Race and the Mismeasure of School Qualityt

In large urban districts, schools enrolling more White students tend to have higher performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to explore this relashares reflects selection bias rather than causal school value added. In fact, value added in these two cities is essentially unrelated to White enrollment shares. A simple regression adjustment is shown to yield school ratings uncorrelated with race while predicting value added as well as or better than the corresponding unadjusted measures.