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Academic Achievement
Research on academic achievement among African American students often focuses on their underachievement or failure, its causes, and possible strategies for remediation. In reviewing that research, this entry inevitably reflects that emphasis. Nevertheless, it asserts at the start the historical understanding that laws were eradicated and practices carried out throughout the United States to ensure that enslaved Africans—and their descendants—would not become literate. If they were caught learning how to read or write, enslaved Africans—and the White people who taught them—would be punished.
Thus, historically for African American people in the United States, education has been viewed as a passport to freedom. This view is shown by the risks taken by the enslaved during enslavement to learn how to read and write, African Americans' push for mass public schooling in the southern United States during the 19th century, and African Americans' legal and political battles for equal and quality education during the 20th and 21st centuries.
Beginning with a historical review of various theories about academic achievement among African American students, this entry then turns to the contemporary dialogue about the socalled “academic achievement gap,” reviews the small body of literature about highachieving African Americans, examines the available quantitative evidence on the subject, and briefly considers an agenda for future research.
20th-Century Perspectives
During the 20th century, a number of theoretical perspectives (e.g., geneticists, cultural deprivation, cultural difference, structural perspective, and groups' cultural expectations) have been used by the broader scholarly community to explain why African American students experience school failure. At different points during the 20th century, each became the dominant paradigm to explain why some groups achieved while others underachieved in mainstream U.S. schools.
Genetics
During the first half of the 20th century, geneticists such as Lewis Terman and Henry Goddard considered the low performance on intelligence tests of some racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities to be a reflection of the supposed genetic inferiority of these groups. Instead of situating African Americans' schooling opportunities—or lack thereof—within a sociohistorical context of denied formal schooling during enslavement, racial segregation, and racism, geneticists attempted to prove that African American people—as well as some European ethnic minorities (Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians), Native Americans, and Mexican Americans—were inferior.
The geneticists consider the differences in academic achievement among various groups of students (often measured by IQ test scores) as indicative of the innate intelligence of certain groups rather than a product of socioeconomic, historical, and cultural factors. Although African American social scientists, in particular scholars such as Horace Mann Bond, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Allison Davis, critiqued the studies that tried to support the argument that African Americans were intellectually inferior, remnants of this belief continued to germinate within the academy, as exemplified by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles H. Murray's 1996 book The Bell Curve. In this book, the authors assert that a major reason why some groups do not achieve in schools might be connected more to rank-and-file notions of intellectual inferiority than to persistent economic, structural, cultural, and historical forces.
Cultural Deprivation
Cultural deprivation theorists viewed students' academic differences on standardized measures as a result of nurture—or lack thereof—rather than on some inherent predisposition to fail the test, as asserted by geneticists. Emerging from the national thrust to eradicate poverty during the 1960s, cultural deprivation theorists offered a counter to geneticists and attributed the academic underachievement among some ethnic and racial groups to the failure of some students' families to transmit the values and cultural patterns necessary for the students to achieve in mainstream academic institutions.
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