Race, culture, and educational opportunity

This article criticizes the view that, if cultural factors within the black community explain poor educational outcomes for blacks, then blacks should bear all of the disadvantages that follow from this. Educational outcomes are the joint, iterated product of schools' responses to students' and parents' culturally conditioned conduct. Schools are not entitled to excessively burden such conduct even when it is less than educationally ideal. Cultural capital theory illuminates the ways schools may unjustly penalize the culturally conditioned conduct of blacks and the poor. However, it must be refined to take into account normative differences between arbitrary and educationally important forms of cultural capital. Differential impact analysis offers a useful tool for revealing when schools' responses to students' and parents' conduct reflects unjust racial stigmatization and ethnocentric bias.