Perceptions of the schooling experience from the perspectives of three African American collegiate basketball non-qualifiers

Literature on the African American experience of schooling within the U.S. educational system suggested that the concepts of culture and cultural assimilation are important to understanding academic achievement and academic difficulties within the African American community.; As a means of understanding academic achievement and academic difficulties of collegiate basketball nonqualifiers, this qualitative study explored the perceptions of the schooling experience of three participants as students within the U.S. system of public education. Academic difficulty was treated as a product created by the impact of the legal and social history of the United States upon the history of African Americans and schooling. Within this context, the final ethnology was consistent with the history of African Americans and schooling from an African American epistemology. The concepts of basketball and academics as in the lives of the participants were interpreted as important to understanding the experiences of each participant with the product, academic difficulty.