Eric Hanushek criticized the focus on the statistical methodology and the estimation of the impacts of various factors on achievement took attention away from the achievement comparisons in the Coleman Report. The study had tested students around the country, and the differences in achievement by race and region were enormous. The average black twelfth grade student in the rural South was achieving at the level of a seventh grade white in the urban Northeast. At the fiftieth anniversary of the report's publication, Eric Hanushek assessed the closure in the black-white achievement gap. He found that achievement differences had narrowed, largely from improvements in the South, but that at the pace of the previous half-century, it would take two-and-a-half centuries to close the math achievement gap.