Black American Students in An Affluent Suburb (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)

Quite interesting read. They looked at school performance of African American students from many perspectives. It's interesting to find that viewpoints were different depending on the generation, with parents/grandparents viewing problems as due to racism and students viewing racism and personal motivation and commitment as the causes.I was surprised that some students with professional parents seemed to not understand what was required of them in terms of hard work and education in order to become upper-middle-class like their parents. Those students expected to have the financial status of their parents almost as if it was all hereditary and automatic. May be some communication gaps between students and parents.Students and teachers broadly described similar performance in schools between white and African American students (this school system had few students of other ethnicities) until late elementary school. Puberty seemed to correspond with a larger percentage of African American students beginning to perform worse than those white students whose performance dropped.Students with high grades in the advanced classes were putting a lot more time into homework and studying and interacting with teachers on subjects in class more. Some students simply said that they were not going to work that hard and give up social time outside school. Some students worked outside of school. Unfortunately, many did not need to work, but enjoyed working to buy themselves more expensive clothes and other cool items. A number of student athletes believed that their acceptance to universities was guaranteed and/or were counting on a professional sports career, although most students found that to be a very risky and unreliable future.Also, there were more behavior problems - talking too much in class, disrupting class, refusing to do homework, being late to class, fights in the hallways among African American students - all of which made it harder for other students to get a high quality of education.

The late Dr. Ogbu did not make excuses for the lack of Black academic progress among our youth. He proved, by research, investigation, and interviews that the true success of any people starts in the home and spreads to the school. One can come from a good home, and NOT be a good student. There were a lot of African Americans who did not like the truth of the Ogbu study, but there are a LOT more who say that Dr. Ogbu was right on target...and the puppets and pretenders need to see his work as ground breaking and generation following, even in our high-tech age.

This book manages to be comprehensible to a general reader while adhering to the rigorous demands of social science, that is to say, the formal structure of presenting and defending hypotheses and footnoting them endlessly. The book could have been better edited; too many errors of grammar, usage and even spelling slipped through.I tend to trust Black commentators on American race issues. John Ogbu, like Bill Cosby, Larry Elder and Thomas Sowell, has an intellectual stature that demands he be taken seriously and an immunity to charges of racism. Another author would not have gotten away with the phrase "academic disengagement." Yet at the end of the book one realizes how appropriate that two-word appraisal is.It is refreshing as well to read an author with an anthropologist's orientation. Ogbu's exhaustive study gave him an opportunity to repeat and reinforce earlier findings in Stockton and Oakland, California, and elsewhere and tailor findings to the Shaker Heights situation.Blacks are, like American Indians, non-voluntary minorities. To say the least, most of their ancestors did not exactly enlist for service in the United States. The fewer and more recent voluntary black immigrants such as Colin Powell are interesting in two respects. First, their children do better in school than native born blacks. Secondly, however, subsequent generations born in the United States tend to adopt the (dysfunctional) attitudes of the native-born.Ogbu's contention is that Blacks' profound distrust of the establishment and their conviction that they will not get a fair shake predisposes them not to give their full effort to schoolwork. Their defeatist attitudes start to emerge in the later primary years and are highly apparent by high school. Among the contributing factors are inappropriate role models -- sports and entertainment figures and various types of outlaws -- and a lack of parental involvement in the children's schooling. He describes a black expectation of a "beer mug" approach to teaching The teacher pours knowledge into the passive student. In this model the parents' job is to get the child to school, and the blame is on the teachers if he doesn't learn. He says also that parents are more attuned to whether teachers "care" than whether they are effective teachers.He surveys a range of attempts to find solutions in changes to the school model: vouchers, charters, merit pay and so on. None have been, by his assessment, markedly successful. His recommendation is to change the culture of the learners themselves. Reinforce positive study habits, recognize achievement, and arm the students against the inevitable attempts of their peers to drag them into mediocrity.I amend this review to refer the reader to "Crash Course" by Chris Whittle (and my review of the same). Whittle manages charter schools for underprivileged children in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia and elsewhere, and has quite a bit of success. He employs some of the ideas Ogbu advocates.Ogbu did a workmanlike job of taking into consideration such factors as parental education, income and peer group values in comparing black and white students. He did so by drawing on his wealth of experience with Black students throughout America. Since his distinction between voluntary and involuntary immigrant status is central to his argument, it would have been useful to attempt to sort out those aspects of the Black educational experience that are unique within the American environment from those that characterize Black students in other national settings. The Nigerian-born Mr. Ogbu would have been uniquely well positioned to do so.

Prof. Ogbu has provided an excellent and very convincing (to me, at least) demonstration of black student disengagement as a major driver in causing the black/white education gap. It is unfortunate that his death prevents him from providing us with insights as to how our society might more effectively address the problem of disengagement. In one respect the Shaker Heights community he studied is fortunate in that it is not impacted by some of the other major drivers (poverty, teachers' expectations, disfunctional families, etc.) that tend to widen and complicate the black/white education gap in other communities that are not so high on the socio-economic scale.

Really interesting book. Really insightful.

私の恩師の遺作となってしまった本です。読む方によっては偏っていると思われるかもしれませんが、テーマに忠実に、詳細にかつ分かりやすく書かれています。著者ご自身が、マイノリティーとしてアメリカで生きてこられた方なので、感情的な部分があるのは否めませんが、そこがこの本のよさとも言えます。このテーマに興味のある方はぜひご一読ください。