Promoting academic engagement among minority youth: implications from John Ogbu’s Shaker Heights ethnography

This article offers analysis and critique of John Ogbu’s last ethnography, titled Black American students in an affluent suburb, in which he described a set of community forces contributing to the academic disengagement of African American youth. Its purposes are threefold: first, to briefly layout Ogbu’s findings; second, to compare these to findings emerging from the author’s current research on school factors that promote and impede success in school for working‐class and migrant students of Mexican descent; and third, to point to ways in which Ogbu, by his almost singular attention to the role of community forces, discounted the power of school factors – both as barriers to achievement and as forces for promoting school engagement and academic success. The article concludes with a discussion of the policy implications that flow from Ogbu’s analysis, as well as the author’s research.