A CODA FOR THE BUSH YEARS. He was describing the ongoing gap in test scores between whites and blacks, but he could have been summing up the past six years in many other ways as well:

�Not only have all boats stopped rising, but the boats that are under water are sinking further down,� said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to the study.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.