Kids Don’t Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap by Angel L. Harris, and: Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown by Karolyn Tyson (review)

For decades, researchers have studied the black-white achievement gap. This research shows that the gap exists at all points along the achievement distribution and is especially prominent among high-achieving students (Hedges and Nowell 1999; Riegle-Crumb and Grodsky 2010). While the gap has narrowed since the 1970s, currently little progress is being made in closing the gap further (Magnuson and Waldfogel 2008). We need to know more about why the achievement gap exists in order to work to narrow the gap. Researchers have posited many explanations as to why black students consistently score lower than white students on achievement tests, ranging from micro explanations, such as innate differences, to marco explanations, such as differences in opportunity structures. One particularly entrenched explanation in conventional wisdom and among educators is rooted in culture, despite academic research that challenges and disputes these theories (e.g., Cook and Ludwig 1998; Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey 1998). The oppositional cultural theory argues that black students have lower test scores than white students because black students recognize that their opportunities in the labor market are limited as a result of their social status and thus devalue education (Ogbu 1978). In other words, black students purposefully resist doing well in school.

Two recent books by sociologists challenge this cultural argument as an explanation for the black-white achievement gap. In Kids Don’t Want to Fail, Angel Harris argues that the oppositional culture theory’s resistance model is flawed. He examines each component of the resistance model and shows that black parents and students do not devalue education nor purposely resist schooling. While Harris systematically takes apart the resistance model, Karolyn Tyson’s book Integration Interrupted builds the argument that the connection students see between race and achievement is not cultivated at home, but at school, through racialized tracking within schools. Both Harris and Tyson successfully argue that we need to examine structural factors, not cultural factors, as they are related to students’ schooling experiences and achievement scores.

Harris presents a thorough quantitative data analysis examining the plausibility of the resistance model in the nine chapters of Kids Don’t Want to Fail. After describing the conceptual framework of the oppositional culture theory and the resistance model, Harris uses the subsequent chapters to analyze multiple data sets, including the Maryland Adolescence Development in Context Study, the National Education Longitudinal Study, the Education Longitudinal Study, the Child Development Supplement from the Panel Study for Income Dynamics, the British Cohort Study of 1970, and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, to test for evidence for the validity of the resistance model. He confirms his findings from the United States with social-class and race data from the United Kingdom.

Harris finds that despite experiences of discrimination and barriers in the labor market, black parents have higher educational expectations and aspirations for their children than white parents, controlling for social class. This finding is opposite of what the resistance model would suggest. In terms of students’ perceptions of opportunity, Harris shows that black parents’ experiences with discrimination and barriers in the labor market are not significantly related to students’ perceptions of opportunities. However, parents’ positive views of education are related to students’ views of the importance of schooling. Harris goes on to show that black students value school more than white students but also believe that there are more barriers to upward mobility. While students’ values are related to their achievement, students’ perceptions of barriers are not.

The final component of the resistance model connects students’ schooling behaviors to achievement outcomes. This part of the model suggests that black students purposively resist schooling. After examining racial differences in thirty...