Rifraf – All excellent points that no politicians or big media outlets will touch with a ten foot pole…However, the performance problems are exacerbated by major cultural problems (which, while highly correlated to IQ are not immutable).

And just to add another point – There are lots (hundreds, maybe thousands) of native Newark students (also Irvington, EO, and Orange) who illegally attend other public school (in Union, Belleville, Bloomfield, Maplewood, West Orange) by claiming residency with extended family. They literally take NJTransit and commute to school. Nobody seems to mention that either. I grew up in Jersey City and went to Dickinson HS (another mostly-crappy inner city high school, but not as bad as others) and I knew a couple kids that were doing that.

There is no evidence that special schools, private schools, charter schools, etc. are able to substantially raise the performance of a non-selected group of lower class African American students. In two recent papers Robert Bifulco (of U Conn) and Helen Ladd (of Duke) showed that charter schools in North Carolina have failed completely in raising the performance of poor blacks (in fact their segregation and performance is WORSE in charter schools!). Brian Gill of RAND in a new study of Philadelphia’s charter schools and privately managed public schools has found the same thing, no improvement of African American students’ academic achievement.

As Richard Rothstein has shown in several articles, all the claims by Kati Hancock and Abigail Thernstrom that special public schools or special private and charter schools can raise the academic performance of mainstream poor African American students are invariably BOGUS BOGUS BOGUS. Abigail Thernstrom sputters on about the high academic achievement of Rafe Esquith’s class at Hobart Elementary School in LA, but she neglects to mention that there are essentially no African American students in the class, instead they are mostly Korean-American students, well DUH!, as Arthur Jensen showed in his classic review article “Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability” (June 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law) Korean-Americans as East Asians have higher IQs than most Americans, so no surprise that they end up in Esquith’s gifted class at Hobart Elementary. Similarly NCLB has totally failed to raise the performance of African American students, the states that claim otherwise have dumbed down their achievement tests in order to have more students show up as proficient; but the black students always remain about one standard deviation lower than whites in Math achievement which pretty much mirrors their one standard deviation lower IQ test measure of intelligence.