At the approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, the US is still struggling to close the wide gap that separates the achievement of African American and Latino students from white and Asian students. For the past half-century, reformers have wielded a range of strategies including desegregation, compensatory education and lawsuits. None has been completely successful. In the past 15 years, however, scholars, judges, and advocates for poor children have developed a new, more promising strategy: public policies should be based on calculations of adequacy--what it actually takes in teachers, books, facilities, and other resources to educate each child. Final Test tells the story of this new strategy and of the great stakes involved for American children and the nation's public schools. If the states require children to pass tests for promotion and graduation, then the states have a reciprocal responsibility to provide those children adequate opportunities to learn the materials on which they're to be tested. Final Test shows how that supposedly implicit bargain is evolving into a set of explicit legal and legislative principles that open a new frontier in education policy and that may well establish the next arena in the battle for civil rights. On the fiftieth anniversary of Brown, no story is more timely. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.