Overcoming the Black-White Achievement Gap
Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement
By John U. Ogbu
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 2003
352 pp., $69.95 cloth, ISBN 0-8058-4515-1, $32.50 paper, ISBN 0-8058-4516-X
By Ronald Roach
The affirmative action debate brought on by the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of the reverse discrimination lawsuits filed against the University of Michigan provides a timely context for the publication of Dr. John Ogbu's Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement
Readers who have followed the affirmative action debate closely know that the fight has centered around access to the nation's most competitive colleges and universities. Because Ogbu, an anthropology professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has tackled the tricky subject of Black student academic performance in the integrated Cleveland suburb Shaker Heights, he has provided a valuable case study on developing a framework for understanding the Black-White achievement gap.
By focusing on children from educated, middle-class, native-born Black families, Ogbu's subjects represent the very students whose academic performance and standardized test scores are being closely scrutinized in comparison to the White and Asian American students seeking admission to elite institutions. Essentially, the affirmative action debate singles out the competitiveness of the best-prepared Black American students, and it's logical to assume that children from Shaker Heights are among the Black community's best-prepared students.
The subject of Black middle-class student performance has for some time been a topic of controversy. Evidence of Black student performance in affluent communities, such as majority-Black Prince George's County in Maryland and other mixed suburbs like Shaker Heights, have shown Blacks lagging in comparison to Whites. Yet Blacks remain defensive to entertain a deep examination of cultural attitudes and family practices around education.
