ABSTRACT
The devastating effects that conditions of economic and social adversity within families can have on the educational outcomes of youth are welldocumented (for recent reviews see Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997, and McLoyd, 1998). The rate of high school dropout, for example, among children from low-income families is estimated to be more than twice that of those living in non-low-income families (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). Yet, it also is important to keep in mind that students from less advantaged family backgrounds are not inevitably doomed to educational failure. Of particular note is the burgeoning literature that has identified a constellation of factors pertaining to both characteristics of children themselves and their surrounding environments that can function to protect against negative outcomes in school and other domains during development (Werner, 1995). Chief among those individual factors identified as promoting resilience are several interrelated aspects of the self, including a strong positive self-concept or sense of self-efficacy, personal values and aspirations oriented toward success in important life domains such as school, and high self-esteem (see Garmezy, 1985; Rutter, 1987; Werner, 1995). These same aspects of the developing self, however, may be themselves affected negatively by the risk conditions against which they have the potential to protect, such as family poverty, hence compromising their availability to those very youth who are most likely to benefit from them. The case vignettes in the following section illustrate these dynamic interrelationships that may exist between family disadvantage, the self, and academic achievement.
