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Disadvantage: The Environmental Case 81of disadvantage themselves. We should be cautious, for example, ininterpreting studies in which aspects of the home life of individuals arediscussed: how was such information obtained; does it derive from selfreport,or from interviews with parents, children or teachers? Dataconcerning personal background are clearly important, but it is difficultto obtain and measure them with accuracy; in an early criticism, Gordon(1965) noted that much of the information here was essentially speculation.As in many other areas of social enquiry, carefully designedlongitudinal studies would be much preferable to the snapshot investigationsthat have been vastly more common. Relatedly, in attempting todetermine characteristics of the disadvantaged child at school, relianceupon standardized tests and observations may be inadequate, for reasonsalready touched upon.Perhaps the most important point here, however one that relates, atleast in part, to the assessment difficulties noted above is that we do notfully understand the relationship between early environment and thecharacteristics of disadvantage, nor are we on firm ground whenconsidering possible links between these characteristics and schoolsuccess (or lack of it). Mere classification and description are notsufficient. How can we account, for example, for the success of manychildren who live in disadvantaged areas and whose homes areinadequate in material and other ways? Wiseman, whom I have alreadycited on this matter, points out that ‘bad homes and neighbourhoodsare more effective in preventing the emergence of brightness than theyare in producing backwardness’ (Wiseman, 1968: 268). And how dowe reconcile the poor academic performance of some immigrantand minority groups with the success of others? Ogbu’s discussion ofthe ‘caste-like’ status that some but not all groups possess is germanehere. His central argument is that minority status need not bedisadvantaging per se; if, however, a group is downgraded, ignored oroppressed, and if social mobility remains uncertain regardless ofachievement, then the stage is set for disadvantaged status (see Ogbu,1978, 1982a, 1982b). But Ogbu’s more nuanced view remains, itself,insufficiently sensitive to intra-group variation, as d’Amato (1987) andErickson (1987) have demonstrated. The upshot is that finely detailedknowledge of the constituents of educational disadvantage remainsincomplete.In itself, this is not so much a criticism of the environmentalist positionin principle as it is the lack of the necessary detail, which that positionreally requires. An additional point, however, does involve a criticismof the environmental-deficit position per se. It is that behind the