According to this theory, minority students underachieve intentionally in school and in standardized testing due to a fear of being stereotyped as acting white.
[2] The Supreme Court's landmark 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson also helped to define education policies in the United States for years to come.
The court also ruled that segregation inherently caused harm to the cognitive development of black children, and officially recognized the importance of educational equality as a compelling interest in the United States.
[4] Following this ruling, Southern school districts began to publish findings of racial gaps in academics as a justification to oppose desegregation.
[6] In high schools, measures of academic achievement such as grades and class rank also show an under-representation of African American and Hispanics.
Additionally, African American and Latino students consistently perform lower on the SAT than their white counterparts thereby affecting their acceptance rates into universities.
John Ogbu's primary goal in his research was to explain "academic performance of racial and ethnic minorities with reference to broader societal structures and historical processes".
[8] John Ogbu used case studies, the most famous of which examined the affluent neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio, to research variables that represented oppositional culture.
Additionally, he suggests supplementary education programs and increased visibility of successful black role models as helpful solutions.
[5] Many sociologists and sources have praised his studies as a valuable addition to the theories explaining the gap in educational achievement among different races.
One example is a case study done in the UK in 2006 by two researchers, Tomlin and Olusola, that sought to discover factors and conditions that affect the achievement levels of high-achieving black students in two urban secondary schools.
Prudence Carter, a sociologist at Brown University, published findings that directly contradicted Ogbu's research that African Americans viewed educational attainment as acting white.
Carter argues that the possession of capital and upper socioeconomic status did not guarantee more interactions with one race over another and that upwardly mobile minorities are more inclined to associate with individuals from their same class over their same racial identification.
[11] Carter states that a focus on racialized communities is not enough- a holistic acknowledgement of the relevance and depth of students' general attitudes and beliefs and how these affect schooling will help improve education policies.
This work is supported by a study by Charles et al. that surveyed the cultural backgrounds of black students in elite universities in the United States.
Wealthier families with higher economic capital can afford to provide additional resources for their children to combat any learning difficulties they may face naturally.