A few months ago, I wrote here that black people come in at the bottom of just about every index of academic achievement "Education: what blacks owe themselves," Aug. 26). It's sad but true that whether it is a measure of math skills, literacy, college entrance exam scores, level of educational achievement or academic readiness, black people can almost always be counted on to bring up the rear. My theory is that this is because we don't tend to have a lot of generations in our families who were well-educated because of a host of historical factors, starting with the...