This manuscript begins by distinguishing the common structural and cultural arguments that tend to guide popular urban achievement gap research. It highlights Jencks and Phillips, and Payne, as two cases of popular texts followed by critical responses to them. It concludes by imagining a compass to guide burgeoning scholars toward reading into research "more complexly" so as to enhance and proliferate critiques of popular cultural and structural arguments and to dissuade abrupt, myopic, and polemic responses. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure and 3 notes.)