How many observers—of whatever race, class or political orientation—can honestly say that they expected such outcomes? Such results are a challenge, if not a devastating contradiction, to prevailing beliefs about either heredity or environment, as those terms are conventionally used. Neither the genes said by some to be a crippling intellectual handicap, nor the poverty said by others to blight minority children’s educational prospects, turned out to be such insurmountable obstacles as many across the ideological spectrum believed.
