The Black-White Test Score Gap edited by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips. It is also, they write, the single most important obstacle to the efforts by both universities and employers to achieve racial balance. Narrowing the gap, therefore, is a crucial step toward reaching racial equality.
Test scores are sensitive to environmental change.
As evidence, they point out that I.Q. test scores throughout the world have risen since the 1930s and that the black-white score gap narrowed dramatically in the 1980s. Neither traditional liberal nor standard conservative explanations for the gap hold up. There is evidence that some school-based strategies for reducing the gap would help. These include smaller classes in early grades, screening new teachers to select those with high test scores, and raising teachers' expectations for black students by exposing them to programs that have already proven successful. But changes in schools are only part of the answer, because the score gap is already very large among students entering school.