Comment

Despite considerable progress in improving the educational opportunities for African Americans in the United States, a persistent gap remains between black and white students in average standardized test scores. While many people believe the differences in test scores result from problems with the testing instruments, the test score gap reflects at least in part real differences in what students have learned.⁶⁰ What causes these differences, and what might be done to eliminate them?

One explanation for black-white differences in achievement that has gained prominence in recent years is the possibility that peer culture is more anti-academic among black than white students. This explanation has been supported by ethnographic and media interviews with African American teens, who sometimes report that high achievement engenders a negative reaction from their peers. But interviews with selected black students cannot reveal how prevalent these peer pressures are among minority students nationwide, whether the prospect of opprobrium among one's peers significantly affects academic performance, or whether the nature or consequences of peer norms are systematically different for black and white students.

Understanding whether much of the black-white difference in academic outcomes stems from differences in peer norms and student effort is important for education policy for several reasons. First, a widespread belief that black-white differences in achievement are the result of differences in student effort may undermine popular support for programs to improve equality of educational opportunity. Voters may be reluctant to fund improvements to schools if they believe that students are not fulfilling their end of the bargain by exerting themselves to the fullest. Second, income inequality in the United States is explained in part by differences in the educational outcomes of workers.⁶¹ How society feels about the current income distribution thus depends in part on what it believes explains variation in schooling outcomes. Third, many analysts bemoan the lack of effort by American students and argue that most students face limited incentives to work hard in school.⁶² If the problem of low student effort is particularly acute among minority students, then specially targeted interventions may be necessary. Finally, questions about peer norms among black and white students are relevant for evaluating policies that affect the racial mix of schools and neighborhoods such as school desegregation plans, school choice, and housing vouchers. For example, systematic differences across race or ethnic groups in peer norms may provide one argument for policies that reduce racial segregation within schools and neighborhoods.

The excellent paper by Ronald F. Ferguson provides important new insight into the issue of peer norms by gathering detailed information about student effort and attitudes for a single high school in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The advantage of Ferguson's case-study approach comes from the richness of the data that can be gathered for a single site. The drawback is that findings from a single school may not generalize to other schools and students, particularly when the school is located in what Ferguson describes as a "model community." In any case, Ferguson's study is useful in helping to resolve some questions about the role of peer norms in explaining the black-white achievement gap, and in the process it raises a number of important new questions.

Student Effort

One important prediction of the oppositional culture hypothesis is that African American students devote less effort to school than whites. Isolating the independent effects of race and ethnicity on student effort requires some adjustment for family background, given the persistent differences in average socioeconomic status between blacks and whites in the United States and the association between family background with student effort and achievement.⁶³ The real question of interest is thus whether black students expend less effort on schoolwork than whites with the same family background.

Data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS) and other national surveys show that blacks on average complete more years of schooling than whites from similar...