Conflict and Symbolic-Interactionist Perspectives
Much evidence indicates that the performance of minority students in American public schools is not distributed randomly; that is, that membership in a minority group tends to correlate to school performance. Members of some minority groups show significantly greater academic success on average than whites, or the student population as a whole. Members of other minority groups are significantly more likely to struggle in school.
There is no evidence that members of any human population have inherently greater or lesser academic potential than others. Thus, we can presume that the reported differences in academic performance by group reflect in some way the social experience of minority-group membership affects academic performance. This social experience might take several possible forms; it might be concentrated at a family level or the community level. It is in any case an appropriate topic for sociological investigation. The following will consider how a conflict theorist and a symbolic interactionism theorist might, respectively, hypothesize a cause of group variance in school performance, and seek to test the hypothesis experimentally.
Conflict theory holds that society is an arena in which groups struggle for wealth and power. Elite groups strive to maintain their elite status by holding down other groups. Oppressed groups strive to shake off the institutions that hold them down. Each side in this struggle may follow a variety of strategies. The elite, in America primarily white, might recruit selected members of otherwise-disadvantaged minority groups and admit them to elite status in turn for upholding elite interests. Or it might thus elevate certain minority groups, while holding down others. In response, members of suppressed groups may seek to assimilate to elite standards, or actively rebel against elite standards, or t
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