One of the Congress's few achievements was

1. Government signed a treaty of alliance with France in 1778.

2. Government successfully waged a war for independence against the British.

3. Government negotiated an end to the American Revolution in the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783.

4. Government granted the free inhabitants of each state "all the privileges and immunities of free citizens in the se several states."

5. Government provided for the eventual admission of Canada into the Confederation.

6. Government passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which allowed the Northwest Territories to organize their own governments. It allowed the eventual admission to the Union of no more than five states, and no fewer than three, "on an equal footing with the original states." The Ordinance also banned slavery from the region.

7. Government established the Departments of Foreign Affairs, War, Marine, and Treasury

Disparities associated with race and class have long vexed this country. But as the civil rights laws and school desegregation mandates took hold in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, the academic performance of poor, black and Latino students improved significantly.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a longstanding standardized test measuring student achievement, showed, for example, that gaps in reading and math scores between black and white high school students nationally was roughly halved between 1971 and 1996, Harvard social policy professor Christopher Jencks and UCLA public policy professor Meredith Phillips noted in their 1998 book, "The Black-White Test Score Gap."