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Last week's federal report card on math achievement was a welcome piece of good news for D.C. public schools. Although the District still lags far behind the country's top-performing systems, the report card showed fourth- and eighth-graders making strides at a faster pace over the past two years than cities including Atlanta, Chicago and New York. But what remains embedded in the latest numbers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress is the persistent achievement gap between African American and white students both locally and nationally. The average scores of white D.C. fourth-graders over the past two years grew from...

WEST PALM BEACH — Incited by poor graduation rates in Palm Beach County, a national civil rights group sued the state Thursday, alleging it failed to ensure that all students receive the high-quality education guaranteed under the Florida Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the school district directly last year, but the case was dismissed on the grounds that the district was not the right party to sue. Now the national and state arms of the ACLU are bringing a class-action suit against the state on behalf of Palm Beach County students and parents. The lawsuit, filed in Palm...

A forthcoming study on Hispanic children’s cognitive skills underlines the challenges the country faces in aspiring to close the achievement gap between these children and their white and Asian counterparts. Hispanic “children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older,” reports the New York Times. “The drop-off in the cognitive scores of Hispanic toddlers, especially those from Mexican backgrounds, was steeper than for other [low-income] groups and could not be explained by economic status alone. . . . From 24 to 36 months, the...

The children of Hispanic immigrants tend to be born healthy and start life on an intellectual par with other American children, but by the age of 2 they begin to lag in linguistic and cognitive skills, a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, shows. The study highlights a paradox that has bedeviled educators and Hispanic families for some time. By and large, mothers from Latin American countries take care of their health during their pregnancies and give birth to robust children, but those children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach...

On Monday, the daily presidential tracking poll for Rasmussen Reports showed that Barack Obama no longer has the job performance approval of a majority of Americans. His overall approval rating was down to an even 50 percent. Released on the same day was a demographic breakdown of that rating: only 41 percent of white Americans approve of the job he’s doing, while 97 percent of blacks approve and 58 percent of all other ethnicities combined approve. The approval rating of blacks jumps off the page because it’s such a glaring anomaly — or at least it should be. Upon seeing...

Amid yet another round of budget negotiations, Democrats made a surprising and controversial proposal this week: Suspend the state's high school exit exam. The move was largely inspired by philosophical worries: Democrats on the influential budget conference committee say they cannot in good conscience mandate the exam for students while at the same time propose to slash education funding by millions of dollars more. "When the state is making cuts that could lead to a shorter school year, fewer teachers and larger class sizes, it doesn't seem realistic to expect the same results as before the cuts," said Assembly Speaker...

Loyola College's Jesuit tradition calls for it to serve students who did not start with every economic, social or geographic advantage. Widespread research, meanwhile, shows that standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT favor those from privileged backgrounds and that such tests are less predictive of college success than excellent grades and a rigorous course load in high school. So, in search of a more diverse and accomplished student body, Loyola has joined a growing list of colleges and universities that no longer require applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. ... Test-optional policies might calm the widespread...

STAMFORD, Conn. — Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years. But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of...

With the Class of 2006, California began requiring high-school students to score at least 60 percent on a test of 10th-grade English and at least 55 percent on eighth-grade math to graduate. With numerous chances to take this exit exam, 90 percent of all students pass it before the 12th grade and graduate with a diploma. Why, then, do the relative few not pass and not graduate with a diploma? Sean F. Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford University, is seeking answers. Using records of the San Diego, San Francisco, Fresno and Long Beach school districts, Reardon compared...

Blacks and Hispanics lag behind whites for higher-paying jobs at the largest rates in about a decade as employment opportunities dwindled during the nation's economic woes and housing slump. Census data released Monday show an increasingly educated U.S. work force whose earnings didn't always seem to match up with its potential. ... Among those 25 and older last year, 86.6 percent had graduated from high school, up from 85.7 percent the previous year. It was the biggest increase since 1992, with record percentages of people earning diplomas across all racial and Hispanic categories. The share of people with at least...

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving black and Hispanic scores, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency. Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test, administered last year, than did their counterparts decades back. But nearly four decades of scores on the same test show that their most important academic gains came not in recent years,...

It's fair to say the tide of elite opinion now runs solidly against the use of the SAT in college admissions. Last fall, the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC) released a report calling on its members at last to act on their skepticism by taking steps to decommission the test for use at their schools. When the report was presented at the group's convention last September, the only complaints were that it didn't go far enough in condemning the test. "It's a lousy test," one NACAC member said heatedly on the convention floor. "It's destructive of what all...

... The unhappy fact is that different ethnic groups exhibit different profiles of results on tests. Attempts to devise a test on which this does not happen have all failed, across decades of effort, criticism, and analysis. Nobody knows why this is so; but the fact that it invariably, repeatedly, and intractably is so, makes testing hazardous — and ultimately pointless — under current employment law. Yet still employees must be selected somehow from applicant pools, and there must be some clear, fair criteria for their subsequent promotion. The state of the law now is that almost anything an organization...

The lagging performance of American schoolchildren, particularly among poor and minority students, has had a negative economic impact on the country that exceeds that of the current recession, according to a report released on Wednesday. The study, conducted by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, pointed to bleak disparities in test scores on four fronts: between black and Hispanic children and white children; between poor and wealthy students; between Americans and students abroad; and between students of similar backgrounds educated in different parts of the country. ... In New York City, an analysis of 2007 federal test scores for...

It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. Now, however, a nationwide study shows the magnitude of the gap: the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs. But that urban-suburban gap, which in part is due to hundreds of failing city schools that some researchers call dropout factories, was far wider in some areas. In Cleveland, for instance, where the gap was largest, only 38 percent of high school freshmen graduated within four years, compared with 80...

... In a heated debate that began in the journal Nature and spread online, they are calling for an end to research on possible links between race, gender and intelligence. "Stupid science" and "evil science" are the more polite terms being hurled. But the arguments for and against the research are not what you'd expect. Political correctness—as in, it's offensive and destructive to even ask if women as a group, say, are less intelligent than men—doesn't merit more than a brief nod, thank goodness. Instead, argues neuroscientist Steven Rose of Britain's Open University, the problem is that both race and...

"It's had serious repercussions," Swihart said. "These young adults who were raised in the '80s, now in their 20s and in the workplace -- those who received praise, rewards and prizes for everything they did without working very hard -- often are very entitled and self-absorbed

The NYT reports that during a press phone call yesterday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan "unleashed a barrage of dismal statistics about the South Carolina schools" whose Governor, Mark Sanford "has told the Obama administration that he would not accept some $577 million in educational stimulus money for South Carolina unless he could use it to pay down state debt." During the putative barrage of dismal statistics Duncan noted that "only 15 percent of the state’s black students are proficient in math and that the state has one of the nation’s worst high school graduation rates." This is a pot kettle...

For decades, high-school students have taken community-college courses to dress up their resumes and prepare for college. Now, competitive middle-schoolers in Florida are flocking to sign up for high-school classes. For parents and students, it's a great chance to get ahead. And school districts have something else to brag about: seventh- and eighth-graders completing courses such as Algebra II Honors and biology that had been reserved primarily for ninth- and 10th-graders. But the nation's foremost scholars in middle-school education are worried the fast-growing trend is leaving minority children behind. They also question whether the practice is legal because, nationwide, it...

... An equity and excellence gap appears when traditionally underserved students comprise a smaller percentage of the successful student group than the percentage these students represent in the graduating class. For example, if 20 percent of students in a state’s graduating class are African American, true equity and excellence would not be achieved until at least 20 percent of the students scoring 3 or higher on AP Exams are African American. • 18 states have closed the equity and excellence gap for Hispanic or Latino students. • 16 states have closed the equity and excellence gap for American Indian or...