The leading cause of death for black men 15 to 34 is homicide.

They weren't born convicted felons.

It's a pretty good bet their mommas didn't raise them to be felons.

Low level street criminals and dealers ain't exactly rolling in dough or so many of them wouldn't still be living with their mothers.

What the racial gap isn’t

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, professor of social policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and co-editor with Meredith Phillips of the 1998 book The Black-White Test Score Gap, has seen a long line of theories — including some of his own — collapse under scrutiny since he first started studying the racial gap in the 1960s. The first to fall was the one implicit in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. "It became pretty clear pretty quickly that eliminating segregation didn’t eliminate the test-score gap," Jencks says.

Many of the discredited theories have survived, though, for want of a solid alternative. "We had no explanation of our own, and you can’t lick a dumb theory with no theory," Jencks says.

But in the last several years, a string of studies has helped to change that, including one being published in April by Roland Fryer, who now teaches at Harvard University, and his former University of Chicago colleague Steven Levitt.

Their study found that black children and white children with the same general characteristics (socioeconomic measures, age, parents’ educational achievement) start kindergarten on an equal academic footing. By the end of the first grade, however, black students fall three months behind — that is, within the first two years of schooling.

This and other studies place the problem squarely with the schools. Perhaps that will help dispel some of the following myths about the racial gap in educational performance:

Poverty. Research has never supported the claim that the race gap is primarily a matter of socioeconomics. "I don’t think that anybody who looked at the data thought that — ever," says Jencks.

Socioeconomic factors do correlate to academic achievement, and black children are disproportionately poor. But this accounts for about a third of the racial gap — at most.

"We’d rather it was a poverty issue," says Jencks, "because we know how to write checks." But it isn’t.

Family culture. Many argue that African-American families are culturally less inclined, or less able, than white families to cultivate an education-driven home culture for their children. It’s true that black children are slightly less likely, prior to entering kindergarten, to be regularly read to or taken to a library. But this gap has been closing significantly in the last 10 years, with no corresponding narrowing of the achievement gap. In fact, black pre-kindergarteners are now more likely than their white peers to be taught letters, words, or numbers in their homes three times a week.

Black and white students spend a roughly equal amount of time on homework, and have roughly equal levels of absenteeism from school. If anything, black parents help their children with homework, and discuss national news with them, more often than white parents.

Single parenting. Conservatives are also adamant about another supposed cultural difficulty — single parenting. But the facts don’t support the theory. The mother’s level of education matters, but after controlling for that factor, Jencks and Phillips found that marital status had almost no effect on children’s test scores.

Test bias. This common explanation for the gap cannot be dismissed out of hand, but it also cannot account for most of the gap. Cultural bias in testing is a real phenomenon; IQ tests of the early-20th century are now seen as suffering from this bias. But today, both the methodology and specific questions in standardized tests have been questioned, including in a recent article in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. (The Educational Testing Service, in Princeton, New Jersey, which administers the SAT, tracks racial disparities on answers to individual questions but does not make those data public.) Now, most academics agree that test bias accounts for only a tiny portion of the current gap, thanks to modern techniques for removing bias.

Genetic inferiority. Although almost nobody professes this theory aloud anymore, it would be naive to assume it isn’t lurking in the backs of many minds. As recently as 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray suggested it in their book The Bell Curve.

Unsurprisingly, the data confirm that innate ability is not an issue. "There ain’t nothing wrong with these kids," says Jeff Howard, founder of the Efficacy Institute, an educational-consulting firm based in Lexington. "In the hands of adults who know what they’re doing, they can quickly become proficient."

live in abject poverty

professional gang class ……. in a multi-billion-dollar black market