Parental Education Choice: Some African American Dilemmas

The research literature on families and educational achievement as it addresses African American populations is uniquely characterized by attention to educational failure rather than educational success (Slaughter, Nakagawa, et al., 1990). This orientation originated over 40 years ago with the "culture-as-social-class" conceptual model, which attempts to explain the behavior of lower income African American children and families in encounters with traditional schools (e.g., Davis, 1948). Even the most progressive of contemporary models addressing families and schooling in relation to this population such as those of Ogbu (1974, 1988), Brice-Heath (1988), and Clark (1983) have been compelled to account for the educational failures of urban African American children.