A decade of education reform has lifted the academic performance of college-bound seniors of all races and ethnicities - white, black, Asian, Hispanic.

But there's a dark side to this good news: The improvement has been dramatically uneven, with white students raising their scores on college-entrance exams to a greater degree than other students have lifted theirs.

As a result, the performance gap - long a distressing feature of American education - is wider now than it was before "standards" and "accountability" became the watchwords of reformers across the US.

Indeed, SAT scores released this week by the College Board, when compared with test scores from 1991, reveal that the 1990s can be seen as a decade of "educational backsliding" for all minority groups except Asian-Americans, some analysts say.

"The gap doesn't just 'remain.' It has widened dramatically, if you read this report with the right eye," says Seppy Basili, vice president of pre-college programs at Kaplan Inc., an education and test-preparation firm.

At a minimum, the gap suggests that minority students are not as well prepared as whites are for the academic rigors of college, the traditional ladder to upward mobility in US society. More broadly, it is a sign that much more remains to be done to improve minorities' access to excellent schools and teaching.

The College Board, which administers the tests, puts a positive spin on this year's test results. It notes that the 1.3 million SAT takers now entering college include the "largest number of minority students in history" - more than one-third of the total.

Such numbers indicate that a rising share of minority students see college as a viable option. Nearly 364,000 SAT test takers were students whose parents had not attended college, a development that college board officials called "very heartening."

But others offer a less sanguine assessment.

"The irony is that the continuing surge [of minority SAT test takers] shows the aspiration to be highly educated is clearly there," says Hugh Price, president of the Urban League in New York. "What isn't there is reciprocal commitment on the part of public schools and society to provide a quality education to children of color."

The SAT results, he says, reflect "a continuing disinvestment" in the urban school systems that educate a vast majority of children of color.

Part of the problem, analysts say, is continued reliance on local property taxes to fund local schools. That tax base continues to grow in affluent communities, but not as much as in urban school districts.

Other reasons are often mentioned, as well. Some of the test-score disparity has to do with costly SAT test preparation, which many affluent kids in suburban schools receive and less-well-off kids in urban schools don't. Some of it is the rise of intense parent involvement in the more well-heeled communities.

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