ABSTRACT
Students’ peer groups and peer pressures are found in almost every school with adolescents, but their influence on students’ academic engagement and performance varies even among students of the same racial or ethnic group. For example, in his study of Hightown Grammar in England, Lacey (1970) found positive peer pressures on academic achievement as well as peer pressures against school success. Willis (1977), also in Britain, found peer pressures among working-class boys against academic success. In that study, some lower class boys preferred manual labor that did not require academic success. The coeds in North Carolina studied by Holland and Eisenhart (1990) developed a peer culture, the goal of which was “to catch a man” or a fiancee, instead of pursuing their initial academic and professional goals. In a personal communication, Elena Yu (August, 1985) reported that among Asian students in Chicago peer pressures promoted academic engagement and success; the students who were more or less ridiculed and ostracized were students who were not doing well academically. Our own ethnographic findings among Chinese students in Oakland, California, support Yu’s observation in Chicago. However, some studies of other minorities have found negative pressures toward academic achievement (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Kunjufu, 1988; Luster, 1992; Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Petroni, 1970; Petroni & Hirsch, 1972). The point we are stressing is that not all peer pressures are against academic engagement and good school performance. Indeed, as we show later in this chapter, White peer groups in Shaker Heights were not perceived to exert negative peer pressures on White students’ academic engagement to the extent that this happened among Black students.
