academy. These students performed substantially better than they did in their old academic settings and graduated at a much higher rate than their past performance would have predicted. So the CPS school-choice program did help prepare a small segment of otherwise struggling students for solid careers by giving them practical skills. But it doesnt appear that it made anyone much smarter. Could it really be that school choice doesnt much matter? No self- respecting parent, obsessive or otherwise, is ready to believe that. But wait: maybe its because the CPS study measures high-school stu- dents; maybe by then the die has already been cast. "There are too many students who arrive at high school not prepared to do high school work," Richard P. Mills, the education commissioner of New York State, noted recently, "too many students who arrive at high school reading, writing, and doing math at the elementary level. We have to correct the problem in the earlier grades." Indeed, academic studies have substantiated Millss anxiety. In ex- amining the income gap between black and white adults-it is well established that blacks earn significantly less-scholars have found that the gap is virtually eradicated if the blacks lower eighth-grade         test scores are taken into account. In other words, the black-white in- come gap is largely a product of a black-white education gap that could have been observed many years earlier. "Reducing the black- white test score gap," wrote the authors of one study, "would do more to promote racial equality than any other strategy that commands broad political support." So where does that black-white test gap come from? Many theories have been put forth over the years: poverty, genetic makeup, the "summer setback" phenomenon (blacks are thought to lose more ground than whites when school is out of session), racial bias in test-