Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement

Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, by John U. Ogbu (with the assistance of Astrid Davis). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003, 320 pp. $32.50, paperback. The education community suffered a major loss with the passing of John U. Ogbu in 2003. His contributions to our understanding of issues of race, immigrant status, and academic achievement are perhaps the most significant of any educational researcher of his generation. His last book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, is a welcome addition to the literature on the racial achievement gap. While roughly a third of U.S. Blacks live in suburbs (Ferguson, 2002), most work on racial achievement gaps focuses on students in urban schools. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation, which emphasizes disaggregating achievement data and reducing achievement gaps, many highperforming school districts will be forced to confront troubling racial disparities in achievement. Therefore, it is important that we study the experiences of African American students in suburban schools. The book's origins illustrate the level of public concern about the achievement gap. In 1997, Dr. Ogbu and his colleagues were invited to visit Shaker Heights by members of the Black community who were concerned about the low performance of Black students. These parents' concerns had apparently been heightened by a school newspaper article which focused on the district's racial gaps in achievement. After this initial visit, an ethnographic study was undertaken using district funds. The book focuses on community forces (e.g., the educational beliefs and behaviors within the African American community) that shape students' educational outcomes. Ogbu argues that prior achievement gap research emphasized school and societal factors to a greater extent than community factors. While school and societal factors may be important, he argues that the community forces are also very powerful. The book is organized into three parts. Part I (chapters 1-3) sets the work within the national context of the achievement gap, presents findings on the academic disengagement of Black students in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and discusses conventional explanations for the gap along with Ogbu's alternative explanation-the importance of community forces. Part II of the book (chapters 3-7) explores school and societal factors (e.g., race relations, teachers' attitudes and expectations, leveling, or tracking). Part III (chapters 8-13) takes up the issue of community forces. Specifically, it examines the role of the opportunity structure, collective identity, peer pressure, and the family (among other factors) that shape students' school experiences. The book's final chapters summarize its findings and make policy recommendations. In chapter 3, Ogbu provides a comprehensive discussion of explanations for the achievement gap. He concludes this chapter with a discussion of his interpretation that community forces are a critical, although often overlooked, component of the problem. Those familiar with his voluminous and influential work on minority education will recognize Ogbu's interpretation. He argues that Blacks, because of the racial discrimination they must endure, question the instrumental value of education, distrust schools, view them in oppositional terms, and blame schools for students' substandard educational outcomes. As a result, the African American community is largely disengaged from education (Ogbu, 1974, 1978). At the core of the book is an effort to explain why African American students are disengaged from education. The problem with Ogbu's focus is that there is no strong evidence that African American students in suburban schools (or anywhere else for that matter) are any more disengaged than students from other racial groups. Research demonstrates that African American students are no less engaged in school than their White peers. …