Raleigh Publishes on Adoption’s Transracial Achievement Gap
Liz Raleigh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Carleton College, and her colleague Grace Kao (University of Pennsylvania), recently published a paper, “Is there a (transracial) adoption achievement gap?: A national longitudinal analysis of adopted children’s educational performance” in Children and Youth Services Review. Although much of the social sciences literature consistently finds that adopted children do not, on average, perform academically as well as children in biological families, Raleigh and Kao’s research is one of the first studies to dig a little deeper by disaggregating adopted children by their type of adoption.
Liz Raleigh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Carleton College, and her colleague Grace Kao (University of Pennsylvania), recently published a paper, “Is there a (transracial) adoption achievement gap?: A national longitudinal analysis of adopted children’s educational performance” in Children and Youth Services Review. Although much of the social sciences literature consistently finds that adopted children do not, on average, perform academically as well as children in biological families, Raleigh and Kao’s research is one of the first studies to dig a little deeper by disaggregating adopted children by their type of adoption. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a national sample of American school aged children, they show that there is a great deal of variation among adopted children in terms of their educational performance. They find that white children adopted by white parents tend to have lower standardized test scores than white children in biological families. These results are unexpected since adoptive parents tend to have more resources (such as income and education) than other parents. On the other hand, they find that transracially adopted children — that is non-white children raised by white parents — tend to perform as well, if not better, than white children in biological parents. Importantly, these differences tend to grow over time as the children progressed from kindergarten to third grade. Raleigh and Kao’s results underscore the importance of recognizing the diversity within the adopted child population and suggest that white adopted children may be a particularly vulnerable child population that is likely to be overlooked given these children’s race and socioeconomic status.