School Culture, Academic Achievement and the Social Construction of Blackness.

Despite the legal, political and economic changes that America has made since the Civil Rights Era, the racial disparity in academic achievement continues. Over the past several years, a number of theories have been developed to explain this dilemma. My research was inspired by John Ogbu's 'Oppositional Culture' theory, which state's that the racial gap is due to black student's failure to apply themselves academically because of the black community's conception of school as 'white'. While I found this argument compelling, it seemed to me that school's also play a significant role in framing academic arena's as 'white'. To test this hypothesis, I conducted a 5 month ethnographic study at a Minneapolis based alternative school. The preliminary findings of my research at MFS suggest that, while Ogbu may be accurate in his assertion that many black students believe that school is 'white' his assumptions about how and where this belief is constructed are problematic. The belief that school and academics are 'white' results, not from a cultural perspective that black students bring to school, but from a dialectical relationship between the school and the black community. Thus, any effort to eradicate the racial gap in academic achievement must include an examination of the way that school's construct 'blackness' and 'whiteness' in ways that either inhibit or promote academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]