Policy Issues

Abstract

Recent social science research, most notably the Coleman Report and the report on racial isolation prepared by the Commission on Civil Rights, has produced one virtually incontestable finding: there is massive inequality in public school educational achievement along social-class and racial lines. That is, minority group students and students of low socio-economic status score significantly lower than their white middle-class counterparts on a variety of verbal and numerical tests. The Coleman Report indicates that differences between racial and ethnic groups are present at the first grade, and that these differences are not diminished with additional years of schooling. The result is that twelfth-grade Negroes in the urban Northeast read at the ninth-grade level and do mathematics at the seventh-grade level. Southern Negroes, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Indian Americans achieve at even lower levels.