Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
As Peggy Sanday and her collaborators have suggested in a number of articles, it is the nature and degree of contact with the mainstream culture that best explains ethnic differences in educational testing and other areas of educational achievement.1 For many educators this implies the need for a complete acculturation to mainstream cultural values and behavior-an idea common to the melting pot and cultural deprivation theories. But for black Americans who seek mainstream adaptation, or Anglo-conformity, the influence of racism in America renders the achievement of such goals highly unlikely. Further, the continued identification with one's own cultural group not only is necessary for the social supports which are often basic to one's physical and emotional survival2 but also for one's self-image-a factor in educational success.3 The authors of the present paper believe that the best educational policy for our structurally and culturally pluralistic society would be, as described by Burger,4 one that does not ignore or downplay nonmainstream
Gentemann et al. (Sat,) studied this question.