A recent Census Bureau report has good news about African American education. In Educational Attainment in the United States, the Census Bureau reported that 86.2 percent of African Americans ages twenty-five to twenty-nine were high school graduates in 1997, continuing an upward trend in the educational attainment of African Americans that began in 1940.

For Whites between twenty-five and twenty-nine, the high school completion rate was 87.6 percent, meaning there is no statistically significant gap in the high school completion rates between African Americans and Whites. In other words, as far as high school completion is concerned, there is statistical parity between the youngest adult cohort of African Americans and Whites.

My first reaction to this data was pleasure. It is not that this smaller gap is unexpected -- it has been closing for decades. It is just that when we look at the distance we have come, this small gap is amazing. In 1940, for example, 26 percent of Whites but only 7 percent of African Americans over age twenty-five were high school graduates. Considering the youngest group of adults, those twenty-five to twenty-nine, 41.2 percent of Whites, compared to 12.3 percent of African Americans, were high school graduates. In a fifty-seven year period, the number of Whites graduating high school has more than doubled, while the number of African Americans has increased sevenfold. No matter how you slice it, that's progress!

Of course, high school attainment doesn't mean much in a high-tech world where more education than high school is needed. So I'm hoping that educators will not use these data to suggest that enough has been done to improve African American educational attainment.

However, I've already heard that line run by one of my conservative counterparts in the world of punditry. Eventually, she said, all the gaps will narrow. You don't need affirmative action or special programs to help.

She could not be more wrong. Although the gap has narrowed with college completion, proportionately, twice as many Whites as African Americans finish college. According to this latest data, for twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds, 28.9 percent of Whites and 14.1 percent of African Americans have completed college (the college completion rate is much higher -- at 40 percent for Asian Americans; it is also a somewhat lower 10 percent for Hispanics).