School Ethnography PDF

School Ethnography: A Multilevel Approach’
John U. Ogbu*
Ethnography is increasingly used by researchers in education. Among

nonanthropologists, however, it i s often misconceived and superficially
applied; among anthropologists there is a strong bias toward a narrow
application of the technique to the study of education. The present paper
argues for the application of traditional anthropological ethnography in the
study of formal education and for broadening the scope of such studies. It also
suggests a framework-an ecological framework-that permits a multilevel
application of ethnography in formal education. SCHOOL ETHNOGRAPHY;
EDUCATION; M I N O R I T Y EDUCATION; EDUCATIONAL ANTHROPOL-
OG Y; ETHNOECOLOCY.
The Problem
The focus of this paper is on the scope and adequacy of school ethnography
for understanding the process of education and for theory building in
educational anthropology. It will pay special attention to thestudy of minority
education and‘ to the problem of providing a valid explanation for the
disproportionate failure of minority groups like blacks, Indian, Chicanos and
Puerto Ricans to learn successfully in American publicschools. There are three
main reasons for this focus. The first is the misconception of ethnography and
i t s popularization and superficial execution in much educational research. To
be convinced of this one only needs to read or listen to papers presented at
sessions on ethnography at AERA sessions, read research proposalssubmitted
to funding agencies, or read in certain journals articles purporting to be based
on the ethnographic study of schooling.
The second reason for focusing on the scope and adequacy of school
ethnography is the bias toward microethnography in educational research.
Articles in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the main outlet for
educational anthropologists, and other journals show a predominance of
microethnography. in reading the 51 abstraas submitted for the 1980 annual
Ethnography in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania,
one finds microethnography very disproportionately represented.
The third reason is the concomitant neglect of broader community forces
with important implications for schooling. The result is that ethnography of
schooling to date provides almost no basis for an overall conception of
schooling, especially schooling in the context of social, political, and
economic realities-“the imperatives of culture”-in Cohen’s (1971) termi-
nology.
*Department of Anthropology
University of California
Berkeley, California
4 Volume XII, Number 1
A part of the problem is developmental. School ethnography is still i n its

infancy, hardly two decades old. Related to this is that many school
ethnographers have not had the opportunity of training in traditional
ethnographic methods of anthropology. This limitation is made worse by
misconceptions and superficial application of ethnographic research. To
some, ethnography i s synonymous with a nonquantitative and nonexperi-
mental study. Ethnography i s accomplished with observations of a classroom,
a school or a project for a few hours, a few days, a week or two weeks.
Among competent ethnographers the problem i s conceptual-the defi-
nition of what constitutes schooling and the reasons for minority school
failure. In other words, it i s a question of the relation between theory and
method (Herskovits 1955). Those who define schooling as cultural trans-
mission or the process by which “the school develops in the child attitudes,
values, notions about the world and notions about the self” become
microethnographers preoccupied with school, classroom, or home milieu
(Rist 1975:89). Very few school ethnographers go beyond such settings t o
study how the wider society and i t s institutions influence minority schooling.
Furthermore, even when cultural transmission researchers, such as Philips
(1972), simultaneously examine patterns in the community and the school,
they generally ask transactional rather than structural questions. They focus
primarily on continuities and discontinuities between the home-community
and classroom in interactional and communicative styles, in values, moti-
vation, and so. The assumptions are (1) that minority children acquire
interactional styles, communicative styles, and the like, in their “cultures” that
are discontinuous with those of the classroom setting; (2) that knowledge
gained from home-community study can further elucidate classroom events;
and (3) that knowledge of the latter would be useful in improving classroom
practice and teacher education.
In this paper we are calling for a rethinking of our conceptual framework
and, specifically, for a framework requiring the ethnographer to ask both
transactional and structural questions. By structural questions we mean those
leading to an examination of the features of the wider society [e.g., the
stratification systems, the corporate economy) that in important ways shape
the community patterns (interactional styles, communicative styles, moti-
vational patterns, etc.) that minority children acquire, as well as the responses
schools make to these children. And we are suggestingthat the development
of educational anthropology as an intellectually stimulating subfield of
anthropology would be enhanced by turning from current tendencies, which
more or less fit the educator’s definition of the problem of ethnographic
inquiry, and returning to traditional anthropological ethnography.
The Bias Toward Microethnography
Criticism of Traditional Ethnography

Some educational anthropologists are critical of the techniques of traditional
ethnography, arguing that they are difficult to apply to American education.
Critics often single out the “Malinowskian ethnography.” They note, for
example, that the unit of study, an urban American school, i s not like a
Anthropology & Education Quarterly 5
Trobriand village (Erickson 1973:lO). Erickson provides a vivid contrast

between an American school and a Trobriand village and concludes that
“Malinowski’s theories and methods do not work on schools because these
methods are not situationally appropriate” (1973:ll).It seems to me that the
comparison suggested here i s not appropriate. The comparison should be
between a Trobriand village on the one hand and an American city or urban
neighborhood on the other, or between an American school and the
educational institution of the Trobrianders. If we compare such population
units or social institutions, we may be surprised to find striking resemblances,
though mindful of differences i n scale.
Malinowski’s analytic view of society as divisible into units such as social
organization, economics, technology, language, and belief system i s also said
to be inapplicable to American schools (Erickson 1973:ll). However, in an
interesting paper appropriately titled, “The School as a Small Society” (1971),
Khleif has suggested that these divisions can be made. M y own fieldwork
experience in Stockton, California, leads me to suggest, too, that it is possible
to apply the traditional ethnographic categoriesto an American school system
and to write a reasonably good monograph based on such a study in the
manner in which we usually present our accounts of studies of “exotic” and
“modern” communities. Included in such a descriptive account of the school
system would be ecological settings, language and communication, social
organization (including age grading, voluntary association, social strati-
fication, etc.), economy (including labor, food procurement and con-
sumption, taxes, etc.), political organization (including governance, adminis-
tration, law, and external relations), belief system, folklore, education and
socialization, change, and so on. This would be a serious and valid description
and not merely a caricature of the school community. Such an ethnographic
account of the structure, process, and function of the school system, which
links it to .other sociocultural institutions defining its context in the wider
community, i s an appropriate field of study for educatidnal anthropologists.
Traditional ethnography properly applied to urban education or urban
schooling can provide rich and valid descriptive data that can be used for
theoretical and practical objectives. And there i s no reason why such
objectives cannot be achieved. The population that makes up school people
in an American community includes more than teachers and students; it
includes other school personnel, certificated and classified, who may never
show up in classrooms but whose construction of education “reality” and
whose activities nevertheless influence what happens in the classroom i n one
way or another. School population also includes other participants in
educational politics and governance: schoolboard members, parents, and
various community groups whose pressures on local education are easily
visible to an ethnographer at a board of education meeting and i n other
situations (Mann 1975). All these people are permanent residents within the
legal-political boundary of the school system. The school, especially the
classroom, is only one of many settings in the community where school people
meet and transact educational matters. If a metropolitan school district i s too
large (like the “tribe”) to be studied adequately, the ethnographer should
choose a neighborhood (just as he or she would most likely choose a village
in a tribe) as a manageable unit.
6 Volume X I I , Number 1
To do good ethnography of education requires the kind of participant

observation traditionally practiced by anthropologists, summed up by Ber-
reman (1968:337)as follows:
(Participant-observation) refers to the practice of living among the people

one studies, coming to know them, their language and their lifeways through
intense and continuous interaction with them in their daily lives. This means that
the ethnographer converses with the people he studies, works with them, attends
their social and ritual functions, visits their homes, invites them to his home-that
he is present with them in as many situations as possible, learning to know them in
as many settings and moods as he can. Sometimes he interviews for specific kinds
of data; always he is alert to whatever information may come his way, ready to
follow up and understand any event or fact which is unanticipated or seemingly
inexplicable. The methods he derives his data from are often subtle and difficult
to define.
Thus, participant observation as an ethnographic technique requires, first and

foremost, a long period of residence. In contrast, most school ethnographers
are nonresident, scheduled visitors of the “communities” they study. Since
school people have their own languageor argot, the ethnographer must learn
it in order to carry out effective participant observation. Personal attributes are
just as important in school ethnographer as they are in other ethnographies
(Berreman 1968:340-343; Beattie 1965; Freilich 1970; Pelto and Pelto 1978).
Furthermore, a school ethnographer needs an ethnographic imagination like
other anthropologists; that is, he or she needs a good working theory of the
social structure of the school and of the wider community in which theschool
is located. School ethnography should be holistic; it should show how
education is linked with the economy, the political system, local social
structure, and the belief system of the people served by theschools. Problems
of research design, biases, reliability, data analysis and interpretation, which
other ethnographers face, are also experienced by the school ethnographer.
Moreover, if, as anthropological folklore maintains, alienation from his or her
own society i s an attribute of an American ethnographer in an “exotic”
African or Indian community, it can equally be argued that disenchantment
with schools’ treatment of the poor and minorities i s the characteristicof the
school ethnographer. Both attributes raise questions about bias in ethno-
graphic findings.
In general, school ethnographer i s not radically (or should not be)
different from other ethnographies. Anthropologists who set out today to
study “disputing process” (law) in American communities and other societies
(Nader and Todd 1978),changing rural economy in Latin America (Gudeman
1978), education in an urban American neighborhood or rural community
(Leacock 1969; Peshkin 1978),or education in a Japanesevillage (Singleton
,1967)can benefit from the broad principles of fieldwork laid down by
Malinowski without having to follow the details of Malinowski’s field
techniques or his analytical framework. An essential attribute of good
ethnography i s flexibility; besides, anthropological ethnography has devel-
oped extensively since the days of Malinowski. Our difficulties with the
traditional ethnographic techniques i n school research do not arise from the
nature of ethnography per se, but rather from thedual heritage of educational
anthropology, that is, from the cultural transmission orientation of culture-

and-personality studies and the service orientation of intervention research,
as well as from the patronage of our ethnographic products by particular
funding agencies and by educators. We turn to examine these influences on
school ethnography.
Heritage, Patronage, a n d the Definition of the Probfern

The conception of what ethnographers should study about schooling and at
what level has been influenced by four factors: traditional anthropological
perception of schooling as a social problem, the birth of educational
ethnography in a period of social crisis, the background of educational
ethnographers in culture-and-personality and anthropological linguistic
subfields, and the patronage of school ethnography by educators.
Prior to the 1960s very few anthropologists had actually studied formal
education, although some had written about it, including Boaz (1928),
Malinowski (1936), and Redfield (1943). Henry (1963) was probably one of the
few who had actually studied the schools (Spindler 1963:xvii; Wolcott (1971).
Anthropological writings on formal education were primarily commentaries
on schooling as a social problem for “natives” in colonial and trust territories
and for immigrants and ethnicand racial minorities in their own countries (see
Johnson 1947; Roberts and Akinsanya 7976:375-81). Anthropologists felt
justified to criticize the form and content of schooling for these subordinate
groups because of their “acquaintance” with the way the latter raised their
children or with “indigenous education.” I say “acquaintance,” because few,
except for some culture-and-personality anthropologists, were directly en-
gaged in any systematic study of childrearing theories and practices among
non-Western peoples, immigrants, and minorities (see Mayer 1970). Edu-
cational anthropologists have inherited this perspective, so that today they still
define education as cultural transmission or enculturation. In this con-
ceptualization the relative school failure of some racial and ethnic minorities
and the lower class i s often attributed to culture conflict in school and
classroom (Gearing 1973:1238).
Greater involvement of anthropologists in school studies began in the
1960s. Gearing (1973) suggests that anthropologists became more involved
because they desired to make their subject reach a wider audience through
anthropology curriculum in the public schools. That was a part of it. But of
greater significance for the development of school ethnography i s the social
and political crisis of the 196Os, which propelled anthropologists into
intervention rather than basic research i n education. I suspect that some
anthropologists got involved first as consultants to local school districts and
other agencies when the latter came increasingly under criticism for using a
“cultural deprivation” model as a basis for remedial educational programsfor
the poor and minorities. Anthropologists rightly criticized the false assump-
tions about cultures of the poor and minorities under the model (Spradley
1972; Valentine 1968). Some anthropologists might have begun their ethno-
graphic studies to provide more valid pictures of the cultures and education
of the poor and minorities.
Other anthropologists probably got involved to support claims of ethnic
and racial minorities that their cultures are different and that their children are
failing in school because schools do not utilize their cultures for classroom
teaching and learning. Even before anthropologists had conducted enough
ethnographic research in school, they began to explain differential school
success as the result of culture conflict arising from cultural differences. The
political awakening of various minority groups and their ethnic and racial
identity movements have further reinforced the culture conflict explanation.
This interpretation i s quite popular among the minorities; it is also increasingly
accepted by the educational establishment; and it appeals to politicians who
are in need of ethnic votes. Some difficulties with the culture conflict
perspective as a guide to school ethnography will be discussed later, Here the
point is that the social and political context in which school ethnography was
born has encouraged continued perception of schooling as a social problem
and generated an ethnographic tradition with a bias toward events within the
school, classroom, home, and playground.
We have already noted that until recently culture and personality was the
subfield of anthropology where systematic efforts were made to study
childrearing practices or indigenous education. This subfield has influenced
the development of educational anthropology, and hence school ethno-
graphy, in at least two ways. First, many anthropologists who pioneered
research in schools have come from that subfield (e.g., Gearing, Herzog, and
Spindler). Second, the definition of indigenous education as cultural trans-
mission has been transferred to the definition of formal education whereby
schooling is seen as an aspect of cultural transmission (Gearing 1973; Gearing
and Tindall 1973; LaBelle 1972; Spindler 1974; Tindall 1976).However, unlike
earlier studies of culture and personality, which also examined the influences
of various social institutions on childrearing and personality development in a
given culture (Kaplan 1961; Kardiner 1939; Linton 1945; Whiting and Child
1953),cultural transmission studies of formal education almost entirely ignore
other societal institutions and focus primarily on school, classroom, home and
playground events. Conspicuously missing in the cultural transmission re-
search framework i s an adequate conceptualization of social structure and
other macroecological forces influencing schooling. Most school ethno-
graphers of this tradition appear, in fact, to be either indifferent to theories of
society and culture or unfamiliar with such theories.
Patronage. Another factor that encourages microethnographic emphasis
i s patronage, which allows educators more or less to define for ethnographers
their research problems. This dilemma for the school ethnographer was
pointed out some years ago by Wolcott (1971),who noted that the problem
that interests the educator may not be the one that the anthropologist
identifies as the proper focus of his or her research. Unfortunately, educators
directly and indirectly define the research problems of many school ethno-
graphers for three reasons. First, many school ethnographers depend for
research funds on agencies and institutions dominated by educators; in fact,
the personnel of these agencies and institutions often actually define the
research problems in the form of a request for funding proposals. Second,
many school ethnographers are located within schools or colleges of
education and related agencies where formal and informal pressures compel
them to view their research as “applied” rather than “basic.” Micro-
ethnographic studies have a strong appeal to education people, who see their
results as immediately applicable. The findings can be used for in-service
training of teachers and other school personnel, for self-correction by
classroom teachers, and for teacher training in general. The ethnographer
likes the microethnography because he or she sees his or her work as being
instrumental in improving some aspect of schooling; policymakers and
practitioners like it because it points to something concrete that can be
remedied without radically changing the system; clients of the system, the
minorities and the poor, like it because it scientifically documents their
allegation that their children are failing in school because the schools do not
use their communicative etiquettes, their interactional styles or cognitive
styles, in short their culture, in educating their children. Finally, the main
consumers of educational ethnography products are educators or education
people, and the main outlets for publication are journals with a slant toward an
audience made up of educators.
In summary, the service orientation of intervention research, the cultural
transmission definition of schooling borrowed from culture and personality,
and the patronage of educators appear to encourage the formulation and
implementation of school ethnography without an adequate theory of
schooling in the context of cultural imperatives.
Contributions a n d Limitations of Microethnography
There are many kinds of microethnographies, although generally they focus

on school classroom events, home and playground events, or educational
projects. Their contents vary as do their theoretical backgrounds and
methodological techniques. Here we focus on one type of microethnography
of classroom processes, that based on the sociolinguistic model that attempts
to explain minority school failure. This particular group of studies deserves a
special comment because of its potential theoretical and practical con-
tributions and because of i t s limitations. These studies attempt to show that
interaction (verbal and nonverbal) between teachers and students i s a crucial
determinant of academic outcomes for children, especially poor and minority
children. Their basic thesis i s that communicative styles i n everyday life are
culturally patterned; therefore, when teachers and students come from
different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and thus do not share the
same communicative etiquettes, there are “mismatches” in communication
or interaction styles that adversely affect students’ learning (see Koehler 1978;
Philips 1972; Simons 1979). Methodologically, the cultuially patterned com-
municative styles can be identified in a heterogenous classroom through
content analysis of repeated videotaping of selected classroom activities
involving teacher-pupil interaction, supplemented with observational notes.
Microethnography of this kind owes its theoretical and methodological
assumptions to sociolinguistic studies, rather than to traditional anthro-
pological ethnography, and i t s proponents sometimes claim i t s superiority
over the latter. Such microethnography has been applied to learning
problems among blacks, Chicanos, Indians, native Hawaiians, and others, with
interesting results, although the contents of the classroom activities chosen for
description in these cases have varied. A brief survey of some studies will give
an indication of their major features.
Philips’s study (1972) examined the communicative etiquettes i n a
classroom run by an Indian teacher and in another classroom run by an Anglo
teacher on an Indian Reservation i n Oregon. She also compared these
classroom observations with communicative etiquettes within the Indian
community and found major differences, which she described with the
concept of “participant structure.” A participant structure is, basically, a
constellation of norms, mutual rights, and obligations that shape social
relationships, determine participants’ perceptions of what i s going on in a
communicative interchange, and influence the outcome of the communi-
cation, such as learning (Simons 1979). Philips found that the participant
structure of the Anglo classroom was characterized by (1)a hierarchy of role-
defined authority in which the teacher controlled students, and (2) an
imposition of obligations on students to perform publicly b y the teacher
calling on them as individuals and praising and reprimanding them for their
behaviors. In contrast, Indian participant structure (1) deemphasized hier-
archical relationship and control, and (2) did not encourage individual public
performance, reward, and punishment. According to Philips, Indian children
did better in their schoolwork when the classroom participant structure
approximated that of their community.
Philips’ notion of participant structure seems to underlie subsequent
studies in this tradition, some of which are, in fact, attempts to test her
hypothesis. In his work among black students Simons (1979) applies the same
notion to account for the failure of blacks to acquire reading skills. Citing the
work of Gumperzand Herasimchuk (1972), hearguesthat black children fail to
learn to read well because they do not share the same communicative
background with their teachers; hence, the children and their teachers differ
in both communicative strategies and in interpretation of situational
meanings. The result i s a miscommunication that adversely affects the
children’s learning. The same notion of differences in participant structure or
Communicative etiquette underlies the microethnographic studies of Erick-
son and his students (Erickson and Mohatt 1977, cited i n Koehler 1978).
Although with somewhat different theoretical and methodological
emphasis, McDermott’s microethnography (1977) also assumes that classroom
interaction between teachers and students i s a crucial determinant of
academic outcomes. He employs primarily the techniques of nonverbal
analysis to study the process of getting turns at reading lessons. And he finds
that in a classroom organized into low and high reading groups, the low
groups receive less actual reading instruction, because the teacher defines the
group as needing more explicit and consistent guidance, which results in her
spending most of her time controlling the behaviors of the members of the
group (cited in Hansen 1979:75).
Given the definition of the source of academic failures of subordinate-
group children as embedded in teacher-pupil communication, the unit of
these microethnographic studies is teacher-pupil interaction or communi-
cative interchange during a given classroom activity, though sometimes the
child’s use of language in the home and playground i s also studied to
determine i t s compatibility with classroom use. Microethnographers may

initially map out a wide range of classroom activities, but they do not aim at a
full description of the entire range of teacher-pupil interaction; instead, they
opt for selective ethnography, that is, the study of particular activities that are
most salient to their background and interests. Sociolinguists tend to select
reading more appropriately, teacher-pupil interchange during reading
(Simons 1979); others may select any number of activities, such as reading
lessons, clean-up, or sharing time (Schulz and Florio 1978).The ultimate goal of
analysis and interpretation i s to describe how the educational outcome for
students i s determined by the teaching process, the latter being viewed as a
com municative process.
The utilitarian appeal of microethnography was mentioned earlier. It also
has a strong intellectual appeal because it appears methodologically more
rigorous or “scientific” than traditional ethnography. With the latest available
research technology, such as videotape and computer and with ‘ a small
number of subjects (one teacher and one or two students) in a circumscribed
setting (classroom), the ethnographer comes closest to a laboratory experi-
mental worker.
Microethnographic studies have made significant contributions to our
knowledge of how subordinate-group children fail. In the 1960s sociolinguists
and anthropologists rejected explanations of minority-group children’s
school failure based on a “deficit model,” for example, explanations that
attributed black children’s reading difficulties to inadequate language sociali-
zation in the home and advocated teaching methods to replace black English
with standard English. These critics proposed an alternative explanation based
on cultural and linguistic differences and suggested that schools could
accommodate black dialect b y using special materials and teaching methods.
When the reading problems continued, it was suggested that they were due to
either phonological or grammatical interference, hypotheses that have not
been substantiated by empirical research (Simons 1979).The present shift to
teacher-student communicative interchange seems to show for the first time
how cultural and linguistic differences might contribute to school failure. By
focusing on process, microethnographic studies also enrich our under-
standing of the general phenomenon of cultural transmission. Furthermore,
the descriptions of what takes place between teachers and students in the
classroom have the potential of encouraging more cautious interpretations of
quantitative studies of children’s academic performance.
However, from a cultural ecological point of view, these microethno-
graphic studies, as presently formulated and implemented, are too simplistic
and in some cases misleading. More specifically, the microethnographic
approach to minority school failure i s inadequate because (1) it i s not
comparative enough, (2) it ignores the forces of the wider ecological
environment that actually generate the patterns of classroom processes
studied, and (3) while data and insights from microethnographic studies can
be used as a basis for remedial efforts (Simons 1979; Erickson 1978), they
cannot lead to any significant social change that would eliminate the need for
such remedial efforts in subsequent generations of minority-group children.
The microethnographic studies are not comparative enough to warrant
certain generalizations about causes of minority school failures because they

have thus far focused primarily on one type of minority group, which I have
designated as castelike minorities (Ogbu 1978a). In the United States these
include blacks, Chicanos, Indians, Eskimos, native Hawaiians, and Puerto
Ricans. These minorities differ from the dominant Anglos in culture and
language probably to the same extent that another group of minorities,
immigrant minorities, differs from the same Anglos in culture and language.
Immigrant minorities include Chinese, Cubans, Filippinos, Japanese,Koreans,
and “West Indians.” The assertion by microethnographers that the school
failure or failure to acquire reading proficiency of castelike minorities is due to
a mismatch in communicative etiquette leads one to ask a few comparative
questions: Are the communicative interactions between immigrant minority
children and their predominantly Anglo teachers plagued by the same
“mismatch” in communicative etiquettes observed among castelike minor-
ities in their interaction with the same teachers? If the “mismatch” in
communicative etiquettes exists for the two groups of minorities, how do we
account for the relative greater school success of immigrant minority
children? If the mismatch does not exist for the latter, how do we account for
i t s absence, since immigrant minorities and their Anglo teachers do not share
the same cultural or communicative backgrounds?
As presently formulated, these microethnographies do not really help us
to understand why differences in communicative etiquettes should result in
academic failures among castelike minorities but not among immigrant
minorities. This suggestion i s even more instructive when we broaden our
cross-cultural perspective. In Britain, for example, the “West Indians” are said
to be the most similar to the Anglo British i n language and culture of all
nonwhite immigrants (including Africans, Bangladeshes, Indians, Pakistanis,
etc.). Thus it would be expected that West Indians share to a greater degree
the same communicative etiquette with the Anglo British than do other
colored immigrants. However, studies show that West Indians are the least
academically successful among the colored immigrants in Britain (Ogbu
1978a). In New Zealand, immigrant Polynesians from other islands do better
academically than the indigenous castelike Maoris, even though the two
Polynesian groups are similar in language and culture in comparison with the
dominant white or Pakeha who make up the teaching force (Ogbu 1978a;
Huntsman 1979).
Furthermore, although microethnographers argue that school failure and
especially failure to learn to read among subordinate minorities i s due to a
mismatch in communicative style between teacher and student, they present
no convincing evidence that blacks, Chicanos and Indians do better in school
when taught by teachers from their respective ethnic or racial backgrounds
who, presumably, may share the same communicative styles. If the source of
their academic failure were primarily one of a mismatch in communicative
etiquette, the policy implication would be quite straightforward: replace
Anglo teachers with those of the children’s ethnic or racial backgrounds.
However, this i s not necessarily evident in communities where black children
or Chicano children are taught mostly by black or Chicano teachers, respec-
tively (see Ogbu 1978a; Silverstein and Krate 1975).
Another major difficulty with current microethnography i s that it i s not

holistic. That is, it does not deal with the interrelation between schooling and
other social institutions and how such interrelationships may affect classroom
processes. While the classroom is “the scene of the battle” (Roberts1971),the
causes of the battle may well lie elsewhere. Differences in communicative
etiquettes may be the instruments or weapons with which the battle i s fought
between teachers and students. But certainly, if we want to discover the causes
of these battles and how to eliminate their occurrence and reoccurrence, we
will make little progress by studying primarily the actual processes of battles in
the classroom and the instruments used by the combatants. We need to go
beyond the battle scene and beyond the instruments of war.
This leads to yet another problem, which i s that microethnographies tend
to direct the attention of policy makers toward personal change without
structural change. We noted earlier the appeal of microethnographic studies
to policy makers and practitioners. By specifying what it i s in the communi-
cative interaction between teachers and students in classroom, say, reading
lessons that i s assumed to cause reading difficulties, that is, (1)a lack of shared
communicative etiquette between teacher and student and (2)the teacher’s
teaching strategies, the most obvious remedial action is to change the
teacher’s strategies for teaching reading to these children, including enabling
the teacher to accept the children’s language and culture (Simons 1979).This
can be achieved by designing courses for in-service training of teachers
and/or for college preparation of future teachers. Although some teachers
and eventually some students will be helped through such remedial programs,
we are skeptical that any policy that does not simultaneously address itself to
the economic and other subordinations of castelike minorities will have more
than a superficial and temporary impact on the problem of minority school
failure. For greater theoretical and policy relevance, microethnography needs
to be integrated with macroethnography through the kind of analytic
framework we will suggest later.
Macroethnography: Current Patterns
The best examples of macroethnographies of schooling come from studies
outside the United States. These studies generally utilize traditional anthro-
pological ethnography. Examples of such studies include Grindal’s study
(1972)of schooling among the Sisala of Northern Ghana, Singleton’s study
(1967) of education in a Japanese village, and Warren’s study (1967) of
education in a German village. These studies took place in small communities
more or less typical of anthropological research settings. The ethnographers
lived in the communities for extended periods of time, learned local
languages, established rapport with the people, and employed a variety of
techniques to supplement participant observation for data collection.
Furthermore, although the focus of each study was education, the ethno-
grapher also examined how schooling i s linked to other institutions. In this
way their studies demonstrate how societal forces, including beliefs and
ideologies of the larger society, influence the behaviors of participants in the
schools. For example, Singleton shows how the Japanese ideology and
mechanisms of social mobility affect the process of schooling in the village;
Warren shows the influence of industrialization and new economic role

models on local educational aspirations and participation; and Grindal points
to the educational consequences of changing economic and political circum-
stances in Ghana, especially with regard to educational attitudes of the Sisala
youth. The point to emphasize is that these and similar cross-cultural studies
make it clear that families and their children often utilize adaptive strategies in
dealing with schools, which can only be adequately understood or appreci-
ated if the ethnographer looks at the linkages between schooling and the
larger sociocultural systems. These studies do not simply document ethno-
graphically differences in cultural backgroundsof teachers and students as the
basis for explaining differences in outcomes of teaching and learning, that is,
as due to differences in teaching and learning styles or in communicative
patterns.
Within the United States there are only a handful of such macroethno-
graphic studies (e.g., Collins and Noblit 1977; Ogbu 1974a; Peshkin 1978).
Most macroethnographies of education i n the United States have usually
taken one of two forms. On theone hand are earlystudies (Wax 1978:2), which
do not focus on education per se, but nevertheless try to show how school
organizational features reflect features of the local social structure, such as
class, caste, and ethnicity (e.g., Davis and Dollard 1940; Hollingshead 1949;
Havighurst 1962; Warner et al. 1944). These studies also do not show in detail
how the correspondence between school organization and community social
structure affects the process of teaching and learning within the school or
classroom.
Some newer ethnographies fill this gap by documenting how such
organizational features affect the process of schooling. They generally
describe the patterns of interaction between teachers and students or
between students and their counselors, the types of skills and subjects that
children acquire in school, and the informal socialization that goes on to
reinforce children’s respective social background. Among the better known
ethnographies dealing with “how it happens” i n some relation to the wider
social forces are those of Eddy (1967), Fuchs (1966), Leacock (1969), and Moore
(1967).These studies do not, however,empirically probe into the nature of the
linkages between the processes they describe within the schools and the
features of the larger sociocultural systems they allude to, such as was done by
Singleton in his study of education i n a Japanesevillage. In other words, they
do not integrate systematically micro- and macroethnographies, an inte-
gration that would have enabled them both to describe the process and to
explain the patterns of cultural transmission in cultural and structural terms.
A Multilevel Approach
In proposing the following framework for integrating micro- and macro-
ethnographies, or for a more complete ethnography of schooling, we are
particularly concerned with studies dealing with subordinate minorities like
blacks, Chicanos, and Indians. The approach we are suggesting may be
designated as cultural ecological. Four assumptions underlie this approach.
The first i s that formal education is linked i n important waysthat affect people’s
behaviors i n school with other features of society, especially with the

corporate economy and economic opportunity structure. This point will be
discussed more fully later. The second assumption i s that the nature of this
linkage has a history that to some extent influences present processes of
schooling. The third i s that the behaviors of participants are influenced by
their models of social reality. Given these three assumptions, the fourth
follows: that an adequate ethnography of schooling cannot be confined to
studying events i n school, classrooms, the home, or playground. One must
also study relevant societal and historical forces.
Economic Linkage
Let us illustrate the linkage with broader societal forces with the linkage
between schooling and the corporate economy. In modern industrial
societies and certainly in the contemporary United States, the main prep-
aration of children for participation in adult economic life has been delegated
to the schools. During infancy and early childhood families prepare children
to learn what schools will later teach them, including social-emotional skills,
language skills, cognitive skills, and motivational skills. Most families do not
teach children even rudimentary practical skills associated with specific
subsistence techniques, because they do not know the specific jobs their
children will do as adults.
There are several ways in which schools prepare U.S. children for future
participation i n the economy. First, schools teach the basic practical skills of
reading, writing, and computation, which are required in almost every
subsistence task i n the US. industrial economy. Second, schools prepare
children to undertake more specialized training in practical skills required by
specific subsistence tasks or jobs (Wilson 1973:236-37).Third, certain organi-
zational features of the schools, including teacher-pupil relations, grading
system, peer grouping, and the like, help to socialize children into those
social-emotional skills essential for effective participation in the adutt work
force (R.Cohen 1973; Y. Cohen 1971; Leacock 1969; Bowles and Cintis 1976;
Parsons 1968;Scrupski 1975;Wilcox 1978).Finally, schools provide credentials
for young adults to enter the work force (Jencks1972). In the latter case,
schooling is more or less a culturally institutionalized device for allocating and
rewarding individuals within society’s status system. And the most significant
content of the status system in the United States is one’s job (Miller 1971:18;
O’Toole 1974).
An ethnographer in a U.S. community soon learns about the role of
schooling in the economic adaptation from various sources: by asking people
why they go to school, why they send their children to school, and why they
pay taxes to support schools; by listening to public and private discussionsand
gossips involving schooling, jobs, and related matters; by reading relevant
documents from the local school system, the city and county planning
agencies, and employment agencies and welfare departments. From infor-
mation gathered from these sources the ethnographer learns that local people
do not go to school to get an education for its own sake, to satisfy their
curiosity, or for self-fulfillment. They go to school to get an education in order
to get jobs as adults and thereby achieve full adult status as defined by their
society. Moreover, the ethnographer discovers not only that the people
strongly believe that those with more or “better” education should have more
desirable jobs and social positions, but also that the actual life experiences of a
large number of people (i.e., empirical evidence or data on education and
employment) support such a belief. for example, analysis of local employ-
ment statistics will show that people with high school diplomas generally tend
to have a better chance of working at more desirable jobs and earning more
money over a lifetime than their peers with only elementary school diplomas;
the former, in turn, have less chance of working a t more desirable jobs and
earning more money over a lifetime than their peers with college degrees.
This belief, a part of the native epistemology, i s based on the fact that a large
proportion of the population has historically found jobs and earned wages
commensurate with educational credentials (Duncan and Blau 1967; lencks
1972:181). The belief i s communicated to children and reinforced in them in a
variety of ways. The ethnographer would also find that such historical and
current experiences influence how local people strive to achieve an
education.
If, however, the ethnographer probes further, as he or she should, it will
be discovered that not all groups in the community have achieved successful
adaptation to the economy and in school. If the community i s made up of
blacks and whites, the ethnographer may find that blacks do poorer than
whites in school and are more likely to have low-status jobs and to be
unemployed. Adopting a historical stance, as he or she should, the ethno-
grapher may find that traditionally blacks have not been permittedto compete
freely as individuals for any jobs they wanted and for which they had the
educational qualification and ability-a phenomenon we have designated as a
job ceiling (Ogbu 1978a). The wider community appears to have two sets of
rules for economic self-betterment: one stresses the value of school creden-
tials for whites; the other deemphasizes the value of school credentials for
blacks. The ethnographer would do well to study how these differential rules
of behavior for economic self-betterment or economic adaptation in post-
school life-differential reward systems-affect the education and belief
systems of local blacks and whites. This should lead to a study of school and
classroom events and how they are connected to postschool economic
adaptation and events in the home and community, that is, the study of the
relationship among, say, black ecological structure, cognitive structure, and
school behavior. By ecological structure we mean the social and economic
context of schooling, and bycognitivestructure we mean how blacks perceive
and interpret their schooling in relation to their own perception of their
social and economic realities, that is, their cultural knowledge or ethno-
ecology of schooling. Although this cultural knowledge isshaped by local and
national historical and current economic and social realities, not all of it i s
within the conscious knowledge of local blacks. It has become a part of“their
culture.” The cognitive maps, the interactional and communicative styles, and
even the learning strategies black children bring to school and classroom
settings are cultural i n some sense; but they are also products of their
ecological structure.
How can an anthropologist study minority schooling or classroom

interactive patterns i n this broader social or ecological context? Initial steps i n
such a study have already been described. One i s to map out the role of
schooling in a given minority group’s economic and social realities and how
these realitles influence the way the minority group members are perceived
and treated by educators, that is, to study the educator’s or dominant group’s
ethnoecology of minority schooling. Another task i s to study the minority-
group members’ perceptions of their economic and social realities, their
perceptions of schooling in relation to these realities, and their school
behaviors and interpretations of such behaviors, that is, their own ethno-
ecology of schooling. The next task i s to study children’s acquisition of the
ethnoecology of their group and the consequences for their school expe-
riences. In pursuing this task the ethnographer asks questions such as the
following: What are children taught and what do they learn about the
economic and social realities of their group? What are children taught and
what do they learn about schooling in relation to these economic and social
realities? What kinds of orientations and behaviors relevant to schooling do
the children acquire and why? How do the children acquire this knowledge
and these perceptions, orientations, and behaviors?At what age do children
begin to acquire them? How do children’s knowledge, perceptions, orien-
tations, and behaviors influence their school experience, including classroom
interaction patterns? In summary, the ethnographer seeks to describe the
ethnoecologies of schooling, children’s acquisition of their group’s ethno-
ecology, and the influence of these ethnoecologies on school and classroom
events or behaviors.
The Case of Stockton Blacks

M y research in Stockton, California, did not address all the preceding
questions systematically, but it came close to the multilevel approach
proposed in this paper. Some results of this study have appeared elsewhere
(Ogbu 1974a, 1974b, 1977); additional results will be published. In Stockton a
disproportionate number of black children do poorly in school and as adults
many end up with menial jobs, while some remain casually employed or
unemployed. Although there i s a correlation between education and jobs in
the black community, it i s not as strong as the correlation in the white
community because of a job ceiling. We focused on one neighborhood
pseudo-named Burgherside, but our study included blacks from other
neighborhoods in South Stockton. So i n this part of our essay the black
population will sometimes be referred to as blacks and at other times as
Burghersiders. Although the study also included Chicanos and other groups,
the focus of the present discussion will be on blacks.
Our decision to study the connection between school and classroom
events and black job and economic opportunity structure was made after we
discovered that the linkage between schooling and jobs is an important
element in the epistemology or ethnoecology of local blacks. We also found
that the ethnoecology of the people who control local schools, mainly
middle-class whites, i s different from the ethnoecology of blacks and that
OTHER SCHOOL FACTORS
INTERACTION
SCHOOLING AS
COMMUNITY-SCHOOL RELATIONS:
Degree of Cooperation and
OPPORTUNITY STRUC-
TURE: Perceived NATIVE THEORY
Experience inter- c)OF “MAKING IT” DISILLUSIONMENT/ ’ ACADEMIC j ACADEMIC OUTCOMES
preted ATTITUDE
1 AND EFFORT
“(3 A
ALTERNATIVE
“SURVIVAL”
STRATEGIES W J R V I V A L ” KNOWLEDGE,
ATTITUDES AND SKILLS
JEACHING/LEARNING
.
Figure 1. Ecological Framework for Ethnography of Minority Education
the former tend to assume that rules of behavior for economic and social self-
betterment are the same for blacks and whites.
Figure 1 summarizes the framework and scope of our study from that
point. A detailed account of our field techniques has appeared elsewhere
(Ogbu 1974a, 1974b). Here we present only those aspects relevant to the
present paper, the multilevel approach. A detailed description of the different
dimensions of minority education represented in the diagram i s beyond the
scope of this paper. We focus only on the four factors that we believeinfluence
school and classroom processes directly and/or indirectly: minority access to
education (no. 1 in the diagram) and theethnoecology upon which it is based;
minority responses to subsistence and other opportunities based on school
credentials in adult life (nos. 2 and 3); and the relationship between school and
minority community (no. 4).
One of the central themes we studied is the ethnoecologies of schooling
held by various groups involved in local education and how these ethno-
ecologies affected black education. Ethnoecology of schooling refers to
people’s epistemology about schooling, which influences their participation
in and interpretation of school events. However, thestudy of ethnoecology of
schooling includes also a study of school, societal, and historical forces
influencing perceptions, knowledge of, and responses to schooling among a
given group.
The ethnoecology of middle-class Stocktonians (the taxpayers in their
“emic” categories of Stockton’s groups), who control schooling in
Burgherside, a low-income black and Chicano neighborhood, directly as
schoolboard members and school personnel and indirectly as pressure
groups, has strong influences on local education politics and policies. As used
in this essay, taxpayers and nontaxpayers are “emic” categories based on
perceptions of Stockton’s middle-class people, who use these categories to
order reality in dealing with low-income and minority peoples. Thus, those
who classify themselves as taxpayers are generally middle- and upper-class
whites, although they also include the more affluent minorities. To be a
taxpayer a Stocktonian must not only pay taxes (e.g., property, income, sales)
but must also receive public recognition as a taxpayer. To receive that honor
the person must live in a neighborhood that does not have many welfare
recipients, especially recipients of aid to families with dependent children, or
AFDC; the person should be middle class or “working class’’; and, preferably,
he or she should be white. A nontaxpayer is one who does not have some
combination of these attributes, particularly a person who i s a ‘welfare
recipient. By this classification, Burghersiders are nontaxpayers (Ogbu
1974a:50-51).
Taxpayers’ perceptions of their community, the functions of schooling,
and of Burghersiders as nontaxpayers greatly influence their conception of
Burghersiders’ educability and their management of the latter’s schooling.
The taxpayers view their city as a community of equal opportunity. They insist
that formal education offers everyone the same opportunity to become a
taxpayer, that is, to achieve middle-class status. By this they mean that, like
everyone else, blacks can get more desirable jobs, earn higher wages and
salaries, and gain promotions on the basis of training and ability and move into
more desirable neighborhoods when they can afford to do so financially.

Taxpayers believe that they are true representatives of Stockton’s
“mainstream culture” into which they were either born or have assimilated.
They believe that anyone who wants can assimilate into the mainstream
culture. They see a relationship between nontaxpayer status and a resistance
to assimilation. And those who “resist” assimilation are viewed as people who
are not willing to adopt the values that can transform them into “useful” and
“responsible” taxpaying citizens. A study commissioned by a coalition of local
churches summarizes taxpayers’ perceptions of nontaxpayers as follows:
Over 65% of those surveyed thought that low-income people are “stupid, narrow
in their view, intolerant, lacking in imagination, lacking in curiosity, and lacking in
ambition”; that low-income people are immoral and dirty; and that such people
do not want to get ahead. Among those who said these things are teachers,
professional (people), housewives, secretaries, and young people (Hutchinson
1965:4; emphasis added)
Taxpayers, including school personnel, see one of their primary

responsibilities as transforming nontaxpayers like Burghersiders into
taxpayers through public school education and job training. And their
approach to this task, their management of schooling and training programs
for Burghersiders, i s guided by their perceptions and stereotypes. Historically,
Taxpayers have not given local blacks access to the same quality education
given to local whites. Blacks were initiallyexcluded altogether from the public
schools; they were later given segregated and inferior schools. After
integration, many subtle mechanisms were used to keep their schooling
inferior, thus preventing them from qualifying for more desirable jobs and
reinforcing their inferior job status. We have described some of these subtle
mechanisms elsewhere (Ogbu 1974a, 1974b, 1977). Here it will suffice to
describe one example, which involves teaching black children in the
classroom rules of behavior for achievement that are different from those
taught to white middle-class children. The case involved 17 black and Chicano
children whose school records we examined for a period of five years; it was
found that all but one received the same annual grade of C , regardless of how
hard each hadworked i n any given year and, strikingly, regardlessof whatthe
teachers had to say in their written evaluations. There appeared to be little
correspondence between the written assessments and the letter grades. A
child that received a C rating in grade 1 continued to receive the same C rating
in subsequent years, although the teacher at each subsequent grade level
might write that she was “delighted” at the pupil’s “progress.” Since these
children received the same average marks whether or not they worked hard,
we have hypothesized that they were not being taught to associate efforts or
hardwork with higher achievement (Ogbu 1974a:165; 1977:12). There i s a
parallel here with their parents’ experiences of not being proportionately
rewarded with jobs and wages for their education and ability.
Thus we find, as we examine the way taxpayers manage Burgherside
schooling, the kind of education they make available to Burgherside children,
and the way teachers teach Burgherside children, that taxpayers’effortsare not
directed toward enabling nontaxpayers to become taxpayers; school and
classroom processes work in ways, described in various microethnographic
studies, that reinforce school failures. Thus many Burghersiders as adults

become marginally employed or unemployed, or they become “wards” of the
community, maintained through public assistance, creating another role for
taxpayers-that of caretakers of welfare recipients and their children (Ogbu
1974a:57).
Turning to the ethnoecology of Burghersiders, we find several
educational consequences that must influence classroom events. Burgher-
siders, for example, do not believe that Stockton is a community of equal
opportunity. They point out that racial and ethnic discriminations have
traditionally prevented them from obtaining more desirable jobs, higher
wages, and promotions on the job on the basis of education and ability, and
from buying or renting homes in better parts of thecity. Although there might
be some exaggeration, some Burghersiderswould recount instances in which
minority-group persons “had degrees i n their pockets” and yet could only
find jobs in Stockton as manual laborers or farm laborers.
One result of Burghersiders’ethnoecology i s their disillusionment and lack
of effort, optimism, and perseverance. The latter is, of course, a response to
the job ceiling. We learned about this from informal discussions with various
peoples in the neighborhoods and from interviews with students specifically
probing into the effects of the job ceiling on their responses to schooling.
Observations in classrooms and in the community show that many children do
not take their schoolwork seriously and do not persevere long enough at it
even though they acknowledge in interviews that such efforts are necessary to
do well in school. interviews with parents show that although they have high
aspirations for their children they also appear t o teach them contradictory
attitudes toward schooling. On the one hand, parents espouse the need to get
more education than they had and to work hard and do well in school. On
the other hand, they also teach their children verbally and through their own
life experiences of unemployment, underemployment, and other discrimi-
nations, as well as through gossips about similar experiences among relatives,
neighbors, and friends-through the actual texture of life-that even if they
do well in school they may not do so as adults in the wider society. Eventually,
Burgherside children not only become disillusioned and “give up,” but they
also learn to blame “the system” for their school failures, as their parents
blame “the system” for their own failures to achieve desirable jobs and other
positions.
Another response to the job ceiling that has serious implications for
classroom and school processes is what blacks call “survival strategies.” These
fall into two categories. One consists of strategies directed toward increasing
the conventional economic and social resources of the black community and
in obtaining conventional jobs and other social rewards. These strategies
include collective struggle or civil rights activities (Newman et al. 1978; Scott
1976), clientship or UncleTomming (Dollard 1957; Myrdall944; Powdermaker
1968; Farmer 1968; Ogbu 1980b), and mutual exchange (Stack 1974). The other
category includes hustling, pimping, entertainment-hustling and the like-
strategies directed toward exploiting nonconventional economic and social
resources, or “the street economy” (Bullock 1973; Foster 1974; Heard 1968;
Milner 1970; Wolfe 1970).
Within the community, then, success in obtaining conventional jobs and
22 Volume XI!, Number 1
other social resources often requires collective struggle (at least to make
them available) and/or clientship in addition to educational credentials.
Furthermore, alternative survival strategies provide ways of making a living
and achieving status other than the conventional ones. Peoplewho succeed in
the conventional economy and status system, either with school credentials
only or by combining school credentials with clientship and collective
struggle, as well as those who make it i n the street economy through hustling
and related strategies, are all regarded as “successful people.” Their qualities
or skills are admired, and they influence the ways others, including children,
try to succeed.
We have suggested that the survival strategies may require knowledge,
attitudes, and skills that are not wholly compatible with those required for
white middle-class type of classroom learning and teaching. We have also
suggested that children probably begin to learn the survival strategies in
preschool years as a normal part of their cultural learning; consequently, the
potential for difficulties i n school learning may already exist when children
begin school. However, whether or not and to what extent learning difficulties
occur depends on the children’s encounter i n school. Unfortunately, we came
upon this form of response rather late in our research and did not trace the
effects of the survival strategies down to the classroom. Yet we suspect that
some classroom behaviors of black children reported in some microethno-
graphies are due to the incongruence between learned survival skills and
attitudes and the demands of school learning.
The remaining factor indicated i n the diagram to affect school and
classroom learning of black children adversely i s the conflict and mistrust
between blacks and the schools. Burghersiders believestrongly that the public
schools cannot be trusted to educate their children or to give them “the right
education.” Their mistrust of the schools is an outgrowth of a long history of
struggle against discriminatory treatment. For example, they first “fought”
against total exclusion when local public schools opened in 1853; then they
“fought” against separate and inferior schools until 1879, when they were
admitted to the same schools attended by whites “amidst the protestation of
many (white) citizens” (Martin 1959:155). Stockton blacks and Chicanos s t i l l
maintain that their children attend segregated and inferior schools. This has
led to protests, boycotts, and legal actions against the school district in recent
years. In the latter case the court ruled in their favor, ordering the schools to
be more integrated in 1977 (Litherland 1978; Ogbu 1974a:Chapter 7).
We have suggested that mistrust reduces the extent to which Burgherside
parents and their children genuinely accept the goals, standards, and
instructional approaches of the schools as legitimate and, hence, the need to
cooperate with the schools and follow school rules of behavior for
achievement. The conflict and mistrust also force the schools into defensive
approaches to Burghersiders in the form of control, paternalism, or both, or
even into “contest,” all of which divert the attention of both blacks and the
schools from the real task of educating the children.
In summary, the economic and social positions of Burghersiders do not
require much education, and there i s not much reward for educational
achievement. Their menial position influences the ethnoecologies of both the
middle-class Stocktonians, who control their schools, and the Burghersiders

themselves in their perceptions of and responses to schooling. Among the
former it produces an ethnoecology that leads them to offer Burghersiders
inferior education and to treat them in school and classroom in such a manner
as to facilitate a disporportionate school failure, thereby reinforcing their
menial position in adult life. Among Burghersiders it produces an
ethnoecology that generates disillusionment and a lack of perseverance
toward schoolwork; it produces survival strategies requiring knowledge,
attitudes, and skills that might not be congruent with school learning
requirements; and it produces mistrust and conflict that limit Burghersiders’
acceptance of and adherence to school rules and standards, which places the
school in a defensive posture toward blacks. How each of thesecontributes in
shaping classroom events i s a matter that needs further study. We have tried to
describe some of these school and classroom events elsewhere (Ogbu 1974a,
1974b, 1977). They include miscommunication between teachers and parents
and between teachers and students; teachers’ grading; counselors’ clinical
definitions of children’s academic problems; children’s disruptive behaviors
in the classroom; poor school and classroom attendance; and children’s lack
of serious attitudes and efforts in their academic tasks. These events are i n
large measure shaped by a combination of forces originating autside the
school and classroom. Conspicuously absent i n our study is how children
acquire their knowledge of these forces and events.
Conclusion
We have proposed a framework that we believe would enable a researcher to
study problems of minority school failure in many different settings. These
settings include the classroom and school premises; the home, church,
playgrounds, and neighborhoods; community meetings and workplaces; and
community and state agencies concerned with formal education, as well as
employment and the like.
The framework also encourages a researcher to recognize the complexity
of factors underlying minority school failure, which cannot be captured by
focusing on children’s “home environment,” on their unique cultural
background, or on their genetic makeup or idiosyncratic personal attributes.
Nor can it be adequately dealt with by focusing on school and/or classroom
processes alone. Each area of investigation contributes to our understanding
of the problem, but each makes most sense in termsof explanatory power and
policy questions when studied in combination as suggested within the
ecological framework. Microcosmic studies (microethnographies) of
classrooms, for example, may enrich our knowledge concerning how teacher-
pupil interaction or the politics of everyday life in the classroom acts as the
immediate cause of minority-group child’s failure to learn to read. But the
ecological framework suggests that these classroom events are built up by
forces originating in other settings and that how they influence classroom
teaching and learning must be studied if we are ever to understand why a
disproportionate number of minority children do poorly in school, and if we
are going to design an effective policy to improve minority school
performance.
Endnotes
1. Preparation of this paper was made possible by grants from the National Institute of
Education (NIE-C-80-0045) and Faculty Research Fund, University of California,
Berkeley, California. Earlier versions of the paper were read at the AERA annual
meeting symposium on “Values imposed by Anthropology: Implications for
Educational Research and Development,” San Francisco, California, April 1979, and
at the fifth Annual College of Education Symposium, “Ethnographic Research in the
Schools: What’s It All About?,” University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, May1980.
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School Ethnography: A Multilevel Approach’

Ethnography is increasingly used by researchers in education. Among

A part of the problem is developmental. School ethnography is still i n its

The Bias Toward Microethnography

Criticism of Traditional Ethnography

Trobriand village (Erickson 1973:lO). Erickson provides a vivid contrast

To do good ethnography of education requires the kind of participant

(Participant-observation) refers to the practice of living among the people

Thus, participant observation as an ethnographic technique requires, first and

anthropology, that is, from the cultural transmission orientation of culture-

Heritage, Patronage, a n d the Definition of the Probfern

Contributions a n d Limitations of Microethnography

There are many kinds of microethnographies, although generally they focus

determine i t s compatibility with classroom use. Microethnographers may

certain generalizations about causes of minority school failures because they

Another major difficulty with current microethnography i s that it i s not

Warren shows the influence of industrialization and new economic role

behaviors i n school with other features of society, especially with the

How can an anthropologist study minority schooling or classroom

The Case of Stockton Blacks

more desirable neighborhoods when they can afford to do so financially.

Taxpayers, including school personnel, see one of their primary

studies, that reinforce school failures. Thus many Burghersiders as adults

middle-class Stocktonians, who control their schools, and the Burghersiders

Schultz, Jeffrey and Susan Florio

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