families. About 55% of Black families report reading to young children fewer than four days per week, compared with 33% of white families. It is important to note that this factor is likely also correlated with poverty, but teasing out any independent effect between the two is not possible with existing data.
Those early literacy experiences matter. Foundational reading skills built before kindergarten strongly influence later academic success across subjects.
Wisconsin’s disparities are real and deeply concerning. But the research indicates that race itself is not the primary driver of the state’s academic divide. Poverty, disability status, and family stability together explain a large share of the gap.
Strategies focused narrowly on racial identity — such as diversity training or race-based programs — may miss the deeper issues shaping student outcomes. Other approaches, such as focusing aggressively on early literacy, have shown progress in other states. Mississippi, as has been well-documented in The74, dramatically improved reading outcomes through policies aligned with the “science of reading,” which emphasize systematic instruction in phonics, vocabulary and comprehension. A significant achievement gap still exists in Mississippi, but at 25 points it is significantly smaller than Wisconsin’s, even as proficiency levels rise in the state across the board.
Closing the gap will likely require policies that address the broader social and economic realities affecting students’ lives: reducing poverty, strengthening families, improving early literacy and targeting support to disadvantaged students regardless of race. Reduction will also require a focus on what can work in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where about 44% of the state’s African American students attend school. This district has been plagued by decades of mismanagement and poor student outcomes across the racial spectrum.
If Wisconsin hopes to move up from the bottom of the nation’s achievement-gap rankings, solutions will need to look beyond race, and stop accepting the soft bigotry of low expectations.
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