Social scientists have long debated how family background, school quality, and neighborhood residence produce disadvantages tied to the academic underperformance of minority students—African Americans in particular. But theories invoking capital accumulation (human, social, financial, and cultural), structural disadvantage (across schools, families, and neighborhoods) and cultural deficits (including “culture of poverty” and “oppositional culture”) overlook a vexing social fact: students who attend the same schools, grow up on the same blocks, channel the same set of cultural norms, and share the same racial heritage and similar family structures often wind up achieving at dramatically different levels in school. This dissertation takes a longitudinal, mixed-methods approach to exploring internal variation in academic achievement among a cohort of 49 black and Latino high school students in Washington D.C., tracing divergent educational expectations and achievement levels from the fall of 2000, when I was their fourth grade classroom teacher, to the spring of 2009, when they were scheduled to graduate from high school.

For nearly half of the students in this study—the “underachievers”—poor performance in school is a coherent and logical strategy of action. Chronic requests for makeup work and the selective completion of assignments reflect conscious strategies designed to meet the academic targets most valued in the surrounding community—high school graduation and college enrollment. In contrast, “high achievers,” taking advantage of stable (if not always comfortable) home environments, put forth maximum effort in their coursework and create subtle forms of social distance that safeguard their pathways to educational transcendence. Low achievers, on the other hand, are disproportionately likely to experience severe disruptions (e.g. incarceration, family shocks, and childbirth) and often start trouble preemptively to avoid being labeled “dumb” in classroom settings. In other words, students are active agents in the production of educational success and failure; they create strategies of action that both reflect and contribute to their placement along the achievement hierarchy. Not surprisingly, many students—consciously aware of their own academic shortcomings—admit to high levels of doubt about their educational futures, a finding that itself casts doubt on the existence of the “attitude-achievement paradox” and whether fixed-choice measures are the most appropriate way for researchers to measure educational expectations.