Regarding David's post, here's a thought I posted on SCSU Scholars. Suppose you ran a school in a predominantly minority neighborhood, and you actually tracked kids by ability level. Suppose, moreover, that you let everyone -- including parents -- know you were doing it. Because intelligent kids have been ostracized in America regardless of their skin color or ethnicity, one answer could be to put them together, let them excel in one room where ostracism would not be within the classroom. Between classes? Perhaps, but how much worse could that be than now?

Such classes have long been the object of the war against excellence that has existed in our schools for the last forty years. One wonders whether the decline in respect for learning that Cosby and Lee have observed in the black community aren't part of broader trends.