young black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. argues that some black students "have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular be- haviors (i.e., education, ballet, etc.) due to the fact that they may be deemed a person who is trying to act like a white person (a.k.a. selling-out). Such a label, in some neighborhoods, can carry penal- ties that range from being deemed a social outcast, to being beaten or killed." Fryer cites the recollections of a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known then as Lew Alcindor, who had just entered the fourth grade in a new school and discovered that he was a better reader than even the seventh graders: "When the kids found this out, I became a target. . . . It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything Id ever been taught was right. I got all As and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new lan- guage simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide." Fryer is also one of the authors of "Understanding the Black- White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School." This paper     takes advantage of a new trove of government data that helps reliably address the black-white gap. Perhaps more interestingly, the data do a nice job of answering the question that every parent-black, white, and otherwise-wants to ask: what are the factors that do and do not affect a childs performance in school?       In the late 1990s, the U.S. Department of Education undertook a monumental project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The ECLS sought to measure the academic progress of more than twenty thousand children from kindergarten through the fifth grade. The subjects were chosen from across the country to represent an ac-