Illegitimacy and the achievement gap -- baltimoresun.com: A report on big city schools was released this week with The New York Times reporting it under this headline: 'Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower than Expected.' Expected by whom would be a fair question, but we find no answer to that in the story.
Data mined from the National Assessment for Educational Progress, and focusing on black male students in the fourth and eighth grades, shows only 12 percent of black fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared to 38 percent of white fourth-graders.
Only 12 percent of black boys in the eighth-grade were proficient in math, compared to 44 percent of white boys.
'Poverty alone,' says the Times story, 'doesn't seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.'
Though racial achievement gaps have remained intractable despite massive efforts to narrow them, the scope of the gap shown by this report is stunning.
