Racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in academic performance and educational attainment are stubborn features of the U.S. educational system. These disparities are neither inevitable nor immutable, however. They have been produced by—and so may also be reduced by—a welter of social and economic policies, social norms and patterns of interaction, and the organization of American schooling. 

At this conference, leading scholars of education policy and educational inequality will present new research on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of academic achievement gaps and educational disparities, and on the effectiveness of various strategies to eliminate them. 

In addition, the conference will introduce the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), a dataset of measures of academic achievement and achievement gaps in every public school and school district in the U.S. SEDA is based on student performance on over 200 million tests administered in grades 3-8 from 2009 through 2013. The SEDA data will be made publicly available in early May, 2016. The conference will include several training sessions for participants interested in the data and statistical methods underlying the construction of SEDA and in methods for analyzing and interpreting the SEDA data.