Theories of why the madness exist

The achievement gap is an issue that brings in a lot of speculation, studies, special projects, and researchers. This problem is multi-dimensional, and has no one definitive answer on the best way to solve it. Researchers go back and forth about not only how to solve the problem, but simply trying to find out why it exists, especially in the United States of America.
I have several theories of my own. I think that the achievement gap is the offspring of centuries of racism and bigotry. The beginnings of the achievement gap, in a more broader sense, is exemplified in the 1800s in the Dred Scott case, when the supreme court ruled that African Americans could not expect to achieve the same rights as whites; blacks were not seen as Americans. This is only an example of how blacks were considered to be less than white. This ideology quickly moved into the education arena. White parents did not want their kids going to school with black kids, resulting in segregation. When the black children were segregated, and put in less than satisfactory shacks for schools, they began to internalize feelings of low self-esteem and low self-efficacy, shown through the work of the Clark's famous "Baby Doll Test." These feelings became harbored in the minds of many African Americans, and are still there to some degree today. It is exemplified through the "Acting White" threat, where African Americans that achieve are chastised, and are told that they are trying to be white.
I feel that this issue is the result of other problems as well. I theorize that the issue has to do with societies lack of zeal to take hand on steps to fix the problem by erasing the ideas and stereotypes that America still has about black people. I think that if we as a culture worked together to stop promoting the ideas that certain races are smart, certain races are stupid, and certain races are looking for a handout, we could begin to see that everyone does not start off on an equal playing field, and we could start to move forward from there.