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African Americans score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. The gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent ofAmerican whites on almost every standardized test. This statistic does not imply, of course, that all blacks score below all whites. There is a lot of overlap between the two groups. Nonetheless, the test score gap is large enough to have significant social and economic consequences.
Closing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote racial equality in the United States than any other strategy now under serious discussion. Judging by the currently available statistical evidence, eliminating the test score gap would sharply increase black college graduation rates, making them nearly equal to white rates. Such a change would also allow selective colleges to phase out racial preferences in admission, which have long been a flashpoint for racial conflict. Eliminating the test score gap would also reduce racial disparities in men's earnings and would probably eliminate the racial disparities in women's earnings.
Narrowing the test score gap would require continuous effort by both blacks and whites, and it would probably take more than one generation. But we think it can be done. This conviction rests on three facts. First, blackwhite differences in academic achievement have narrowed since 1970. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data on 17-year-olds show that the reading gap narrowed more than two-fifths between 1971 and 1994. The math gap has also narrowed, though not as much. Five major national surveys of high school seniors conducted since 1965 show the same trend. So do surveys of younger students. The gap narrowed because black children's scores rose, not because white children's scores fell.
Second, even IQ scores clearly respond to changes in the environment. IQ scores, for example, have risen dramatically throughout the world since the 1930s. In America, 82 percent of those who took the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 scored above the 1932 average for individuals of the same age. The average black did about as well on the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 as...