Search Results

The Supreme Court's decision in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to eliminate school segregation. Brown promised more than desegregation; the decision also promised integration. More than five decades after the decision, however, black students and white students throughout much of the United States still experience separate and unequal schooling. Black-white racial segregation in public schools produced through tracking (and through gifted and magnet programs) remains a problem. Americans simply assume that academic placements reflect students' ability and their (and their parents') choices and attitudes toward school. Linking achievement with whiteness is one consequence of racialized tracking, but there are others that also shape academic achievement and interracial relations. This book takes a look at how institutional practices such as tracking affect black and other students' schooling experiences. Drawing on the narratives and school experiences of some of the more than 200 students studied in twenty-eight schools, it shows how racialized tracking and the messages it conveys affect students' daily life at school, their academic self-perceptions, school-based decisions and actions, and their relationships with peers.

This chapter examines the way in which racialized tracking creates racial distinctions among students that lead to the interpretation of academic achievement as acting white. It begins with a short discussion of two topics: the meaning and use of the broad concept of acting white among African Americans; and the issue of racial disparities in elementary school gifted programs and race talk among pre-adolescents. The chapter then looks at the experiences of high-achieving black adolescents at nineteen public high schools in North Carolina. Finally, it investigates why some high-achieving black youth are targeted with the acting white slur while many others, including peers at the same school, are not.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's findings and considers what the lack of true integration in American schools means for today's youth. Reflecting on the hardships created by classroom racial isolation, the chapter offers suggestions for ways that schools might address the most damaging aspects of racialized tracking and reduce, rather than reinforce, the conditions that encourage students' casting academic achievement as acting white. Lastly, it suggests new directions for future research on the topic of acting white and academic achievement. In addressing these core issues, the chapter looks at the relationship between race and achievement in American schools.

This chapter examines how and why segregation remains in high school classrooms even as students in the post-Brown era are able to select their own program of study. It describes the placement processes of six North Carolina high schools and recounts how a racially mixed group of sixty-one students attending those schools went about choosing their courses. The analysis shows how students make sense of the messages about race and academic achievement that are communicated through institutional practices such as racialized tracking and gifted identification and placement. The chapter also assesses the consequences of this meaning-making for students' developing sense of self, their friendship networks, and their school-based decisions. The findings reveal how schools' early sorting of students helps steer them toward particular programs of study, which also helps shape their friendship networks. Students, in turn, base their course decisions on a combination of subjective criteria: their interpretation of the meaning of their prior placement and achievement experiences, and their understanding of where they fit within both the intellectual pecking order and the social networks of their school.

The topic of acting white has received a great deal of scholarly attention, but the process by which the link between race and academic achievement has developed among contemporary black youth remains very much under-examined. This chapter provides a theoretical outline of the formation of this association. It argues that students' tendency to link achievement with whiteness emerged after desegregation and is a consequence of racialized tracking. The dominant perspective regarding black students' attitudes toward school and achievement frames the issue as largely about culture and values: black youth learn to disparage school learning and academic success because they grow up in communities where a cultural orientation in opposition to mainstream (white) culture is widespread. This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of this popular idea. In explaining the limitations of the cultural explanation, it shows the advantages of focusing on students' in-school experiences as the most important source of their actions and ideas regarding academic achievement.