African American Fact File

An Analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) led William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University, found no disparity in academic performance between highly religious African American and Latino students from "intact" families and white students.
The findings refute assertions that were made in the controversial and best-selling book The Bell Curve.
- The 1994 book by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray claimed that gaps in student achievement were the natural result of variation in students' genetic makeup and natural ability.
Jeynes' analysis of a study on a national sample of 20,706 12th-grade high school students indicated that highly religious African American and Latino students from intact families, when controlling for socioeconomic status, scored equally as well as white students on the social studies test and the Test Composite (combination of math and reading).

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Date: 3/30/2007

17 percent of U.S. youngsters are obese
Overweight preschoolers have a five times higher risk of being fat at age 12 than do lean preschoolers according to data on more than 2,000 3-year-olds from a study that tracks from birth children born to low-income families in 20 large U.S. cities.
Thirty-two percent of the white and black tots were either overweight or obese
- 44 percent of the Hispanics.

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Date: 12/29/2006

Binge drinking among eighth and tenth graders continued to decline slowly in recent years, from 15 percent of eighth graders in 1999 to 11 percent in 2005 and from 26 percent among tenth graders in 2000 to 21 percent in 2005.
Among students in the twelfth grade, the percentage engaging in binge drinking declined from 32 percent in 1998 to 28 percent in 2003, and remained at 28 percent in 2005.
By twelfth grade males are much more likely than females to binge drink (34 percent versus 24 percent, in 2004, the latest year for which such estimates are available).
The difference is much smaller in tenth grade (24 percent versus 20 percent, respectively, in 2004). However, in eighth grade in 2004, girls were slightly more likely than boys to report binge drinking (12 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).

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Date: 12/16/2006