The Effects of Racial Dissonance on the Academic Achievement and Self-Esteem of Hispanic Middle School Students

  • Results indicated that Rosenberg’s dissonance theory was not supported with regard to academic performance and self-esteem.
  • Results did support Rosenberg’s notion of a dissonant communications environment. Regardless of ethnicity, majority status in a school context was associated with lowered levels of perceived discrimination.
  • Evidence that the phenomenon of desegregation contributes to the persistence of inequality of education for Hispanic students.
  • The racial dissonance/consonance of the school settings did not appear to have a significant effect on self-reported grades.
  • Hispanic students at the dissonant school setting reported more positive school-related behaviors than Hispanic in the other school contexts. Because the effects sizes for these analyses were small, the differences across school and ethnicity were relatively small.
  • Self-esteem did not vary by ethnicity and/or school attended, after controlling for parental education.
  • Self-esteem scores did not vary according to school attended and/or grade level, nor did the scores differed with regard to differences in the students’ ages.
  • The hypothesis concerning perceived discrimination received the strongest support, since both Hispanic and non-Hispanic Whites reported lower levels of perceived discrimination in consonant school contexts than their same-race counterparts in dissonant or balanced school settings. Overall, school attended, not the interplay between student ethnicity and the racial distribution of the school (dissonance/consonance), emerged as the most consistent factor associated with the outcomes of the dependent variables.