Back to the Future: Reclaiming Our History to Reposition Ourselves in the Contemporary Urban School Discourse

Abstract

In light of the unrelenting negative educational outcomes experienced by Black youth, its impact to the community, and the community's relative absence from the sociopolitical sphere of educational policymaking, this article explores how two specific periods in the educational history of African Americans provide a framework of how social networks and capital can be leveraged to make substantive progress towards achieving educational success for our youth. This discussion does not intend to romanticize or to invent an idyllic revision of a difficult and tumultuous past, or to suggest that community members are not currently engaged in any strategic action to affect educational change. It does intend to recognize that the structure of the social networks within the community as well as its generation and utilization of social capital played an important role in the historical struggle for educational access and quality.

Keywords:

• school engagement
• social capital
• social networks
• urban communities
• urban education reform

Notes

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Children's Defense Fund, “Each Day in America” (2008), http://www.childrensdefense.org (accessed August 2008).

Citizens Committee for Children, “Keeping Track of New York City's Children Fact Sheets” (2008), http://www.cccnewyork.org/facts.html (accessed August 2008).

National Urban League, “State of Black America Report” (2008), http://www.nul.org/thestateofblackamerica.html (accessed August 2008).

C. Chambliss, “The Relationship Between Mass Incarceration and Unequal Education in the United States,” http://www.fedcrimlaw.com/visitors/PrisonLore/PrisonEducation2.htm (accessed March 2005).

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A. L. Solomon et al., “From Prison to Work: The Employment Dimensions of Prisoner Reentry” (October 2004), http://www.urban.org/publications/411097.html (accessed December 2005).

J. Cotterell, Social Networks and Social Influences in Adolescence (New York: Routledge, 1996), 16.

M. Warren, J. P. Thompson, and S. Saegert, Social Capital and Poor Communities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 1.

V. Gecas, “The Social Psychology of Self-Efficacy,” Annual Review Sociology 15 (1989): 291–316.

Ibid., 4.

S. L. Lightfoot, Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 142.

R. Brooks, Integration or Separation? A Strategy for Racial Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 5.

A. Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 7.

W. E. B. Du Bois, “Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans,” http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/dubois07/dubois.html#dub73 (accessed August 2008).

Lightfoot, Worlds Apart, 148.

Ibid.

Ibid., 165.

W. Cutler III, Parents and Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 191.

D. Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 29.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 104.

Ibid., 6.

Ibid., 15.