Reform all starts in the home
UC Berkeley anthropologist John Ogbu didn’t set out to be controversial in his new book, “Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement” (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). But the e-mails and letters keep arriving every day. He files them in a white three-ring binder, as if they are more research to be organized. Hundreds of identical white binders line the shelves of Ogbu’s office in the basement of his Oakland, Calif.-home, each one labeled on the spine in black capital letters.
“Some people support what I wrote,” he says. “Some accuse me of playing to the white man’s system. They think I am not doing politically correct research. It doesn’t really worry me because I’ve been doing this for 30 years. People can say anything they want.”
Generally, the books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, which produces scholarly textbooks, generally sell about 1,000 copies over a lifetime. Ogbu’s book generated so much buzz it sold more than 1,000 copies before it even arrived in the warehouse. LEA reprinted the book three weeks after publication, a first for the company.
The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has ordered copies for all its employees.
Ogbu is an unlikely rabble-rouser. He speaks in a soft voice with a musical lilt from his native Nigeria, where his father was an uneducated farmer. His thin schoolboy legs, dangling from his desk chair, barely brush the floor. Damaged disks in his back force him to walk in a painful hunch, so he spends most days at his desk, writing and researching. Surgery is scheduled for next month.
The book began with a phone call from a group of black parents in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1997. Shaker Heights is an affluent suburb of Cleveland. It is considered to have the best school system in the state. Yet affluent and middle-class black students, who make up about half the district, still lagged significantly behind their white counterparts in grade point average, test scores and placements in high-level classes.
Ogbu spent several months in Shaker Heights. He observed 110 classes. He interviewed students, teachers and parents. He spent time in the homes of black families.
“It’s what I do whenever I go into a minority community,” Ogbu says. “Children don’t succeed or fail just because of what happens in school. In Chinatown, I want to know how the Chinese think about education and how they go about getting it — what their children learn at home that they bring to school. I did the same thing in Shaker Heights.”
He found that black parents even in this affluent community held the school, rather than their children, responsible for academic success. They were not as engaged in their children’s academic lives as white parents, or even parents of other ethnic minorities. Black parents, Ogbu says, weren’t passing on to their children the strategies and work ethic necessary for academic achievement.
His thesis smacks of blaming the victim, his critics argue. Discrimination and low expectations are alive and well in American school systems, they say, so to point fingers at the targets of that discrimination rather than the perpetrators is to play right into the hands of the racist majority.
But that isn’t what Ogbu is saying. He acknowledges the history of discrimination against African-Americans. Indeed, he argues that this historical discrimination is exactly why blacks interact with the school system as they do.
It is a dynamic he has seen many times in his studies around the world. This is what Ogbu wants to make clear: The achievement gap that is so vexing here in the United States between blacks and whites is not unique to American blacks.
It is not even about race.
In my next column, Ogbu explains why there is an achievement gap and what schools and parents can do about it.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].)