How One Suburb's Black Students Gain - New York Times: "SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio
IT is hard to pick up an education article these days without reading about some excited governor or mayor who is busy closing the achievement gap. Test scores of minority children go up a few points, and there stands the politician on the 6 o'clock news declaring that merit pay for teachers or laptops in the classroom or the federal No Child Left Behind law is closing the gap between white and minority children.
Here in this integrated, upper-middle-class Cleveland suburb, you would think they would be boasting. African-Americans' combined math and verbal SAT scores average 976, 110 points above the national average for black students. The number of black sixth graders scoring proficient on the state math test has nearly doubled in three years and is more than 20 percentage points above the Ohio average for blacks.
Top black seniors get into top colleges. In recent years, Charles Inniss went to Princeton, Karelle Hall to Dartmouth, Winston Weatherspoon to Georgetown and Danielle Decatur to the University of Virginia.
While many a politician discovered the gap in 2002, when No Child Left Behind required that test data be separated by race, Shaker Heights has battled it for decades."
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