Minority Students Desire to Achieve

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The yawning achievement gap separating Black and Latino students and their White and Asian counterparts has been one of the most vexing problems facing American educators for decades.

The gap has existed since the earliest days of standardized testing. It closed substantially between the 1960s and 1980s, as schools became better funded and better integrated and more Blacks and Latinos made the jump to the middle class. But progress stalled afterward, baffling analysts and causing them to look for answers not in school but in the lives of children. Some concluded that Black students, in particular, are part of an "anti-intellectual culture" that ridicules high achievers as "acting …