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Rating: 
Summary: Objective Study
Review: Any open minded person that reads this book will quickly discover the obvious; The Black community in Shaker Heights, Ohio is in deep need of Dr. Phil McGraw's "Self Matters." Ogbu produces page upon page of community respondents culturally brainwashed to focus their intellect on a history they have not lived, and an available future that they cannot fathom. Ogbu's tone is harsh. His main argument: The Black community's cultural beliefs and practices are not conducive to success in academics. This is where the controversy lies. Because the book doesn't blame the testing gap on White racism, his analysis must be wrong. Simply read what students themselves are saying and draw your own conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: Objective Study
Review: Any open minded person that reads this book will quickly discover the obvious; The Black community in Shaker Heights, Ohio is in deep need of Dr. Phil McGraw's "Self Matters." Ogbu produces page upon page of community respondents culturally brainwashed to focus their intellect on a history they have not lived, and an available future that they cannot fathom. Ogbu's tone is harsh. His main argument: The Black community's cultural beliefs and practices are not conducive to success in academics. This is where the controversy lies. Because the book doesn't blame the testing gap on White racism, his analysis must be wrong. Simply read what students themselves are saying and draw your own conclusions.
Rating: 
Summary: Truly interesting but sometimes looks in the wrong direction
Review: Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb, by the late Dr. John Ogbu, is an interesting attempt to explain the educational gap between two races: black and white. The fact of the matter is that Caucasian students do significantly better than African-American students in every aspect and level of education. John Ogbu's intentions are to help the reader understand nearly every aspect that attributes to this discontinuity, and he is successful at his attempt to do so. Even though I don't agree with every point he argues (blacks are lazy), I must say that the amount of time and research that had to have went into this project is truly amazing. He spent a considerable amount of time in the Shaker Heights Community doing countless interviews and research. The statistics that he imparts on the reader are truly overwhelming in the sense that this problem is so obvious, but isn't being immediately addressed. Being an African-American student in a suburban school, I walked into this book with certain views as to why this gap exists, but after reading it, I have come to the realization that this educational gap is a huge problem that exists everywhere and needs to be addressed before blacks continue to fall behind. It raises the question, "Is education integrated but still not equal?"
Rating:
Summary: Much more than "BLACKS NEED TO CHANGE THE WAY THEY ACT..."
Review: I was a student of Dr. John Ogbu's and worked for him as a research assistant. Dr. Ogbu was the foremost specialist on educational issues of social and ethnic classes, focusing on inner-city minorities. I say "was" because Dr. Ogbu passed away on Thursday, Aug. 21,2003.Just because some might say, "Ogbu didn't blame the achievement gap on White racism..." does not mean racism and cultural and class privilege has nothing to do with the educational disengagement of people of color. Dr. Ogbu fought for social justice issues and cultural understanding. He never taught where to place blame but rather, inherent in the discipline of cultural anthropology, he forced us to look at history, political economy, classism, racism, structures of cultural power and propagation, sociology, etc. Thus, from the breadth of Dr. Ogbu's work in general and this book in particular, one should conclude that the educational disengagement of minority youth (particularly Black youth) in this country has unique characteristics that are founded on various historical situations, many of which have been systematic, intentional and clearly Euro-centric and racist. Having said this, I implore the reader not to simplify Dr. Ogbu's work into a blame-shifting issue. Racism exists and race matters. This does not mean "every White person is racist." People of all colors can be racist. Cultural understanding is paramount in becoming an empathetic society. Dr. Ogbu dutifully accomplished this in his teaching and also encouraged us to fight against social and economic power structures that all too often exacerbated the disenfranchisement of certain classes of people.
Rating:
Summary: Much more than "BLACKS NEED TO CHANGE THE WAY THEY ACT..."
Review: I was a student of Dr. John Ogbu's and worked for him as a research assistant. Dr. Ogbu was the foremost specialist on educational issues of social and ethnic classes, focusing on inner-city minorities. I say "was" because Dr. Ogbu passed away on Thursday, Aug. 21,2003. Just because some might say, "Ogbu didn't blame the achievement gap on White racism..." does not mean racism and cultural and class privilege has nothing to do with the educational disengagement of people of color. Dr. Ogbu fought for social justice issues and cultural understanding. He never taught where to place blame but rather, inherent in the discipline of cultural anthropology, he forced us to look at history, political economy, classism, racism, structures of cultural power and propagation, sociology, etc. Thus, from the breadth of Dr. Ogbu's work in general and this book in particular, one should conclude that the educational disengagement of minority youth (particularly Black youth) in this country has unique characteristics that are founded on various historical situations, many of which have been systematic, intentional and clearly Euro-centric and racist. Having said this, I implore the reader not to simplify Dr. Ogbu's work into a blame-shifting issue. Racism exists and race matters. This does not mean "every White person is racist." People of all colors can be racist. Cultural understanding is paramount in becoming an empathetic society. Dr. Ogbu dutifully accomplished this in his teaching and also encouraged us to fight against social and economic power structures that all too often exacerbated the disenfranchisement of certain classes of people.
Rating:
Summary: An extremely accessible piece of social science scholarship
Review: This book manages to be comprehensible to a general reader while adhering to the rigorous demands of social science, that is to say, the formal structure of presenting and defending hypotheses and footnoting them endlessly. The book could have been better edited; too many errors of grammar, usage and even spelling slipped through.
I tend to trust Black commentators on American race issues. John Ogbu, like Bill Cosby, Larry Elder and Thomas Sowell, has an intellectual stature that demands he be taken seriously and an immunity to charges of racism. Another author would not have gotten away with the phrase "academic disengagement." Yet at the end of the book one realizes how appropriate that two-word appraisal is.
It is refreshing as well to read an author with an anthropologist's orientation. Ogbu's exhaustive study gave him an opportunity to repeat and reinforce earlier findings in Stockton and Oakland, California, and elsewhere and tailor findings to the Shaker Heights situation.
Blacks are, like American Indians, non-voluntary minorities. To say the least, most of their ancestors did not exactly enlist for service in the United States. The fewer and more recent voluntary black immigrants such as Colin Powell are interesting in two respects. First, their children do better in school than native born blacks. Secondly, however, subsequent generations born in the United States tend to adopt the (dysfunctional) attitudes of the native-born.
Ogbu's contention is that Blacks' profound distrust of the establishment and their conviction that they will not get a fair shake predisposes them not to give their full effort to schoolwork. Their defeatist attitudes start to emerge in the later primary years and are highly apparent by high school. Among the contributing factors are inappropriate role models -- sports and entertainment figures and various types of outlaws -- and a lack of parental involvement in the children's schooling. He describes a black expectation of a "beer mug" approach to teaching The teacher pours knowledge into the passive student. In this model the parents' job is to get the child to school, and the blame is on the teachers if he doesn't learn. He says also that parents are more attuned to whether teachers "care" than whether they are effective teachers.
He surveys a range of attempts to find solutions in changes to the school model: vouchers, charters, merit pay and so on. None have been, by his assessment, markedly successful. His recommendation is to change the culture of the learners themselves. Reinforce positive study habits, recognize achievement, and arm the students against the inevitable attempts of their peers to drag them into mediocrity.
Ogbu did a workmanlike job of taking into consideration such factors as parental education, income and peer group values in comparing black and white students. He did so by drawing on his wealth of experience with Black students throughout America. Since his distinction between voluntary and involuntary immigrant status is central to his argument, it would have been useful to attempt to sort out those aspects of the Black educational experience that are unique within the American environment from those that characterize Black students in other national settings. The Nigerian-born Mr. Ogbu would have been uniquely well positioned to do so.
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