Racial achievement gap

More evidence showing that intellectual skills vary by race:

Compared with their peers in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, U.S. 15-year-olds are below average when it comes to applying math skills to real-life tasks, new test scores show.

The U.S. students were behind most other countries in overall math literacy and in every specific area tested in 2003, from geometry and algebra to statistics and computation.

The latest scores from the Program for International Student Assessment also show that white U.S. students scored above average, while blacks and Hispanics scored below it. That achievement gap has become the focus of federal education policy.