  There has recently been surprising progress in understanding the spin and
flavor dependence of deep inelastic structure functions in terms of the same
physics needed in the simple quark models used for hadronic spectroscopy.
However, the corresponding scale is usually very low, casting doubt on the use
of leading order $QCD$ evolution. We show that the conclusions are not
significantly altered if one goes to next-to-leading order. In particular, the
excellent agreement with unpolarized and polarized valence quark distributions
is retained.
