Through the 1960s, African-Americans earned much less than whites--even when their cognitive abilities (as measured by test scores) were similar. By the end of the century, however, many believed that employment discrimination had attenuated to such a degree that the gap in labor-market outcomes could be explained almost entirely by differences in test scores. Consequently, reducing the well-known gap between the test scores of black and white students is now seen as an important way to reduce economic and other forms of inequality. In response, the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics commissioned Mathematica Policy Research, a contract research firm, to find out whether 1) employers are now playing fair and 2) schools are doing their part in narrowing the black-white test-score gap. Accepting the challenge, the authors discovered that the answer to the first of these questions was both more hopeful and much easier to provide. Their 2001 report, "Educational Achievement and Black-White Inequality" (Jonathon Jacobsen, Cara Olsen, Jennifer King Rice, Stephen Sweetland, and John Ralph) essentially confirmed earlier studies, providing additional evidence that most of the remaining wage gap is due to differences in cognitive skills, as measured by test scores.