ABSTRACT
Having conducted comparative research on minority education for more than 15 years, I came to the conclusion that discrimination in society and school as well as minority responses to the discrimination, though significant, are not enough to explain why there are differences in school performance among minority groups. My comparative study suggested that two additional factors from the dynamics in minority communities also contributed to school performance differences. In a joint publication with Dr. Signithia Fordham in 1986, we stated that the two additional factors were collective identity or fictive kinship and cultural frame of reference (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). We also reported a study of Capital High students in Washington, DC where we found that the two factors played a major role in school performance of Black adolescents.
