We are grateful to Alexandra (Sandy) Wigdor of the National Research Council for proposing that we should write this paper and to Timothy Ready, David Grissmer, Sara Stoutland and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

By the time that young people are age 23, the relationship of hourly earnings to scores is clearly evident even within racial groups. This statement is based on our analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 cohort). It is a nationally representative sample of roughly 12,000 youth who were ages 14 to 21 in 1979. Ninety-five percent of the sample took the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) in 1980. See Ferguson (1995) for a discussion of the relationship of AFQT scores to earnings disparities both within and among racial groups, even after taking years of schooling and several family background measures into account.

The baseline date here for Hispanics is 1975 because they were not separately identified in NAEP reports before 1975.

Ferguson (2001b) has explored some possible reasons.

Of course, there are also large disparities within each group. And, there are many whites and Asians who do poorly and there are many blacks and Latinos who do quite well.

Southern whites were not ready to share their schools. Immediately following the decision, the Court provided for a “cooling off” period. As reported in the Atlanta Constitution Daily Newspaper on May 18, 1954, “Not until next autumn will [the Court] even begin to hear arguments from the attorneys general of the 17 states involved on how to implement the ruling. . . . It is not time to indulge the demagogues on either side nor to listen to those who always are ready to incite violence and hate.” An article in the Jackson Mississippi Daily News was less open-minded. Entitled, “Bloodstains on White Marble Steps,” it proclaimed, “Human blood may stain southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be in the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building. White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation. Miscegenation leads to mixed marriages and mixed marriages lead to mongrelization of the human race.”

The impact of the finance cases on achievement has not been extensively studied and would be difficult to estimate with much accuracy.

Farkas and Hall believe that well-trained tutors for students in the early elementary grades would be a much more efficient alternative use for Title I funds. Farkas and his associates have developed such a program, called Reading One-on-One. It has shown positive results and its designers have been frustrated at times by the refusal of some schools to adopt it, even where existing uses of Title I funds are clearly inefficient and ineffective.