This preliminary report examines the complex relationship between black adolescents' school performance and black Americans' intragroup social organization, as well as the intrusive influence of the larger social structure. It is based on a two-year ethnographic study of high school students in a black section of Washington, D.C. Emphasis is on the intragroup response--fictive kinship--and its impact on school achievement among black adolescents. The study examines the relationship between school performance and the students' unarticulated valuation of the fictive kinship system extant in the school context. The study also describes how and why some black adolescents are successful in school, and offers ethnographic evidence showing why the majority of the students at the school are unsuccessful on school measures of success. Preliminary findings indicate: (1) the importance and effect of the fictive kinship system on black adolescents' school performance and (2) the potentially powerful counterbalancing influence of the instructional and organizational supports in the school context on students' academic achievement. While fictive kinship and other indigenous cultural responses make academic achievement more difficult, the mere existence of these responses does not necessarily result in school failure. An extensive list of references is appended. (LHW)