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Recent studies have used increasingly complex methodologies to estimate the effect of peer characteristics--race, poverty, and ability--on student achievement. A paper by Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin using Texas state testing data has received particularly wide attention because it found a large negative effect of school percent black on black math achievement. This paper replicates the HKR models using state testing data from North and South Carolina and national testing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The replications fail to support the Texas results. In most models tested, black peer effects are small and not statistically significant, and in the few instances where effects are significant, they are much weaker than those found in Texas. Moreover, it appears that computational problems in the HKR study led to incorrect estimates for black peer effects. An appendix is included. (Contains 8 tables, 5 figures and 15 footnotes.)

Substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap. Our results, based on both Texas Schools Project (TSP) administrative data and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS), differ noticeably from other recent analyses of the black-white achievement gap by providing strong evidence that schools have a substantial effect on the differential. The majority of the expansion of the achievement gap with age occurs between rather than within schools, and specific school and peer factors exert a significant effect on the growth in the achievement gap. Unequal distributions of inexperienced teachers and of racial concentrations in schools can explain all of the increased achievement gap between grades 3 and 8. Moreover, non-random sample attrition for school changers and much higher rates of special education classification and grade retention for blacks appears to lead to a significant understatement of the increase in the achievement gap with age within the ECLS and other data sets. (Contains 20 tables, 2 figures and 42 footnotes.) An appendix is included which develops the decomposition presented in equation (1). [Support for this work has been provided by the Packard Humanities Institute.]