Must Schools Fail? looks at a number of books on the gap between white and black academic performance:
For his study Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb, John U. Ogbu, a Nigerian-born anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who died unexpectedly last year, investigated the high school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, trying to understand why middle-class black students did far less well than middle-class whites. Ogbu, who has reported similar findings for over thirty years, lists in this most recent book the familiar claims about black students, claims that he found largely accurate. They put pressure on one another not to ‘act white’ by doing well in school. They do not work as hard in school as white students from economically similar families. Black students watch TV and socialize with friends more than whites do. More black students than whites come to class unprepared and are more disruptive. Black students spend much more time at after-school jobs. Many think grades are unimportant because they can go to college on athletic scholarships. When given the opportunity to take more academically challenging courses in high school, they frequently decline.
I find the differences between low- — pardon, working- — and middle-class families more interesting:
Annette Lareau, who has observed middle- and working-class children, writes in her book Unequal Childhoods that middle-class children today are encouraged from an early age to negotiate with their parents over what to wear or eat, to question adult statements if they seem implausible, and to interact with adults as equals. Children from the white middle class are expected, for example, to describe their symptoms to pediatricians.
Also, middle-class kids have a busy schedule full of structured activities:
These activities also promote teamwork and easier relations with strangers. The working-class children Lareau observed mostly stayed in their neighborhoods, playing games only among themselves.
More:
Middle-class parents were more likely to encourage children to figure out problems for themselves. Working-class parents were more likely to tell them what to do. Lareau’s middle- and working-class parents both encouraged their children to read, and parents from both classes read aloud to their children when they were young; but middle-class parents were more likely to read themselves, thus showing the importance of reading by their own behavior. Moreover, Lareau’s middle-class parents more frequently intervened in schools when they felt it in their children’s interest to do so. In high school, as John Ogbu observed, middle-class white parents are aggressive in guiding their children’s decisions on curriculum, while Ogbu’s black parents and Lareau’s working-class parents are not. Indeed, in many ways, Ogbu’s middle-class blacks are similar to Lareau’s working-class whites in attitudes toward education.