Today’s New York Times on a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools that finds that middle-class black boys do no better on standardized tests than poor white boys:

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences…“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Versus Diane Ravitch on the relationship between poverty and academic achievement:

Poverty is the single greatest determinant of low scores.