This research investigates causes of the widening Black-White gap in dropout rates during the 2000s using two cohorts of National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, NLSY79 and NLSY97. The authors found four factors which contributed to the widening of the Black-White gap: school suspension policies, peer impact, fatherless households, and the student-teacher relationship. Logistic regression and decomposition analysis suggests that the gap would have been narrowed by 2.62% if all conditions had remained the same. This implies that factors that have been considered to impact the Black-White gap in the past do not fully explain the current racial gap. Ongoing and potential societal changes demand a new research model to understand the racial gap.