This paper investigates how neighborhood cultural context shapes academic achievement. Drawing on contemporary conceptualization of culture and recent evidence of the importance of neighborhood cultural context, I hypothesize that students from disadvantaged neighborhoods will display more cultural heterogeneity, or variability in cultural orientations, operationalized here as self-efficacy. In addition, I hypothesize that neighborhood cultural heterogeneity will have negative effects on academic achievement, particularly for those students with high individual self-efficacy. Results from multilevel models using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) support my hypotheses. Results indicate that students exposed to greater cultural heterogeneity are less able to translate high self-efficacy into better achievement, and suggest that exposure to increased cultural heterogeneity is one reason why students residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods underperform in education.
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