But the wisdom of the ability paradigm and its use of early test scores would also seem to depend on how good its tests are. If they do a good job of measuring abilities that are indispensable to later school and life functioning, and if they can predict the level of that functioning well, then this paradigm could have considerable value, its flaws in relation to minority and low-income students notwithstanding. But if they measure a difficult-to-specify set of abilities and predict future performance only weakly, that would be another story.

In this regard, several features of standardized tests are worth keeping in mind. They are not designed to test some known, agreed-upon conception of intelligence. They are built bottom-up, by empirically identifying a set of items that predict school performance, not top-down, from some understood conception of what human intelligence is. When an item turns out to predict, we don't know exactly why. It could be measuring a critical cognitive ability, or it could be measuring something more incidental about a person that affects, for example, his or her cultural fit at the next level of schooling. Thus it is very difficult to know what abilities or skills ability tests test.

Nor do they predict particularly well. The SAT, for example, correlates .42 with freshman grades (it correlates considerably less well with subsequent grades and life outcomes). This means that it measures about 18 percent of the characteristics, whatever they are, that determine freshman grades. It also means that even large point differences on the test--say, 100 to 200 points--do not tell you much about underlying differences in skills, and have very little predictive value. As my colleague Jay Rosner and I have said before, standardized tests are to real school performance what free-throw shooting is to basketball playing--not unrelated, but capturing only a small set of relevant skills.

Most of the testing companies say all of this in their guidelines, much like the caveats that accompany drug advertisements on television. But our need for a system to allocate opportunity is such that, like people who need the advertised drug, we tend to ignore the caveats.

After a talk I gave recently, an African-American school administrator from a suburb of New York City cautioned me. He said the black-white test-score gap was the only leverage he had for focusing more of his district's resources on minority students. I could see his point. He had been living with inattention to these problems until news of the gap hit the local newspapers. But I have a larger fear: that whatever funds he wins to address this gap will be applied through the ability paradigm. Minority students will not be given a richer, more compelling education. They will likely be given a skills-focused, remedial education that will itself become a contingency of their identity, virtually guaranteeing the persistence of the race gap long beyond the Sandra Day O'Connor deadline. And the process of downwardly constituting them in this way will be understood not as a problem in the system of allocating educational opportunity but as a perhaps natural outgrowth of group differences in ability measured early in life.

In the years leading up to the Brown decision, the challenges to achieving an integrated society were legal. Today they are educational: to loosen the grip of the ability paradigm on the academic fate of African-American, Latino and poorer students. To this end, I hazard a few recommendations:

1. As much as possible, replace the word "ability" in our educational lexicon with words like "skill level" and "educational readiness." These terms say no more than we know, and thus keep us self-conscious about assuming more than we know.

2. When placements are made to accommodate lower skill levels, do not allow them to become life sentences. Provide clear curricular pathways to upward mobility and see to it that some students ascend that pathway as role models.

3. As much as possible, especially early in schooling, focus high-expectation, demanding and enriched schooling on lower-scoring students. Emphasize getting them to identify with and be excited about their schooling.

4. Discourage the use of ability and aptitude tests in favor of tests based on specific curriculums to which all students have access.

5. Develop and use multiple, low-stakes, cumulative, curriculum-based assessments rather than single-sitting, high-stakes tests--including for use in college, graduate school and professional school admissions.

6. Develop and use additional metrics for such signs of student readiness as motivation and desire, breadth of life experience, degree of experience in the relevant domain, work discipline, maturity, etc.

7. Much of the current test-score gap comes from high-scoring students' use of supplementary education tutoring, after-school and weekend programs, test-prep courses, etc. Coalitions of school, church, community and civil rights organizations should develop and extend these "shadow" educational resources to minority and low-income communities--extending Head Start programs into supplementary school programs that serve older children, for example.

Major changes in society and in organizations happen when everyone starts working on the same thing. Then things tip. This was true of the Brown decision itself. It finally happened when lawyers, social scientists, judges and educators all came together to make it happen. To get rid of test-score gaps, the same coming together is necessary. So in this year of commemorating Brown, let us remember the resolve that brought it about.

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Claude M. Steele, the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, is the author, with Asa Hilliard III and Theresa Perry, of Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students (Beacon).

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