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The 35 percent of African-American youth living in poverty are the most visible victims of what is often called the achievement gap. But black children of all socioeconomic levels perform worse on national tests and graduate in fewer numbers than their white middle-class peers. A 2009 study by the U.S. Department of Education s National Center for Education Statistics found that African-American students scored, on average, 26 points lower than white students on their reading and math tests. Some say, as Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray did in their 1994 book, The Bell Curve, that the cause is genetic. And though The Bell Curve has been discredited in scientific circles, the idea that IQ is somehow linked to race has been slow to retreat. Others, like Cornell University researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg, believe that physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement, as they wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our best efforts at narrowing the gap nationally think No Child Left Behind haven t worked. But locally, there are now signs of hope. At the Harlem Children s Zone s Promise Academy charter schools, at least 97 percent of third graders scored at or above grade level on a statewide math test in 2008, outperforming the average scores of both black and white children in New York City and New York State. | 
