A nationwide comparison of African American and white eighth graders' academic achievement, educational aspirations, and current attitudes toward education.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the paradox of low school achievement and high educational aspirations among young African Americans by using race, gender, SES, family configuration, urbanism, and region in an attempt to predict outcomes on student achievement, educational aspirations, and their current attitudes toward education. The underlying hypothesis of this research is that because of its orientation to the present versus the future, current attitudes toward education is a more powerful measure in explaining racial differences on achievement than are educational aspirations. This dissertation first reviews the literature dealing with academic achievement disparities between African American and white students. Close attention is paid to the impact of educational aspirations and other educationally related attitudes, socioeconomic status, family configuration, urbanism, and region on achievement. After the literature review, hypotheses are then developed in an attempt to explain differences on achievement and educationally related attitudes among the different groups included in the variables mentioned above. To test these hypotheses, dummy variable multiple regressions are employed to analyze the first wave of data from The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). The findings of this research show that African American students possess higher educational aspirations and more positive current attitudes toward education than their white counterparts. However, contrary to what was hypothesized, current attitudes toward education--as measured in this study--is not more powerful in predicting educational achievement than is educational aspirations. It is concluded that even though African American students possess higher educational aspirations and more positive current attitudes toward education than their white counterparts, simply possessing these attitudes does not translate into African American student obtaining higher achievement scores than their white counterparts. Future research should, among other things consider: (1) a different measure of current attitudes toward education, (2) more structural variables such as type of school, curriculum, and tracking, and (3) more critical analyses of the variables presented in this study--for example, the impact of family configuration at different levels of socioeconomic status.