Not only have test scores in math and reading shown "solid gains" in the words of the New York Times, young black students have "significantly narrowed the gap" between themselves and white students. All this is based on official annual data from 28,000 schools across the country.Sounds about right to me...
What is especially revealing is that it is the young black students who have made the largest gains while older minority students "scored as far behind whites as in previous decades."
In other words, the children whose education has taken place mostly since the No Child Left Behind act show the greatest gains, while for those whose education took place mostly under the old system, it was apparently too late to repair the damage.
Mark's Remarks
I disagree with that last thing, about being too late to repair the damage. Those older minority students were there when you tried to "sneak past" NCLB. As time has gone on and the law has not disappeared and accountability has become the norm, these students were not held to the same standards as the younger ones. If they were, maybe the achievement gap would be less pronounced. However, the soft bigotry of decreased expectations is a hard force to move, especially since these older students had been exposed to it for so long.
