>Minnesota is widely acknowledged to have the best primary and secondary
>education system in the country (Iowa is its biggest contender). This fact,
>coupled with your stat, makes me want to utter some bold, unsubstantiated
>(and perhaps irrelevant) claim like: If black children are given a decent
>system to work in they can outperform white students. Instead, I'll just
>say that this is a plausible counter-argument to the racist stereotypes.
The excellent economist Patrick Mason gave paper at the New School a year or so ago, in which he said that based on all the usual econometric goo-gahs used to predict educational attainment (parents' education and income, etc. etc.), black kids actually exceed statistical projections of their years of schooling.
Many of Patrick's papers are collected at <http://www.nd.edu/~pmason/>.
Doug