ABSTRACT
The Black-White gap in educational performance remains a prime concern to social scientists and rightly so. With education playing such a central role in the stratification process, explaining the race gap in school performance would go a long way toward understanding the persistence of racial stratification in general. In this chapter, I relate how my initial work with Jim Ainsworth, done with the expectation of confirming an oppositional culture, ultimately provided evidence against it. Current disputes surrounding oppositional culture theory depend, in part, on whether the kind of evidence we presented-Blacks’ reports of pro-school values-should be believed. Below I make the case for trusting that Blacks mean what they say.
