Black Students Close Curriculum Gap, Study Says
By one academic measure, a little-noticed finding from that U.S. Education Department report showed that black high school students have caught up to their white classmates.
The study of the transcripts of 2005 high school graduates found that 52 percent of the black graduates had completed a four-year curriculum of at least "mid-level" difficulty. For their white counterparts that year, the rate was 51 percent -- a one percentage point difference that experts said was statistically insignificant.
Three surveys in the 1990s had found that black graduates trailed white graduates on that measure by a significant margin; the gap was 11 percentage points as recently as 1994. AMIT PALEY in the Washington Post.