Mind the gap, but not so much

The black-white education gap has not vanished in the years since the 1990s. That's the bad news, I guess. But when I read the fine print (i.e. the actual text of the article), I found this:

On average, the gap narrowed by about 7 points from 1992 to 2007, so that black students scored about 28 points behind white students on a 500-point scale.

So this is like saying that, on average, black students do 6 points worse than whites on a 100-point test. That doesn't sound like too huge a gap, does it? If whites average a 76, blacks average a 70. Not awesome, but not apocalyptically bad. And 20% of the gap vanished in the last 15 years. That is progress.

My attitude on this is that, while we should continue finding ways to close the gap, we shouldn't worry too much about its existence. No gap is desirable, but a gap of this size does not constitute the massive failure of our educational system.