Last night 60 Minutes opened with an Anderson Cooper piece on the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), exploring its methods, explaining that President Obama wants to replicate it in cities all across the country, re-visiting the children Ed Bradley met there in 2005, and touting HCZ’s remarkable results found in a recent paper by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie. Aaron Pallas, a professor of Sociology and Education at Columbia University and a frequent contributor at GothamSchools, criticized the piece before even going to bed. In his post, Pallas repeats the same mistakes he made in his last analysis of the HCZ back in May.

Here’s the basic gist: Fryer and Dobbie find evidence that the HCZ was able to erase the black-white achievement gap after controlling for income and gender. Pallas leaves off the second part, and features graphs showing a black-white achievement gap that includes the effects of income and gender. Poof! Like magic, a gap is still there!

This type of maneuvering is pretty cynical. It attempts to destroy the amazing gains recorded by HCZ students as mere fluff. (And if you doubt the quantitative evidence discovered by Fryer and Dobbie, watch the 60 Minutes clip yourself, especially for the segment with fifth-grader Richar Anozier, a student interviewed by both Bradley, when Anozier was in kindergarten, and Cooper, for this piece. The fifth-grade Anozier sounded a little too money-driven for my tastes, but he was certainly poised and intelligent.).

An academic like Pallas should know better. Starting from an early age, large and persistent achievement gaps exist across racial/ethnic lines. These gaps are not as large as ones based on income, but they exist and they’re troublesome. Efforts like the HCZ that are able to eliminate racial gaps should be celebrated, not torn down because they don’t solve everything.