It's a familiar refrain in American education: African-American children score lower on standardized tests, graduate high school at lower rates, and are considerably more likely to be suspended or expelled than the general population. Two recent reports, one from the Council of the Great City Schools and one from the American Institutes for Research, reveal that the achievement gaps are still large between African-American and white students. But concerted efforts in certain states and districts have shown that the historical trend doesn't have to remain the same, and overall the picture may have brightened slightly over the past decade or two, according to statistics and anecdotal observations. Still, some activist groups and educational researchers fear the systematic federal evaluations conducted under the No Child Left Behind law have given districts and states powerful incentives to move lower-achieving students out of their general populations to special education placements, alternative schools, or elsewhere--perhaps dovetailing with an urgency to create zero-tolerance discipline policies. Long-term data on the much-discussed achievement gap between white and black students shows uneven improvement over the past few decades. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results since 1980 show that gaps in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores have either narrowed or, at worst, stayed the same. But the most current data, from 2009, still show great gaps. For example, only 12 percent of fourth-grade black male students performed at or above proficiency in reading on the 2009 NAEP, compared with 38 percent of white males. And in eighth grade, only 12 percent of black males across the country performed at or above proficiency in math, compared with 44 percent of white males.