The racial achievement gap in education is the major civil rights issue of our time. “…The glaring racial gap… between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other… is an American tragedy and a national emergency for which there are no good excuses. It is the main source of ongoing racial inequality, and racial inequality is America’s great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed. Our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students is both an educational catastrophe and the central civil rights issue of our time.. . .True, the black high-school graduation rate has more than doubled since 1960, and blacks today attend college at a higher rate than whites did just two decades ago. But the good news ends there. Equal years warming a seat in school do not mean equal skills and knowledge, and the hard fact is that non-Asian minorities are leaving high school without the training that will enable them to do well in a society whose doors are finally wide open. This is not a story about lower IQs. It is a story of kids who have the ability to learn, but who have been tragically — and needlessly — left behind.” —Abigail Thernstrom (a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute) and Stephan Thernstrom (professor of history at Harvard University), coauthors of the recently published No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Boston Globe