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Black American Students in An Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)Hardcover– January 1, 2003
"For those who are interested in nurturing high-achieving African American students, regardless of their place in the educational system, Ogbu's findings may help to craft policies that result in significant improvements in the levels of academic achievement."
-Fall 2006, The Journal of African American History
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.Read more ›
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
I am a Shaker graduate and a minority who now has a child in the Shaker school system; Dr Ogbu's study is right on target. Certainly it does not help to be poor, discriminated against etc., but the telling factor in academic performance is the attitude and work ethic children bring to the classroom. This is of course shaped by parents and also pop culture.
Now that more than 70% of African American children are born out of wedlock is symptomatic of the state of the African American home.
Dr Ogbu's study caused a monstrous flap in our affluent, largely liberal community. For those that are curious, Shaker spends more than $13,600 per student in a medium cost of living area, and the mediam family income is over $63,000. Integration is not the issue, money spent per child is not the issue, attitude and academic performance is. Too bad, more minority parents have not heeded the warning.
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I found this book to be truly insightful. The author provided interesting information that was gained through observation, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews of just how disengaged affluent African American high school students are from the educational process. The author underscores the fact that the challenges facing African American and educations goes beyond economics.
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45 of 60 people found the following review helpful
Any open minded person that reads this book will quickly discover the obvious; The Black community in Shaker Heights, Ohio is in deep need of Dr. Phil McGraw's "Self Matters." Ogbu produces page upon page of community respondents culturally brainwashed to focus their intellect on a history they have not lived, and an available future that they cannot fathom. Ogbu's tone is harsh. His main argument: The Black community's cultural beliefs and practices are not conducive to success in academics. This is where the controversy lies. Because the book doesn't blame the testing gap on White racism, his analysis must be wrong. Simply read what students themselves are saying and draw your own conclusions.
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47 of 67 people found the following review helpful
I was a student of Dr. John Ogbu's and worked for him as a research assistant. Dr. Ogbu was the foremost specialist on educational issues of social and ethnic classes, focusing on inner-city minorities. I say "was" because Dr. Ogbu passed away on Thursday, Aug. 21,2003. Just because some might say, "Ogbu didn't blame the achievement gap on White racism..." does not mean racism and cultural and class privilege has nothing to do with the educational disengagement of people of color. Dr. Ogbu fought for social justice issues and cultural understanding. He never taught where to place blame but rather, inherent in the discipline of cultural anthropology, he forced us to look at history, political economy, classism, racism, structures of cultural power and propagation, sociology, etc. Thus, from the breadth of Dr. Ogbu's work in general and this book in particular, one should conclude that the educational disengagement of minority youth (particularly Black youth) in this country has unique characteristics that are founded on various historical situations, many of which have been systematic, intentional and clearly Euro-centric and racist. Having said this, I implore the reader not to simplify Dr. Ogbu's work into a blame-shifting issue. Racism exists and race matters. This does not mean "every White person is racist." People of all colors can be racist. Cultural understanding is paramount in becoming an empathetic society. Dr. Ogbu dutifully accomplished this in his teaching and also encouraged us to fight against social and economic power structures that all too often exacerbated the disenfranchisement of certain classes of people.
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