ABSTRACT
Unequal achievement among population groups is a source of unrelenting frustration to all who care about education and social equity. Historically, Black-White differences have dominated the discussion of unequal achievement and opportunity in the United States. For many generations, African Americans have lagged behind Whites in every available measure of cognitive ability and achievement (Loury, 1998). A difference in mean IQ between Blacks and Whites of about one standard deviation (15 points) has been amply documented (Jencks, 1972; Scarr & Weinberg, 1976). At the tails of distributions, moderate differences in means translate to gross differences in representation. When group means differ by 15 points, only 16% of the lower-scoring group exceeds the mean of the higher-scoring group (Gustafsson & Undheim, 1996). Although a gap of this magnitude is well established in Black-White comparisons, a similar lag can be found for Hispanic Americans (Rodriguez, 1992).
