As teachers and students readied themselves for a new school year, two important reports on education were issued, one bearing good news, the other bad.

First the bad: The Department of Education said that a gap between test scores of black and white students which had narrowed during the 1980s widened again in the 1990s, with the average black 17-year-old reading only as well as the average white 13-year-old.

Particularly troubling is that the gap is widest among children of best-educated parents. This suggests that millions of hard-working black parents who have moved into the middle class have been unable to attain educational equity for their children. It’s not that white achievement has gone up, rather it’s that black achievement has fallen back to the level of the late ’70s.

Why? This is a profound and urgent question because these results make a mockery of the foundations of American aspiration. Doing the right thing is supposed to pay off.

In searching for answers, social researchers must face the issue squarely and without fear that their findings might be offensive or unpopular. Children’s futures are at stake. That should be enough to override trepidation of the kind that silenced research after 1965 when the infamous Moynihan report was branded as racist for suggesting that family breakup hindered black progress.

It’s good that society can now speak more frankly. Apparently, one explanation already can be dismissed. This gap in scores is not a reflection of innate intelligence. The prominent researcher Abigail Thernstrom, popular in conservative circles and co-author of two books on the issue, said flatly: “This is not an I.Q. story … this is a story about schooling.”

Indeed, in cities like Houston and Philadelphia where universal pre-school and after-school programs and smaller classes have been employed, the gap did not widen. Other factors are, of course, possible. Teachers may still have lower expectations of black students regardless of class. Black students may elect, or be placed in, less challenging courses. And some youth subcultures may celebrate alienation and nonachievement, making it unpopular for many black students to work to their potential. Whatever the reasons, they must be rooted out and squarely addressed.

Better news came from California, where English immersion appears to be improving the reading and other test scores of Spanish-speaking children, often at striking rates. Thus, the catastrophe predicted by proponents of bilingual education has not come to pass. After a super-heated campaign two years ago, voters compelled the state to limit bilingual schooling in favor of a cold-bath approach that emphasized instruction in English.

So far, so good. In the heat of the Proposition 227 campaign, conservatives especially were guilty of cultural scare tactics that seemed to overwhelm the best interests of children. Now, perhaps with quieter voices, California, Arizona and other states can proceed in a way that preserves treasured Hispanic cultures and language while effectively moving Spanish-only children into an English-speaking mainstream that offers wider and brighter opportunity.



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