They have lower scores on standardized tests and lower graduation rates than their white peers, and what is more vexing, the results stay that way even when researchers control for socioeconomic status and other factors.

Race, in other words, matters. As much as factors such as income or English-language proficiency matter, they cannot fully explain the disparity seen in Wisconsin schools between white students and students of color. And Wisconsin's "achievement gap" is the largest in the nation.

Yet discussions of this subject can be difficult and fraught. It's too easy to sound racist at worst or pessimistic at best. But the explanation for discrepancies between white kids and minority kids is not genetic; racist theories of the human mind have been discredited and should be thrown out. It's also not true that minority students don't try as hard, and in our experience it is almost never true that a teacher would consciously exclude or discriminate against students of color.