Another example of stereotyping involves African-American girls. Research has been conducted in classroom settings which shows that African-American girls are rewarded for nurturing behavior while white girls are rewarded for acade-mic behavior. Though it is likely true that many African-American girls are excellent nurturers, having played with or helped to care for younger siblings or cousins, they are penal-ized by the nurturing "mammy" stereotype when they are not given the same encouragement as white girls coward academic endeavors

n any discussion of education and culture, it is important to remember that children are individuals and cannot be made to fit into any preconceived mold of how they are "supposed" to act. The question is not necessarily how to cre-ate the perfect "culturally matched" learning situation for each ethnic group, but rather how to recognize when there is a problem for a particular child and how to seek its cause in the most broadly conceived fashion. Knowledge about culture is bur one tool that educators may make use of when devising solutions for a school's difficulty in educating diverse children.

To categorically characterize U.S.-born Mexican youth as emanating from cultures that do not value achievement is to at once treat them as if they were a monolith and to promote an invidious distinction. Key institutional mechanisms such as track.ing-and, as I shall shortly argue, subtractive schooling-mediate and have always mediated achieve-ment outcomes. That most minority youth, however, are nor located in the college-bound track should not keep us from recognizing the power of such placement: It is there where they acquire privileged access to the necessary skills, resources, and conditions for social ascendancy within schools, and ultimately, within society

Schools subtract resources from youth in two major ways. The first involves a process of "de-Mex.icanization," or subtracting students' culture and language, which is consequen-tial to their achievement arid orientations toward school. The second involves the role of caring between teachers and students in the educational process. De-Mex.icanization erodes students' social capital (Coleman 1988, I 990; also see Stanton-Salazar, 1997), by making it difficult for constructive social ti~s to develop between immigrant and U.S.-born youth:

Two decades of research has demonstrated that when an individual identifies with a group (e.g., race or gender) as part of their social identity and that group is stereotyped in negative ways, the person is at risk for lower performance relative to the stereotyped dimension of that identity

Because Black children are much more likely to be in the lower track than in the honors track in racially mixed schools, such apparent sorting along racial lines sends a message about what it means to be Black. One young honors student I interviewed described the irony of this resegre-gation in what was an otherwise integrated environment, and hinted at the identity issues it raised for him. "It was really a very paradoxical ex-istence, here I am in a school that's thirty-five percent Black, you know, and I'm the only Black in my classes .... That always struck me as od~;

One thing that happens is puberty. As children enter adolescence , they begin to explore the question of identity, asking "Who am I? Who can I be?" in ways they have not done before. For Black youth, asking "Who am I?" usually includes thinking about "Who am I ethnically and/or racially? What does it mean to be Black?