Being at the forefront of the educational system, teachers, especially the great ones, have immediate access to the realities in the schools they work for. Jonathan Kozol is one such teacher who was aghast at the educational inequalities he has observed in schools with the direst conditions and schools with the best facilities and programs offered to more fortunate students. From the physical environment to the curriculum, Kozol (1991) has documented and given commentaries on the realities he knew existed but seemed to be unseen or unheard of, if not ignored, by people in authority to balance the inequalities. Kozol (1991) lyrically presents ironies in the educational system of the land of the free as he laments the provision of sorry states: “The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. “This land is your land,” they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of “good” and “brotherhood” “from sea to shining sea.” It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets” (Kozol:160). Educational inequality is mostly felt by poor African American adolescent students due to the developmental task of “integrating their individual personal identity with their racial identity. This integration process is a necessary and inevitable developmental task of growing up Black in the midst of White mainstream culture (Ward, 1995, Cross et al., 1991) Living with their predecessors’ legacy of being racially discriminated and historically exploited and abused by the White people may have left generational scars in their psyche, that even up to now, being Black in an urban setting remains to be an issue. Many social scientists, politicians, and the media tend to paint a bleak picture for youth living in predominantly Black urban settings in this country (Barbarin, 1993). Poverty, academic failure, early death due to poor health care and violence, drug abuse and addiction, high unemployment rates, teenage pregnancy, gangs, and high crime rates are some of the conditions highlighted to describe the state of the urban underclass in which children must develop and attempt to survive (Dryfoos, 1990; Halpern, 1990; Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990; Werner, 1990). Theoretical conceptualizations of factors that influence urban African American adolescents’ academic achievement have included deficiency models, which focus on factors that may preclude some of these youths from achieving academic success. Fordham & Ogbu (1986) have asserted that in order for these Black American adolescents to succeed academically, they should adopt more Eurocentric values regarding education. This “acting White” hypothesis has largely assumed a positive correlation between endorsing Eurocentric values and high scholastic achievement. Challenges to this theory have come from a few empirical studies, in which the endorsement of mainstream socialization messages and Eurocentric values were negatively associated with school and general self-esteem (Constantine & Blackm