Peer Relations and School Resistance: Does Oppositional Culture Apply to Race or to Gender?

Oppositional culture theory argues that members of involuntary minority groups tend to underachieve in high school for fear that they be accused of "acting white." The underlying assumption, then, is that academic success harms peer relationships for involuntary minorities more than it does for other groups. Prior tests based on survey data fail to support the theory. Using the first follow-up (high school sophomores) of the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), we examined race/ethnic and gender differences with respect to the two main components of oppositional culture theory: peer relations and school resistance. Like prior survey analyses, we found no support for the thesis that oppositional culture accounts for race/ethnic differences in school achievement. However, oppositional culture does appear to play a key role in explaining why male students tend to receive lower grades despite standardized test scores that equal or exceed the scores of female students. Based on a battery of measures in the NELS, we find that anti-studious attitudes and behaviors are more prevalent among males than females, and conclude that future researchers should be more sensitive to this gender aspect of school culture.

The educational performance of African Americans has been a much-studied topic in the sociology of education. This research has revealed a mixed picture of African Americans in the American educational system (see Miller, 1995). On a positive note, there has been a steady increase in the high school completion rates such that by 1989 the percent of the Black population aged 25 to 29 that completed twelve or more years of school was 82.2 compared to 86.0 for the White population. On a negative note, despite increased high school completion rates, Blacks continued to lag substantially behind their White counterparts in school achievement. For example, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments for reading and mathematics, in 1990, White 17-year-olds had an average reading score of 297, which is close to the "Adept Level" (300). In contrast, Black 17-year-olds had an average reading score of 267, which is closer to the "Intermediate Level" (250). With mathematics, an increasingly important subject in this high-technological society, Blacks continued to lag significantly behind. In 1990, the average math score for White 17-year-olds was 310, and for Black 17-year-olds the average score was 289.

The most recent NAEP findings continue this trend (NCES, 2004). In 2003, White students in the eighth grade had an average reading score of 272, while Black eighth graders had an average reading score of 244. In mathematics, White eighth graders had an average score of 288, while in contrast Black eighth graders had an average score of 252. There have been many attempts to explain these gaps. Among these attempts, the theory that has perhaps attracted the most attention is the oppositional culture theory of Fordham and Ogbu (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Fordham, 1988; Ogbu, 1978, 2003).

OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE THEORY

Oppositional culture theory provides a compelling account of school resistance among African American students. To explain variations in minority success, it distinguishes between two types of minorities: voluntary minorities and involuntary minorities. Voluntary minorities consist of immigrant minorities, such as Punjabi Indians and Koreans who migrated more or less voluntarily from their homeland to America, seeking to improve their economic condition. In contrast, involuntary minorities are those who did not originally choose to become members of American society but were incorporated largely against their will either through enslavement, colonization, or conquest, and were relegated to a subordinate status. African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans are cited as groups that fall into this category (Ogbu & Simons, 1998).

These differences of entry into American society result in differences in adaptation and differences in the perception of structural and social barriers usually confronted by new migrants. Voluntary minorities are more willing to adapt to American society as a means for upward mobility and, indeed, it is argued that in anticipation of possible barriers to opportunities, they overachieve scholastically (Ogbu & Simons, 1998). They compare themselves to compatriots in their countries of origin to derive a favorable view of American society. Involuntary minorities, in contrast, compare themselves with the dominant members of American society, and they are painfully aware of their disadvantaged status (Ogbu & Simons, 1998).

To further explain the individual behavior of African American students and the peer culture that perpetuates and maintains academic underperformance, the theory makes two additional propositions. It argues that within an oppositional cultural frame of reference, African Americans develop symbolic devices for protecting their identity and for maintaining boundaries between them and White Americans. secondly, because of the historical and continuing legacy of oppression, African Americans develop a sense of collective identity in opposition to the social identity of White Americans. Indeed, to behave in a manner defined as falling within a White cultural frame of reference is known as "acting White" and is negatively sanctioned by one's peers (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986).

Gender appears as a subtext in Fordham and Ogbu's work; male students appear to be more susceptible to the negative consequences of academic success than their female counterparts (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). They cite students' comments that question the sexual orientation of academically successful African American males, an issue that was not of concern for African American females.

Three Investigations of Oppositional Culture

Three contemporary investigations of oppositional culture in education stand out in the literature, and like the present study, all three employ NELS to assess oppositional culture theory or blocked opportunities theory: Cook and Ludwig (1998), Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998), and Kao and Tienda (1998). All three investigations, however, failed to find evidence of oppositional culture. Our goal is to extend these studies in several ways. We examine boys and girls separately for each of four race/ethnic groups: Whites, African American, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Most prior studies are limited to African Americans and Whites. We also extend prior studies by including results from a more thorough and direct examination of the academic orientation-peer culture relationship. Kao and Tienda (1998) focus on aspirations rather than on peer culture and peer relations. Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998) include a measure of peer relations, "popularity among peers," as a dependent variable to test oppositional culture theory. While their results fail to support the theory, they do not use popularity among peers as an independent variable to test whether peer relations are consequential for academic orientation. Cook and Ludwig (1998) employ only two indicators of academic orientation. By using multiple indicators of both peer culture and academic orientation and examining the effect of academic orientation on peer culture, and vice versa, the authors provide a more thorough test of oppositional culture theory.

The Current Investigation

The academic and the public debate about the veracity of oppositional culture theory persists. Some qualitative studies of student culture (MacLeod, 1992; Matute-Bianchi, 1986) have found evidence of oppositional culture, while the most consistent threat to oppositional culture theory comes from recent survey research. Although a few qualitative and theoretical inquiries into oppositional culture have challenged Fordham and Ogbu's thesis in part or whole (e.g., Deyhle, 1995), for the most part these inquiries have only presented alternative possibilities of minority students' behavior, not a complete rejection of oppositional culture theory, as in the case of survey researchers.

Based on nationally representative samples, survey researchers have been unable to replicate the ethnographic findings of race differences in resistance to school. This failure of survey research to replicate the ethnographic findings could reflect the bluntness of survey research, the explanation favored by ethnographers, or it could reflect the nonrepresentative nature of the schools studied by ethnographers-the explanation favored by survey researchers. Indeed, in a recent exchange, considerable doubt has been cast on the validity of oppositional culture theory (Downey & Ainsworth-Darnell, 2002; Farkas, Lleras, & Maczuga, 2002).

In the present study, the authors use the same survey data as the three investigations of oppositional culture mentioned above, but with the innovations noted earlier (including Hispanic and Asian American students, examining race differences by gender, and examining the relationship between academic orientation and peer relation in more detail).

METHOD

Data

The data for this study come from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS). The sample consists of 1,766 African Americans, 12,238 Whites (non-Hispanic), 1,042 Asians Americans, and 2,150 Hispanics. The NELS is a multistage longitudinal study designed to provide trend data about important transitions experienced by students as they leave elementary school and progress through high school and into postsecondary institutions or the work force. The authors use data from the first follow-up panel, conducted in 1990, making students in the study high school sophomores.

Measures

Peer Relations. The study employs three measures of the construct peer relations-how well respondents report getting along with their peers. Factor analysis is used to construct scales for the first two dimensions. The first scale, Friends, consists of questions such as "Respondent makes friends easily with girls." The second scale, Integration, is based on respondents' selfreports of how well integrated they are among friendship cliques. Finally, Acceptance is a singleitem measure of the degree respondents report feeling accepted by students in class. The Friends and Integration scales have alphas of .78 and .75, respectively. All three measures were coded such that higher values reflect better peer relations: greater ease of making friends, being well integrated, and being well accepted by peers.

Consistent with the literature on peer relations and influence (Hallinan, 1982), it is assumed that students' peers are same-race peers. Students tend to make in-group comparisons when assessing their status and school tracking tends to reinforce racial segregation within school (Rosenbaum, 1976). Moreover, as Ogbu (2003) has demonstrated, the racial composition of the school is inconsequential, for even Black students in highly integrated schools are resistant to academic success.

Academic Orientation. Academic orientation involves the way students conduct themselves in terms of their academic responsibilities. In the present investigation, academic orientation is measured using students' data on behaviors, attitudes, and self-reported grades. All scales were created using factor analysis with Varimax rotation.

The Academic Behaviors scale is created from two sets of questions: (a) the first measures students' self-reported efforts in mathematics, English, history, and science, and (b) the second measures how often respondents report going to class with pencil and paper, books, and homework done. The Academic Behaviors scale has a reliability alpha coefficient of .60. "Attitudes" is assessed using students' responses to items such as, "How important are good grades to you?" It has an alpha coefficient of .79. Finally, "grades" has an alpha coefficient of .82 and is assessed using respondents' self-report in mathematics, English, history, and science.

Standardized test scores were used to get an aptitude measure of performance and to provide a base from which to compare the academic orientation of respondents. The standardized test scores scale was created by combining the cognitive test results in four subject areas: reading comprehension, mathematics, science, and history (alpha = .92).

To complete the demographic characteristics of respondents, race and gender were included in the analysis. These variables are dummy-coded with Whites as the reference category for race and females as the reference categories for gender.

FINDINGS

The unadjusted means of grades and test scores reveal that Asian Americans perform best followed by non-Hispanic Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans. These findings are not new, of course; since numerous studies document race/ethnic differences in grades and test scores among students in the United States (Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Kao & Tienda, 1988; MatutiBranchi, 1986). The authors restate them here because they set the stage for subsequent analysis.

Ethnic Differences in Student Attitudes and Behaviors

One of the problems with the oppositional culture thesis is that surveys consistently find that African American students have more positive attitudes toward school than White students (Ainsworth-Darnell & Downey, 1998). These findings agree with those earlier results. For questions such as, "How often do you feel it is okay for you to. . .be late for school? Cut a couple of classes? Copy someone else's homework?" the authors found that African American students are the least likely to approve of such things, and White students are the most likely to approve of them (Table 1, top panel).

Defenders of the oppositional culture thesis tend to discount these kinds of results. Ogbu (1991) notes that the positive response of African American students to these questions may represent nothing more than "wishful thinking." After all, "acting White" refers to behaviors, not attitudes. The fact that a student says she disapproves of cutting classes has no effect on her academic achievement unless she, in fact, does not cut classes.

Consistent with the oppositional culture thesis, then, it is important to emphasize that positive attitudes of some groups will translate into academic success for that group only to the extent that there is behavior consonant with the attitudes-and surveys fail to find such consonance by race/ethnicity. For the attitude scale, the order used is African Americans (most positive), Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Whites. For questions about specific behaviors bearing on academic success (e.g., "How often do you come to class without these things:. . .pencil or paper. . .books?"), the order is Asian Americans, Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans (Table 1). Therefore, African Americans and Hispanics tend to have favorable academic attitudes but unfavorable academic behaviors.

Other studies report the same attitude-behavior discrepancy, and a debate rages over the proper interpretation for this discrepancy (Mickelson, 1990). There is no point to being lured into this debate, since for this purpose the critical point is that resistance to school will effectively produce group differences to the extent that groups vary in the level and consistency of their antischool attitudes and behaviors. Attitude-behavior consistency for the groups is crucial to the subsequent analysis of group differences.

Based on the behavior scale, the findings in Table 1 offer very limited support for the oppositional culture thesis. In support of the thesis, the order of the groups based on studious behaviors (e.g., bringing pencils and books to class) parallels their order based on grades and test scores: Asian Americans, Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans. However, the ethnic differences fail to narrow when measures of peer approval are added (Table 1, middle panel). That result is inconsistent with the thesis that African American students, who do not exhibit oppositional behavior, will incur the disapproval of their peers. In other words, if ethnic differences in oppositional behaviors are caused by ethnic differences in peer approval of those behaviors, the ethnic differences in behaviors should disappear or narrow substantially when peer approval is controlled. This, however, is not the case.

In short, consistent with oppositional culture theory, the authors find evidence of greater oppositional behavior among African American and Hispanic students, but not for the reasons given by the theory. Contrary to the theory, race/ethnic differences in oppositional behavior do not narrow when peer relations are taken into account. Similarly, race/ethnic differences in grades and test scores remain after the behavior for peer approval is controlled (Table 1, bottom panel). The differences in the adjusted means in Table 1 are almost as wide as the (unadjusted) differences described earlier in grades and test scores. Thus, the findings for grades and test scores also are inconsistent with the oppositional culture thesis.

Ethnic Differences in Peer Relations

Oppositional culture theory has been criticized for assuming that resistance to school is a distinctive characteristic of involuntary minorities. The ethnographic finding that there is a high level of resistance to school in predominantly Black student populations might be irrelevant to the underachievement of Black students compared to White students, since resistance to school might be just as pervasive in predominantly White student populations.

In the prior section it was concluded that there are race/ethnic differences in student behaviors in the direction predicted by oppositional culture theory. However, these race/ethnic behavioral differences did not disappear when they were controlled for peer relations, which undermines the theory's argument that involuntary minorities underachieve because highachieving minorities are more vulnerable (than high-achieving Whites are) to the disapproval of their peers.

Why did the controls for peer relations fail to narrow the ethnic gaps in school behaviors and achievement? One possibility is that the negative sanctions argument is invalid. Perhaps highachieving Blacks and Hispanics are not ostracized by their peers, or, if they are, the ostracism is no greater for high-achieving Blacks and Hispanics than for high-achieving Whites.

Based on the unadjusted means (Table 2, top panel), Whites find it easiest to make friends, African Americans find it hardest, and Hispanics and Asian Americans are in the middle. We have already noted that African American students tend to exhibit less studious behavior than White students (Table 1). What if African Americans matched the level of studious behavior of Whitesand their mean on the studious behavior scale increased from 2.94 (the actual level) to 3.062 (the mean for Whites)? If African American students are in fact deterred from studious behavior because such behavior would make it more difficult for them to make friends, then increasing their studious behavior should make it more difficult for them to make friends. In short, adjusting the means for studious behavior should (based on the oppositional culture thesis) increase the gap between African Americans and Whites with regard to making friends. Yet there is no increase (Table 2, middle panel).

By similar logic, if African Americans are deterred from studious behavior because they fear the disapproval of their peers, then adjusting the African American mean up to the overall mean on studious behavior should also significantly reduce the feelings of integration and acceptance among African American students. Yet we find no support for that prediction (Table 2, middle panel).

The bottom panel of Table 2 reports ethnic differences in means that have been adjusted for academic orientation in general, where that term is understood to include pro-school attitudes and good grades, as well as studious behavior. If African American students who "act white" by their studious behaviors, pro-school attitudes, and good grades are in fact ostracized by their peers for failing to conform to the oppositional culture, the effect of that ostracism should be evident when the African American means is adjusted to match the overall means for all four groups on behavior, attitude, and grades. Contrary to the oppositional culture thesis, however, African American students fare no worse on the peer relations measures when they are adjusted statistically to "act white" by moving their means to match the overall means on behavior, attitudes, and grades.

To this point the major conclusions parallel those of previous survey analyses. First, consistent with the oppositional culture thesis, African American students are less likely than White students and Asian American students to exhibit studious behavior, yet (contrary to the thesis) African American students are more likely to express pro-education attitudes (e.g., Ainsworth-Darnell & Downey, 1998, Table 3). Second, the race/ethnic gap in behavior does not account for the race/ethnic gap in student achievement. The gap in grades and test scores between African Americans and Whites and Asian Americans remains even after the authors control for group differences in studious behavior. Third, there is no evidence that high-achieving African American students are sanctioned more negatively (than White and Asian students) for their achievement. Indeed, Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998, Table 4) find that being a good student boosts the self-reported popularity of Black students, undermining the negative sanctions argument. The authors extend the "popularity" variable to include three measures of peer relations, but still find no evidence for the negative sanctions thesis.

The third conclusion, in particular, hurts the theory. If high-achieving African American students are not subject to more severe peer disapproval than high-achieving White and Asian American students, then it is hard to make the case that oppositional culture is crucial to the underachievement of African Americans relative to Whites and Asian Americans.

When the authors extend previous research to include Hispanics, we find that Hispanic students most closely resemble African American students with regard to academic behaviors, grades, and test scores (like African American students, Hispanic students tend to score lower than Whites and Asian Americans in all three areas). Moreover, with regard to peer relations, Hispanic students also resemble African American students in terms of their ability to make friends, their level of integration, and their feelings of acceptance.

Gender and Oppositional Culture

Gender Differences in Academic Achievement. Fordham and Ogbu's theory of oppositional culture rests on the premise that for African American students there is an inverse relationship between academic orientation and good peer relations. Because they are focusing on a Black population, Fordham and Ogbu imply that oppositional culture is specific to Blacks. The use of the blocked opportunity literature, which tends to focus on Blacks as the point of departure, further links oppositional culture to African Americans. Hence, the clear implication is that resistance to school is most pronounced among African Americans.

Even though the Fordham-Ogbu oppositional culture theory does not fare well in survey studies of race/ethnic differences in student achievement, the "resistance to school" line of argument might help to account for another noteworthy group difference in student achievement: the difference between girls and boys. What appears to be little appreciated is that gender differences in academic orientation and achievement in many instances are just as pronounced as race differences in academic orientation and achievement. And these gender differences in academic performance do appear to be linked to gender differences in school resistance, as the authors will show.

Table 3 reports the overall gender differences in attitudes, behaviors, grades, and standardized test scores. Girls exhibit higher scores on both attitudes and behaviors. The mean for girls on the 9-item attitudes scale is about 0.14 points (about 0.3 standard deviation) higher than the mean for boys. The mean for girls on the 9-item behaviors scale is about 0.16 points (about 0.23 standard deviation) higher than the mean for boys. Girls also tend to receive somewhat higher grades (by an average of 0.263 points on the 8-point grade scale, or 0.18 standard deviation) but boys tend to score slightly higher on standardized tests (by an average 1.1 points, or 0.12 standard deviation). These gender differences remain after adjusting the means for the effects of peer approval (Table 3, bottom panel). Thus, the negative sanctions argument of oppositional culture theory does not appear to account for the gender differences in academic orientation.

In general, resistance to school is greater among boys than girls, as reflected in the lower means for boys on the attitude and behavior measures. Consistent with this apparent poorer effort, boys tend to receive somewhat lower grades in high school. It is hard to attribute the lower grades for boys to lower aptitude, since boys tend to perform slightly better on standardized tests (Wightman, 1998). The pattern of results suggests that it is less academic effort, not less ability, that accounts for boys' lower grades.

Does the greater male resistance to school hold true for all race/ethnic groups? Table 4 provides confirming evidence. Note the greater than sign (">"), indicating a statistically significant gender difference. In every instance, males exhibit lower means on both attitudes and behaviors, and in every instance they receive lower grades. This gender difference holds for Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, and the difference remains even after the means were adjusted for peer approval. Yet, males tend to score slightly higher on standardized tests; therefore, again the evidence suggests that the gender difference in grades is not due to a gender difference in aptitudes.

In summary, the survey data indicate clear gender differences in high school sophomores. By collapsing gender, tests of the oppositional culture thesis have implicitly assumed that oppositional culture applies equally to African American girls and boys, thus missing the main point of school resistance. Males appear to be more resistant to school, and they receive poorer grades despite scoring as well as or better than females on standardized tests. Within race/ethnic groups, males average about .12 points (one-fourth of a standard deviation) lower on the attitudes scale, about. 15 points (one-fifth of a standard deviation) lower on the behaviors scale, and about .27 points (one-fifth of a standard deviation) lower on grades. These gaps tend to be as wide as the racial/ethnic gaps examined earlier. The within-race gender difference on the behavior scale (.15) is larger than the African American-White difference on the behavior scale (-.12: Table 1), and the gender difference in grades for African Americans (.40) is the same size as the adjusted African American-White difference on grades (-.39: Table 1).

Gender as the Locus of Differences in School Resistance. The finding that gender differences in resistance to school are as large as race/ethnic differences in resistance to school is strategic. The finding is strategic because sex, unlike race/ethnicity, is largely independent of parental socioeconomic status, school quality, and other variables that determine grades. Hence, gender differences in school resistance provide a purer test of the effect of school resistance, per se, on academic achievement than do race/ethnicity differences in school resistance. The more-orless random assignment of boys and girls to families and schools makes it difficult to argue that there is no causal link when it is observed that gender differences in school resistance are related to gender differences in grades.

This assignment suggests that gender differences in school resistance are nontrivial, and that they are related to gender differences in grades. It is interesting to observe that the groups (African Americans and Whites) exhibiting the greatest gender gaps in grades (.398 and .276, respectively) are also the groups exhibiting the greatest gender gaps in behaviors (.172 and .173, respectively). Importantly, the gender gap in behaviors is reinforced, not offset, by the gender gap in attitudes, unlike race and ethnic differences.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

In this study, the authors reanalyzed the NELS data toward providing a more thorough test of the thesis that high achievement damages peer relations more for African American and Hispanic students than for their White and Asian American counterparts. The reanalysis largely confirms the negative findings of prior survey analyses with respect to the oppositional culture explanation for the underachievement of involuntary minorities. It was found that high-achieving African American and Hispanic report more favorable peer relations-contrary to the negative sanctions thesis that is key to the oppositional culture theory. In the second part of the study, gender differences in academic orientation was examined. By comparing the results for gender with those for race, two key discoveries were made. First, gender differences often match race differences in size. Second, gender differences display the sort of reinforcing pattern of effects that oppositional culture theory predicts, but one does not find for race differences in academic achievement.

The authors suggest that resistance to school does matter, but the effect of the resistance shows up in gender differences, not in race/ethnic differences. It matters because gender differences in school resistance are consistent whereas race/ethnic differences in school resistance are not. Recall that male students scored lower than female students on both the behavior scale and the attitude scale, whereas race/ethnic groups showed no such consistency. Previous research has alluded to the consistent nature of gender differences in understanding school resistance (Davis, 1994). Another has pointed to the specific differences in educational attainment and attitudes for African American males versus African American females (Carter, 2003). Indeed, African American males are perceived to be in a state of crisis as they consistently underperform relative to their female counterparts (Gordon, Gordon, & Nembhard. 1994).

These intriguing findings suggest that the oppositional identity notion has merit, but that the oppositional identities are associated with gender, not with race or ethnicity. In this special sense, then, the authors find substantial support in the NELS for the notion that group differences in academic performance can be traced to group differences in the degree of acceptance of school norms. But the divide is gender-based, not race-based.

These findings, however, must also be understood within the context of the limitation of the current investigation. The NELS data set, for example, is over a decade old and may be inadequate in detecting current changes in school culture, although more recent studies seem to suggest that is not the case (e.g., Carter, 2003). Another limitation is that this investigation relies on self-reported measures of resistance and grades. There may be specific gender and race bias in reporting of school engagement and grades, although the findings of Massey, Charles, Lundy, and Fischer (2003) suggest otherwise. Finally, the standardized test scores of NELS have been reported to be unstable for the eighth-grade wave of the survey (Roberts, 2000). This instability in the eighthgrade seems to consolidate and stabilize as students progress through high school. This investigation, escapes this pitfall by employing the sophomore wave; nevertheless, this limitation must be considered when interpreting the results.

Why do boys exhibit greater and more consistent school resistance? One possibility may be the role males are forced to play in this society. Theorists have argued that in some respects males are more restricted in terms of the roles they are allowed to assume (Franklin, 1988). More specifically, the behaviors the school rewards may be antithetical to successfully playing out the male role. If girls are more obedient and require less attention from the teacher as a result, it follows that boys would attempt to label that behavior as girl-like (i.e., "sissy") and thus attempt to create distance from that type of behavior. If so, then those boys who can establish greatest distance from femininity and successfully play the male role would be those most likely to be looked up to. In addition, to avoid the appearance of weakness or inadequacy, boys might be less likely to seek help with their schoolwork. All of these factors would tend to lead to greater school resistance among boys.

Whatever the underlying reasons, the results indicate that resistance to school is genderbased. These findings, along with mounting evidence that oppositional culture does not account for race differences in academic achievement, tend to undermine oppositional culture theory as it has been articulated to this point. This is not to deny the existence and possible importance of school resistance, but it is to suggest that the concepts might have more currency if they were applied to gender differences rather than to race differences.

Future researchers would do well to systematically control for gender when investigating the process of school resistance. The literature on gender socialization and youth culture all seems to suggest that boys and girls would and do interact with the institution of education differently (Kessler, Ashenden, Connell, & Dowsett, 1985). Moreover, educators and policymakers need to reconsider the structure of education as it applies to males-Black males in particular. Programs must be implemented and sustained that provide a welcoming atmosphere for males and counters the perception of learning as inconsistent with masculinity (Davis, 1994). If we are committed to an open society where opportunities have no boundaries, the educational system must be at the core of this process.

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Garvey F. Lundy University of Pennsylvania

Glenn Firebaugh Harvard University

AUTHORS

GARVEY F. LUNDY is Adjunct Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

GLENN FIREBAUGH is Visiting Scholar, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

All queries and comments regarding this article should be addressed to garvey@pop.upenn.edu.

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