Black educational advantage in the inner city

Research on contemporary urban poverty has overwhelmingly focused on the plight of African American young adults residing in deteriorating inner city neighborhoods. Rarely are whites of the inner city explicitly or even implicitly addressed. This article examines the extent to which urban disadvantage differentiates young adult educational outcomes by race. Proceeding from a Wilsonian framework, we predict that given their shared inner city community context, no significant differences in educational attainment are anticipated between blacks and whites. Longitudinal data from the Pathways to Adulthood study are employed to construct and estimate models of educational attainment for a sample of 1829 black and white children born between 1960 and 1964 to inner-city families. Findings show that race exerts a significant influence on educational outcome independent of factors advantaging one race over another. We found that African American inner city children were significantly more likely to graduate from high school and college compared with similarly situated white children.