Weighing the Oburden of Acting Whiteo : Are There Race Differences in Attitudes Towards Education?

**Below is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract.** Ethnographic research and media reports suggest that many African-American students view academic achievement as a form of "acting white" and that peer pressure leads to reduced effort and performance. This paper uses data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to answer three questions: 1) Are blacks more alienated from school than non-Hispanic whites? When we compare measures of educational effort, such as educational persistence (measured by high school graduation), the amount of time spent on homework and the number of classes and days of school that are skipped, we do indeed find that African-American tenth graders devote less energy towards school than white students. However, once we make even minimal controls for differences in socioeconomic status, we find that black students work at least as hard as white students. 2) Are there social penalties for success for black students? 3) If so, are these "achievement penalties" more severe than those found for white students? Using several measures of students' views of their social standing, we find there is no social penalty for doing well in school for African-American students--or for white students, for that matter. The results do not appear to be driven by race differences in survey-response bias. Our two "effort" variables that are based on school records rather than self-reports yield findings that are consistent with the self-report results, and the "achievement penalty" calculations compare high achieving blacks with other blacks, and similarly for whites