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Oppositional culture theory posits that students who belong to oppressed ethnic minority groups define their ethnic identity in opposition to the majority of students. Minority students might restrict their achievements and effort in schools to gain popularity since they believe that their peers regard investing in pro-school attributes as a betrayal of their own culture and adaptation to the majority culture. Thus, peer pressure might explain why minority students’ performance lags behind that of their majority peers. We tested this theory among 584 seventh- and eighth grade (13–14-year-old) students in 38 ethnically diverse Hungarian classrooms. We conducted a vignette experiment in which students rated the “coolness” of fictive vignette persons whose attributes (GPA, effort, and school behavior) were randomly combined. Each student rated 12 randomly chosen vignettes. We found that Roma students rated their peers as less popular if the peers had a good GPA in classrooms with high ethnic diversity. We did not find a significant Roma/non-Roma gap in pro-school attributes in other domains such as effort and school behavior, or in non-pro-school attributes in any domain. Accordingly, we conclude that differences in ethnic identity explain little of the Roma/non-Roma achievement gap in Hungarian schools. Therefore, oppositional culture between Roma and non-Roma students appears to occur in context-specific and sporadic ways in Hungary.

Although schools are important socialization venues for all children, they also serve as sites of acculturation for immigrant youth. According to segmented assimilation theory, first- and second-generation students experience divergent trajectories of incorporation, in part, because they are exposed to school contexts that support or stifle their attainment. I argue that such a process must have social-psychological underpinnings, which I examine by relating children’s educational expectations to their school environment during adolescence. Specifically, I use the National Education Longitudinal Study to assess differences in expectations by school context among immigrant and U.S.-origin youth between eighth and 12th grades. Results indicate that students in comparably disadvantaged school environments report lower expectations, though this relationship is driven by household resources and student characteristics. I also find that most students exhibit increases in their educational expectations, and that such changes are not systemically patterned by school context. This article sheds light on the goals of immigrant youth and the extent to which these plans transform from childhood to adolescence.

Research has established that adolescents both befriend peers based on their academic achievement and adjust their own achievement to that of their friends’ over time. However, these processes may be different for ethnic minority students, because some of them may adhere to an oppositional culture that rejects striving for academic success. We examine respective differences between self-identified ethnic minority and majority students using longitudinal social network analysis (stochastic actor-oriented models) in a sample of 1175 students (aged 13) from 12 grade-level networks in Germany secondary schools. Among the students, we find that academically successful students in particular prefer friends with high grades, but that students with poor grades exert more social influence on their friends to adjust their performance. Moreover, while minority students are indeed less inclined to select friends with higher grades, both ethnic majority and minority youth prefer friends with similar academic achievement and are similarly influenced by their friends’ achievement. However, social influence is stronger from same-ethnic than from inter-ethnic friends. In sum, there is mixed evidence for an oppositional culture among ethnic minority students in our sample.

Three leading theories of racial achievement gaps in education include cultural capital match/mismatch, oppositional culture, and teacher bias. Cultural capital match/mismatch theory suggests that students and teachers do not share the same understanding of the standards, norms, and expectations required for achievement. Oppositional culture theory suggests that students may resist the standards, norms, and expectations of achievement, and teacher bias theory suggests that teachers have standards, norms, and expectations that privilege some students, but not others. The unifying thread in all three of these theories is how teachers and students perceive and execute the standards, norms, and expectations of schooling. This study offers a unique way of operationalizing whether and how cultural capital, oppositional culture, and/or teacher bias occur in everyday classroom practice and behavior by examining racialized patterns of student–teacher effort assessment match/mismatch. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (Base Year 2002), I find no evidence for oppositional culture; net of other background characteristics, black students are less, and Hispanic students are no more likely than white students to agree with their teachers that they have low effort. Black and Hispanic students are more likely than white students to believe they are working hard when their teacher disagrees, but, consistent with cultural capital theory, socioeconomic background and academic skills account for all of their effort misalignment. Lastly, white and Asian students seem to benefit from positive teacher bias; net of background and skill, black and Hispanic students are less likely than white and Asian students to receive positive teacher effort assessment when they admit to not working hard.

In many Western countries, increasing levels of immigration have raised concerns over the outcomes of social–ethnic segregation in schools. This study relates social–ethnic school composition to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive disengagement. While previous research mostly remains atheoretical, this current study investigates the applicability of the perceived control explanation, with the expectation that attending low socioeconomic status (SES) schools and schools with a higher proportion of ethnic minority pupils lowers students’ perceived control and hence produces disengagement. Multilevel analyses on data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,759 students in 83 Flemish secondary schools, show that students in lower SES schools are more likely to disengage behaviorally and emotionally from school. This association is, as expected, mediated by feelings of perceived control. Higher ethnic minority concentration, however, yields lower disengagement, especially for ethnic minority students. The implications are discussed.

Recent studies suggest that anti-achievement attitudes and behaviors that are specific to black students occur most commonly in integrated or predominantly white school contexts. Accordingly, this study examines the degree to which racial differences in achievement-related attitudes and behaviors (collectively called academic orientations) actually contribute to corresponding differences in academic performance among nearly 25,000 students attending integrated secondary schools in the United States. The findings suggest that when controlling for socioeconomic status indicators, black students exhibit more pro-academic orientations than their white counterparts. School racial composition did not significantly influence these dynamics, and the racial composition of black students’ friend groups showed modest but inconsistent influence on academic orientations. Finally, the authors demonstrate that racial differences in expressed academic orientations have only negligible consequences for student performance, and thus do not show much promise for explaining or remedying black/white achievement disparities in secondary schools.

Against Ogbu's oppositional culture hypothesis, this article offers a class or structural/relational framework to contextualizing and understanding why it is that Blacks have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs compared with their White counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom. We synthesize Marxian conceptions of identity construction within capitalist relations of production with the Wittgensteinian notion of “language games” to offer a more appropriate relational framework within which scholars ought to understand this Black–White academic achievement gap in America and the United Kingdom.

So what is the answer to these multifarious problems identified in the simple words ‘disruptive behaviour’? Which theorists should trainees or practitioners follow? Should they believe in Kohn or Kounin, use intrinsic motivation procedures, be managerial facilitators or become more draconian? Be more like Fred Jones or Harry Wong? With the growing complexity, problematic and stressful nature of many issues concerning vulnerable or even aggressive learners, should teachers be using therapy models or behavioural rewards and punishments? As we have seen, causes of ‘bad behaviour’ may not be easily determined. There might be socio-economic, biological or gender issues or differences in ethnicity that might impact on group or cultural atmospheres or identities in classrooms. There might be an oppositional culture between the teacher and students, assumptions about class difference. Wars in other parts of the world could be replicated in the classrooms of England. On the other hand, the teacher and student can come from the same culture or background, but this can also be a source of dislike, resentment, self-hate or even contempt. As has been reiterated throughout, it is not easy to legislate or pre-determine why difficulties happen. Although practical solutions have been discussed, the underlying attitude has been to examine the complex nature of these challenging situations, view different sets of recommendations and try to unravel the key elements that have emerged in each area of research undertaken.

Elijah Anderson's (1999) Code of the Street thesis argues that joblessness, alienation, structural disadvantage, and black status converge to explain higher rates of violence among African-American, inner-city males. Few studies examine whether a similar phenomenon extends to females. Additionally, few studies investigate how family attachment affects belief in an oppositional culture that Anderson calls “street codes.” Using data from the National Youth Survey, the present study addresses these issues by examining whether boys actually embrace street codes more than girls, whether family attachment reduces the likelihood of street code adoption for both boys and girls, and whether the magnitude of the effect of family attachment on street code adoption differs between boys and girls. Ordinary least squares regression results indicate that boys embrace street codes more than girls, but a substantial number of females embrace them as well. Moreover, family attachment reduces street code adoption for both g...

The most common lay explanation for the racial gap in educational achievement in the US is the ‘oppositional culture hypothesis’, which holds that Black students tend to undervalue education and stigmatize their high-achieving peers, accusing them of ‘acting White’. Many believe that, insofar as this hypothesis is true, Black underachievement is unproblematic from the perspective of justice, because Black students are simply not taking the fair opportunities presented to them. This article offers a systematic critique of the normative aspects of this view and some conceptual clarifications regarding the nature of opportunity.

Previous research demonstrates that students taught by teachers of the same race and ethnicity receive more positive behavioral evaluations than students taught by teachers of a different race/ethnicity. Many researchers view these findings as evidence that teachers, mainly white teachers, are racially biased due to preferences stemming from racial stereotypes that depict some groups as more academically oriented than others. Most of this research has been based on comparisons of only black and white students and teachers and does not directly test if other nonwhite students fare better when taught by nonwhite teachers. Analyses of Asian, black, Hispanic, and white 10th graders in the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study confirm that the effects of mismatch often depend on the racial/ethnic statuses of both the teacher and the student, controlling for a variety of school and student characteristics. Among students with white teachers, Asian students are usually viewed more positively than white students, while black students are perceived more negatively. White teachers’ perceptions of Hispanic students do not typically differ from those of white students. Postestimation comparisons of slopes indicate that Asian students benefit (perceptionwise) from having white teachers, but they reveal surprisingly few instances when black students would benefit (again, perceptionwise) from having more nonwhite teachers.

Is the acting white hypothesis empirically viable? The strong version of this hypothesis—that African American students are negatively sanctioned by peers for academic success, while their similar white peers are not sanctioned—misses the possibility that some students preemptively pull back academic effort without having received sanctions. This article tests a weak version of the hypothesis—that some academically engaged African American students perceive the costs of peer sanctions to be sufficiently high to scale back overt academic engagement before receiving peer sanctions. The weak version predicts sufficiently high costs of sanctions in schools with racialized social norms about academic engagement. The author uses multilevel modeling to test strong and weak versions of the hypothesis on a nationally representative sample of African American and white students. While the results do not support the strong version of the acting white hypothesis, they point to a mild form of the weak version of the hypothesis.

Do black and white students hold similar beliefs about the causes of life opportunities? Disparities in academic performance between blacks and whites have been attributed, in part, to differing attitudes about the relationship between education and life opportunities. Advocates of oppositional culture theory argue that black students consider structural barriers to have more influence on prosperity than do their own efforts in the classroom; detractors contend that black and white students equally consider individual academic performance to be key to future life opportunities. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study, 1988 through 1992, the author demonstrates that students simultaneously accept both structural and individualistic explanations for prosperity. Black students report greater support for structural explanations than do white students, but they report equal or greater support for the relevance of education to their futures. The author finds that, while black and white students do differ in their optimism about future opportunities, dissimilar attitudes about social structure, rather than education, are accountable for this.

This article assesses whether social-ethnic composition influences students' school misconduct. Based on general strain theory, we expect to find that individual sense of futility acts as an intermediate mechanism. Starting from cultural deprivation and oppositional culture theory, however, we hypothesize that a shared school culture of futility acts as mediator. Multilevel analyses of data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,872 students in 85 schools, showed that ethnic composition has an impact on school misconduct: there is more deviance in ethnically mixed schools than in ethnic concentration schools due to a greater student sense of futility. The presence of a culture of futility did not affect the probability of being deviant. These results were true only for natives: school factors did not affect migrants' deviancy. We conclude that, although a dispersal of ethnically diverse students across all schools is favorable, this can yield negative side effects.

Research has documented important connections between ethnic identity and academic success. In the multiethnic context of the US, ethnic self-identification is a dynamic process that develops through social interaction within institutions. Understanding the emergence of a Latino self-identity within schools can provide insight into the meanings adolescents confer to a “Latino” identity and the relationship between a Latino self-identity and academic success. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine (1) the association between a Latino self-identification in-school but not at home and academic well-being, (2) the association between a Latino self-identification in-school but not at home and school processes, and (3) whether school processes help to mediate the relationship between Latino self-identification in-school but not at home and academic well-being. Results suggest that while adolescents who identify as Latino at school but not at home come from families and neighborhoods with higher levels of economic and human capital, by the end of high school they have accumulated less educational capital then either consistently identifying Latinos or non-Latino whites. Much of this association can be explained by prior academic experiences, yet other factors associated with resistance to institutional norms and attending low performing schools may also be important. Results suggest that non-minority, underachieving adolescents may choose to self-identify as Latino in schools as a way to save face and avert identity crises and that perhaps youth in schools have come to associate a Latino identity with poor school performance.

This article uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to establish that once socioeconomic status is considered, black Americans go to college at higher rates than whites. The outcome replicates numerous other studies that use different datasets and varying methods. Combining statistics and literature, I propose that blacks’ superior educational investment is an “empirical generalization.” This leads to discussions of the black-white “gap” in education and the “attitude-achievement paradox.” The latter claims that black people have high educational aspirations but fail to act on those attitudes. But when considering the choice to invest in education, the “attitude-achievement paradox” evaporates. Black Americans have high educational aspirations and, when there are enough resources, act on those aspirations by going to college at higher rates than whites. The paper concludes with a theoretical explanation of why black people, more than whites, efficiently translate resources into educational investment. I use literature to show that in the United States, the bearers of light skin are afforded numerous informal opportunities that allow them to get higher returns out of a given level of human capital. Non-whites, on the other hand, have fewer informal opportunities, and they therefore deploy “supra-normal efforts” of skill acquisition as a strategy to overcome their informal disadvantage.

Some theories have posited that African American youth are academic underachievers because of sociocultural factors. We label this point of view the cultural incompatibility perspective. Ogbu’s oppositional culture theory and Steele’s stereotype threat theory are selected as popular examples of this viewpoint. A critical review of the literature on these particular theories was conducted. It was concluded that there is limited empirical support for the cultural incompatibility perspective on African American academic achievement. This raises questions about the focus on academic underachievement among African Americans versus high achievement among other ethnic/racial groups. Implications of the empirical findings on the incompatibility perspective for the role of African American culture in Black student achievement are discussed.

Using a newly available data set, which allows one to construct a novel measure of a student's social status, we demonstrate that there are potentially important racial differences in the relationship between social status and academic achievement. The effect is concentrated among students with a grade point average (GPA) of 3.5 or higher and more pronounced in schools with more interracial contact. Earlier studies showing a positive relationship between popularity and academic achievement for blacks are sensitive to the inclusion of more continuous achievement measures. We argue that the data are most consistent with a model of ‘acting white’ in which investments in education are taken as a signal of one's opportunity costs of peer-group loyalty, though imprecise estimates make definitive conclusions difficult.

Popular conceptions of welfare recipients are congruous with policy constructions that attribute responsibility for poverty to personal decisions and choices. This research investigates the ways welfare mothers resist these negative constructions. Resistance strategies are methods that the participants in this study used to minimize the pejorative constructions associated with a welfare identity. Focus groups with 64 single welfare mothers and personal interviews with eight of those women reveal two categories of resistance strategies—overt and covert. The less common type of resistance practiced by the women participants, perhaps because of risk of punishment, is overt resistance. This includes oppositional culture, fighting the system, and maintaining control in a McDonaldized welfare culture. Covert resistance strategies are avoidance, withdrawal, and dissociation.

Little attention has been paid to the role of peer social capital in the school context, especially as a predictor of adolescents’ academic outcomes. This study uses a nationally representative (N = 13,738, female = 51%), longitudinal sample and multilevel models to examine how peer networks impact educational achievement and attainment. Results reveal that, in addition to those factors typically associated with academic outcomes (e.g., school composition), two individual-level peer network measures, SES and heterogeneity, had significant effects. Although educational attainment was generally worse in low SES schools, for all ethnic groups higher attainment was associated with attending schools with higher concentrations of minority students. At the individual level, however, membership in integrated peer networks was negatively related to high school graduation for Asians, Latinos, and non-Hispanic whites, and to GPA for Asians and Latinos, as only African-American achievement increased in more racially/ethnically heterogeneous peer networks. Our results suggest that co-ethnic and co-racial peer friendship networks should not be viewed as obstacles to the educational accomplishments of today’s youth. In fact, in many cases the opposite was true, as results generally support the ethnic social capital hypothesis while providing little corroboration for oppositional culture theory. Results also suggest that co-racial and co-ethnic ties may mediate the negative effects of school choice, or more specifically of between-school socioeconomic segregation. Consequently, we conclude that school policies aimed at socioeconomic desegregation are likely to beneficially affect the academic outcomes of all race/ethnic groups.

The study presented here tested three theories of racial differences in academic performance among monoracial and multiracial high school students. These theories (status attainment, oppositional culture, and educational attitudes) were developed to explain differences in achievement among monoracial groups, but the study tested how the theories apply to a multiracial sample. The results show that ethnic identity and experiences of ethnic discrimination are not strong factors in explaining academic performance among multiracial or monoracial students. Instead, the grades of multiracial students are related to their concrete beliefs about the consequences of school failure, the educational values of their peers, and the racial composition of their neighborhoods and schools. Additional descriptive statistics found that multiracial students who self-identify as black or Hispanic achieve lower grades than do those who self-identify as white or Asian. The author suggests a transracial theory of academic performance that considers the effects of contexts.

Several studies indicate that students who are involved in extracurricular activities during college are more academically successful than are those who are not; however, most studies do not distinguish between different types of activities nor do they adequately consider the unique experiences of under-represented college students. Drawing on Ogbu’s theory of oppositional culture and Tinto’s theory of educational departure, I examine the effect of involvement in six different types of student organizations, as well as involvement in a co-ethnic student organization, on the academic performance of African American and Latino college students attending 27 different selective colleges. I find that student organizations differentially affect academic performance, depending on the type of organization and the race and gender of the students.

Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this ‘school structures’ argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and are cognizant of racial patterns of track placement within the local school context, the authors found no evidence that Black students oppose school achievement. These findings are important because they shed light on some of the educational dilemmas that Black students encounter, which have received limited attention in prior work on oppositional culture. These dilemmas include cross‐race peer pressure from Whites among high‐achieving Black students and dilemmas of low achievement among Black students who struggle academically. Based on the findings, future lines ...

This article examines whether young people in a deprived area are disaffected with education, training and employment, or disengaged from participation in their community. It draws upon evidence from the Drumchapel Aspirations Survey, a study of the attitudes, aspirations and skills of young people from one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow. The study involved a survey of young people in two secondary schools in the Drumchapel area, and focus groups with recent school-leavers. The research explored young people's outlooks at a critical life-stage transition: their levels of social participation, existing skills, future employment and training ambitions, and their understandings of the processes involved in the transition to employment. These data are analysed to examine whether there is evidence of any rejection of mainstream values or an oppositional culture among young people in this deprived community or among any sub-groups within it. The Drumchapel Aspirations Survey study demonstrates that there...

Prior research on oppositional culture theory has generally focused on beliefs about the opportunity structure, or the “acting white” hypothesis, as an explanation for racial differences in school achievement. However, little attention has been given to the mechanism by which these beliefs affect achievement: schooling behaviors. The authors posit that students' prior level of skills may be an important omitted factor that biases the effect of schooling behaviors on achievement. Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey, they found that whereas behaviors account for a larger proportion of Asian Americans' achievement advantage than do prior skills, prior skills explain half to nearly three-quarters of blacks' low achievement relative to that of whites and that dramatic declines in behavioral effects on achievement are observed after prior skills are controlled. Finally, the findings show that schooling behaviors are partially shaped by prior skills. They suggest that students with low skill levels prior to high school are likely to have poor achievement at the end of their high school careers, regardless of their schooling behaviors during high school.

For two decades the acting white hypothesis—the premise that black students are driven toward low school performance because of racialized peer pressure—has served as an explanation for the black-white achievement gap. Fordham and Ogbu proposed that black youths sabotage their own school careers by taking an oppositional stance toward academic achievement. Using interviews and existing data from eight North Carolina secondary public schools, this article shows that black adolescents are generally achievement oriented and that racialized peer pressure against high academic achievement is not prevalent in all schools. The analysis also shows important similarities in the experiences of black and white high-achieving students, indicating that dilemmas of high achievement are generalizable beyond a specific group. Typically, highachieving students, regardless of race, are to some degree stigmatized as “nerds” or “geeks.” The data suggest that school structures, rather than culture, may help explain when this stigma becomes racialized, producing a burden of acting white for black adolescents, and when it becomes class-based, producing a burden of “acting high and mighty” for low-income whites. Recognizing the similarities in these processes can help us refocus and refine understandings of the black-white achievement gap.

After more than 15 years of comparative study of minority education, I concluded that I would have to study two additional factors, namely collective identity and cultural frame of reference to more fully explain the variability in minority school performance. In 1986, I published an article with Signithia Fordham on how “oppositional collective identity and cultural frame of reference” or oppositional culture contributed to Black students' school performance. Many critics have misinterpreted the joint article and even constructed a different thesis of oppositional culture than the one we proposed in the joint article. The thesis is that Black students do not aspire to or strive to get good grades because it is perceived as “acting White.” Furthermore, they have translated my cultural–ecological theory into an oppositional culture theory. I am writing this paper to correct the misinterpretations of the joint article in order to advance scholarship on the subject. I begin by explaining the meaning of collective identity and distinguishing it from other concepts of identity. Specifically, I summarize the evolution of oppositional collective identity and cultural frame of reference or oppositional culture among Black Americans and discuss the Black experience with the “burden of ‘acting White’” in the contemporary United States. Finally, I suggest some continuity between Black historical and community experiences with the “burden of ‘acting White,’” as experienced by Black students.

Informed by the Afrocentric quest to "abandon ethnocentric and racist systems of logic and to place the un-discussed in the center of discourse" (Asante, 1990, p. 6), this article challenges oppositional culture theory and the idea of "acting White." More specifically, this article first reveals how oppositional culture theory, at its core, is a culture-of-poverty theory of Black academic underperformance. Second, this article examines the notion of acting White and ties it to the critical literature on Whiteness, in the process demonstrating how it fosters White supremacy by making Whiteness an invisible category. Finally, it is argued that rather than a rejection of academic success, cultural agency is at the heart of Black students' resistance to acting White. It is asserted that at a fundamental level, Black students are seeking liberation from the destructive grips of White supremacy and a culturally affirming way of being human.

Oppositional culture theory has been primarily used to explain race and ethnic differences in education. It argues that members of involuntary minority groups tend to underachieve for fear of being...

Literature on the urban experience suggests that, in response to poverty and other structural constraints, residents in poor urban neighborhoods often develop oppositional cultures and exhibit attitudes and behavior that differ drastically from those found in the larger society. This project examines the attitudes of a sample of poor and near-poor urbanites regarding what is needed to get ahead in life. If their attitudes reflect an oppositional culture, respondents would be expected to associate success with ascription variables such as race/ethnicity, sex, and family economics rather than achievement variables such as hard work and education. Bivariate and multivariate results indicate that regardless of race/ethnicity, sex, household economics, or neighborhood poverty, respondents embrace an achievement ideology that acknowledges the importance of education and hard work. These findings help dispel oppositional culture theories as exemplars of the attitudes of residents in poor urban neighborh...

This article has three objectives. First, it describes Ogbu's classification of minorities: autonomous, voluntary or immigrant, and involuntary or nonimmigrant minorities. Second, it explains Ogbu's cultural-ecological theory of minority school performance. Finally, it suggests some implications of the theory for pedagogy. The authors regard the typology of minority groups as a heuristic device for analysis and interpretation of differences among minority groups in school experience.

Normative expectations may be divided between social values that define the nature of desirable social orders in terms of right and wrong and cultural norms that constitute meaning. In contrast to normative expectations, which are stable in the face of situational change, cognitive expectations are malleable when contradicted by their environment. Certain political responses of blacks in the USA may be explained in terms of these normative orientations. Most blacks share a commitment to mainstream values, a set of cognitive expectations that implies an inability to implement those values, in part owing to the persistence of racism, and an oppositional cultural identity. This configuration of normative orientations led most blacks to support the O.J. Simpson verdict; they could rationalise the evidence against him as a consequence of police racism and, given the way the trial was presented, they could identify with Simpson as part of their oppositional culture. Most blacks supported the Million Man March a...

Elijah Anderson (1997, 1999) argues that exposure to extreme community disadvantage, residing in "street" families, and persistent discrimination encourage many African Americans to develop an oppositional culture that he labels the "code of the street." Importantly, while the adverse conditions described by Anderson increase the probability of adopting the code of the street, most of those exposed to these adverse conditions do not do so. The present study examines the extent to which genetic variation accounts for these differences. Although the diathesis-stress model guides most genetically informed behavior science, the present study investigates hypotheses derived from the differential susceptibility perspective (Belsky & Pluess, 2009). This model posits that some people are genetically predisposed to be more susceptible to environmental influence than others. An important implication of the model is that those persons most vulnerable to adverse social environments are the same ones who reap the most benefit from environmental support. Using longitudinal data from a sample of several hundred African American males, we examined the manner in which variants in three genes - 5-HTT, DRD4, and MAOA - modulate the effect of community and family adversity on adoption of the street code and aggression. We found strong support for the differential susceptibility perspective. When the social environment was adverse, individuals with these genetic variants manifested more commitment to the street code and aggression than those with other genotypes, whereas when adversity was low they demonstrated less commitment to the street code and aggression than those with other genotypes.

This study examines oppositional culture among immigrant and majority adolescents in the Netherlands. Oppositional culture theory expects that immigrant adolescents would uphold positive attitudes towards education. The social exclusion theory predicts instead that immigrant adolescents develop an oppositional culture, particularly in ethnically concentrated schools. To test these ideas, we make use of one of the first large-scale studies on oppositional culture in the Netherlands, and in Europe more generally. Applying multilevel analyses to a survey across 340 schools among 11,215 adolescents aged 11 to 19, we find no clear evidence that immigrant adolescents support oppositional culture either more or less than majority adolescents. Results however showed that oppositional culture differs across schools and that in more ethnically concentrated schools, there is a higher tendency for ethnic minority adolescents to skip classes. Furthermore, oppositional culture finds more support among adolescents who are in a higher grade, male, and who attend a lower education track.

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why this behavior may persist over time. We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional culture in the minority group cannot always be sustained in equilibrium. Indeed, because the size of the majority group is larger, there is an ‘‘imposed’’ process of exposition to role models from the majority group that favors the diffusion of mainstream values in the minority community. In spite of this, an oppositional culture in the minority group can nevertheless be sustained in steady state if there is enough cultural segmentation in terms of role models, or if the size of the minority group is large enough, or if the degree of oppositional identity it implies is high enough. We also demonstrate that the higher the level of harassment and the number of racist individuals in the society, the more likely an oppositional minority culture will emerge. We finally show that ethnic identity and socialization effort can be more intense in mixed rather than segregated neighborhoods. & 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Oppositional culture theory is a widely accepted explanation for disparities in academic performance between middle class Whites and middle class African Americans. The authors make the case that oppositional culture theory has its roots in cultural deficit theory popularized in the early 1960s and present a significant body of evidence to refute it. They express concern that oppositional culture theory is a form of victim blaming that distracts attention from numerous forms of racism that remain as virulent and ubiquitous barriers to academic achievement among African Americans.

In 1986 Fordham and Ogbu introduced the idea that black students continue to underperform in school because of their cultural opposition to acting white. This notion of the burden of acting white and Ogbu's cultural ecological theory more broadly have provided one of the dominant theories used to explain the black-white achievement gap. The research presented here offers a reassessment of the burden of acting white and directs researchers to examine the variation to be found in students' peer groups. This article highlights the ability of students to sustain an authentic black identity and to achieve academically by effectively managing their academic success among their peers

RESULTS PUBLISHED in our 1998 ASR article (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey 1998, henceforward A-D&D) presented a serious challenge to the oppositional culture explanation for racial/ethnic differences in school performance. It was a surprise to many to learn that black students typically report more optimistic occupational expectations, view education as more important to their future, and maintain more pro-school attitudes than do white students. In our conclusion, we stated our hope that this new evidence would lead to further debate regarding the source of racial/ethnic differences in school performance

The oppositional culture explanation for racial disparities in school performance posits that individuals from historically oppressed groups (involuntary minorities) signify their antagonism toward the dominant group by resisting school goals. In contrast, individuals from the dominant group and groups that migratedfreely to the host country (immigrant minorities) maintain optimistic views of their chances for educational and occupational success. Because of its historical and cross-cultural appeal, this explanation has been well-received by academics, although key implications of the theory have not been carefully tested. Proponents have failed to systematically compare perceptions of occupational opportunity and resistance to school across involuntary, dominant, and immigrant groups. Using a large sample of African American, Asian American, and non-Hispanic white high school sophomores from the first follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Study, we provide the first rigorous test of the oppositional culture explanation. Upon close scrutiny, its key predictions fail. DR espite recent improvement on some measures, the gap in educational performance across racial groups persists. Finding explanations for that gap continues to frustrate academics. Some scholars point to characteristics of the minority family itself (Moynihan 1965), while others see differences in educational performance as primarily a function of social structural conditions (Bourdieu 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976), such as the types of neighborhoods students live in (Massey and Denton 1993) and consequently the kinds of schools they attend. The oppositional culture explanation draws from both of these traditions, recognizing that social structural conditions shape opportunities but arguing that these conditions form students' motivation for schooling.

Introduction Lack of knowledge of the collegiate experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual students forms a significant gap in the higher education literature. Not only is there minimal research-based work in this area, some of the most prominent research tends to portray lesbian, bisexual women, bisexual men, and gay men as a homogeneous body, often grouping them under the common category of "homosexual." The assumption that lesbian, gay, and bisexual students share quite similar experiences has led to overgeneralizations about their lives and has compromised the quality of scholarship on such populations. In turn, this has contributed to campus policies and practices that are inadequately articulated and often implemented ineffectively (Rhoads, 1994). What is most needed at this time is in-depth knowledge of the diversity that exists among lesbian, gay, and bisexual students. Although their common struggle in the face of an oppositional culture has led to the loose formation of a "community" organized around the need for solidarity, such a common struggle ought not to be confused with a clearly articulated cultural enclave. With the preceding in mind, I have three goals in this article: First, I seek to contribute research-based findings about the experiences of gay and bisexual college males. The focus is on issues of identity, as I utilize theories of culture to make sense of students' collegiate experiences. Second, in presenting a subcultural analysis, my intent is to highlight the diversity among gay and bisexual male students and thus resist the tendency toward monolithic portrayals of "homosexual" identity. I argue that understanding the diversity of students' experiences is crucial to the work of higher education researchers, faculty, and student affairs practitioners. Only through a commitment to understanding the complexity of students' lived experiences will colleges and universities be able to build the kinds of diverse learning environments needed for educating a truly multicultural society (Rhoads & Valadez, 1996; Tierney, 1993b). A third goal of this article is to raise questions about the utility of developmental models of gay identity, such as stage theories advanced by Cass (1979, 1984), Coleman (1982), and Troiden (1979, 1989), among others. Although developmental models such as these are sometimes helpful in better understanding the general phases that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people may face, such perspectives also run the risk of misleading professionals involved in researching and/or educating lesbian, gay, and bisexual college students. Developmental models of "homosexuals" become problematic if they are used to particularize findings to specific individuals when, in fact, significant differences exist among lesbian, gay, and bisexual students. Thus, I use an ethnographic study of gay and bisexual college males to highlight some of the significant differences among these students. I argue that localized understandings are needed to offset the limitations of developmental stage models. Student Culture and Identity There are a multitude of theories about college students and their experiences that have proliferated over the past thirty years or so. From the early work on student culture and peer influence (Becker, 1963, 1972; Clark & Trow, 1966; Feldman, 1972; Feldman & Newcomb, 1970; Leemon, 1972; Newcomb & Wilson, 1966) to the more recent emphasis on student out-of-class learning and learning outcomes (Astin, 1993; Kuh, 1995; Kuh, Schuh, Whitt, & Associates, 1991; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991) a variety of topics and developmental concerns have been addressed. This literature is immense, and any effort to summarize this body of knowledge here would be foolhardy and naive. There are, however, some key works that have paved the way for contemporary work on student culture and identity. In terms of identity acquisition, the work of Erikson (1956, 1968), Chickering (1969), Perry (1970), and Kohlberg (1975) cleared some early ground for others to advance developmental understandings of identity processes. …

The authors review their previous explanation of black students' underachievement. They now suggest the importance of considering black people's expressive responses to their historical status and experience in America. “Fictive kinship” is proposed as a framework for understanding how a sense of collective identity enters into the process of schooling and affects academic achievement. The authors support their argument with ethnographic data from a high school in Washington, D.C., showing how the fear of being accused of “acting white” causes a social and psychological situation which diminishes black students' academic effort and thus leads to underachievement. Policy and programmatic implications are discussed.

Various explanations for low school achievement of minority students include those of cultural differences between teacher and student and low motivation of students because of cynicism regarding their chances in the labor market. These explanations are compared, critiqued, and reconsidered in terms of critical social theory, more especially resistance theory. The article considers the perceived legitimacy of the school and its teachers and the development of oppositional culture by students. Transformation of routine educational practice is necessary, and culturally responsive pedagogy is one means of transformation. CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY, MINORITY STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT, RESISTANCE THEORY, OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE

Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action. The reigning model used to understand culture's effects on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values toward which action is directed, thus making values the central causal element of culture. This paper analyzes the conceptual difficulties into which this traditional view of culture leads and offers an alternative model. Among sociologists and anthropologists, debate has raged for several academic generations over defining the term "culture." Since the seminal work of Clifford Geertz (1973a), the older definition of culture as the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or that (associated with the name of Ward Goodenough) as everything one would need to know to become a functioning member of a society, have been displaced in favor of defining culture as the publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning (see Keesing, 1974). For purposes of this paper, culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which "social processes of sharing modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community" (Hannerz, 1969:184) take place.