Education tragedies.

No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning

By Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $26

Few Americans today would disagree that people of all races should have an equal chance to succeed in our society and that education is the key to a lucrative professional career. Unfortunately, achievement often closely tracks racial lines. No Excuses, the latest book by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, examines this persistent racial gap and its underlying causes.

Scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress exam, which tests basic skills in core subjects, reveal that black and Hispanic high school seniors scored similarly to white and Asian eighth graders--a four-year knowledge gap. A disproportionately large number of blacks and Hispanics score below their white and Asian counterparts in every subject area, and evidence suggests efforts to narrow this gap have failed so far.

Are standardized tests racially biased? Racial disparities alone, say the Thernstroms, do not indicate discrimination, and theories explaining disparate performance do not hold up under close scrutiny. But, more to the point, they argue, all students, regardless of race, need to learn basic math and reading skills and how to demonstrate that knowledge on a test. And an alarming number of black, white, and Hispanic students drop out of college because they simply can't do the work.

Race itself, of course, poses no barrier to achievement. So, why are the public schools failing to prepare our children for college and the professional world? The obstacles to learning apparently come from the students' learning environment.

First, the Thernstroms argue that teachers themselves need more training in effective communication and in their subject areas. They also believe the contemporary obsession with smaller class sizes hurts students when schools quickly hire mediocre instructors just to bring down the teacher-student ratio. Another reason for poor teacher quality is a lack of incentives. Public schools hire and fire unionized teachers on the basis of seniority, not efficacy. And teachers feel social pressure from not to exceed minimum expectations because it reflects poorly on their peers.