"There is a debate among social scientists regarding the existence of a peer externality commonly referred to as 'acting white.' Using a newly available data set (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health), which allows one to construct an objective measure of a student's popularity,...

"The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from 'No Excuses' charter schools - which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children -...