![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
This article discusses the range of challenges faced by African American students today and argues against “silver bullet” solutions in addressing them. Academic success will not be achieved by imposing narrowly conceived remedies to interconnected factors such as teacher preparation, student engagement, school financing, or parent support. Sustained, community-wide Black academic excellence requires contextual responses to these areas, along with comprehensive policies that address quality of life in Black communities. This article suggests that contextually generated responses to local realities have the potential to usher in broader structurally transformative solutions so that low-income students and students of color can access high quality learning opportunities unhindered by indecent housing, lack of healthcare, inadequate nutrition, financial insecurity, or other destabilizing conditions that affect families. We offer examples of the collaborative, action-oriented work that must be conceptualized and enacted if we are to successfully address the ongoing challenges in Black education. We also introduce a framework for considering the transformative work engaged by critical educators, organizers and activists across the country. Our hope is that along with direct service programs that facilitate community responses to sociocultural and economic influences on learning, complementary efforts are engaged to eradicate the systemic inequities to which such programs respond.
Notes
Our understanding and subsequent development of the ideas of contextual and transformative action is greatly informed by the longstanding understandings, teaching, and unpublished work of anthropologist Ted Gordon of The University of Texas at Austin.
National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), 5.
National Center on Education and the Economy, Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (San Francisco: Wiley, 2007); Peter Sacks, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown, 2005); Brian Crosby, Smart Kids, Bad Schools: 38 Ways to Save America's Future (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008).
Sacks, Tearing Down the Gates; Kozol, The Shame of the Nation; Beth Harry and Janette Klingner, Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education? Understanding Race and Disability in Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2005); Hala Elhoweris et al., “Effect of Children's Ethnicity on Teachers' Referral and Recommendation Decisions in Gifted and Talented Programs,” Remedial and Special Education 26, no. 1 (2005): 25–31.
U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2008, NCES 2008-031.
Frederick Hess, “Teacher Quality, Teacher Pay,” Policy Review 124 (April–May 2004): http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3438676.html
UTeach Institute, UTeach Elements of Success (2007), http://www.uteach-institute.org/publications/index.cfm (accessed August 10, 2008).
Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000).
Hugh Price, Achievement Matters: Getting Your Child the Best Education Possible (New York: Kensington, 2002).
Ray McDermott and Kathleen D. Hall, “Scientifically Debased Research on Learning, 1854–2006,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 38, no. 1 (March 2007): 9–15; Business Roundtable, Assessing and Addressing the “Testing Backlash”: Practical Advice and Current Public Opinion Research for Business Coalitions and Standards Advocates (Washington, D.C.: Business Roundtable, 2001).
Asa Hilliard, “No Mystery: Closing the Achievement Gap Between Africans and Excellence,” in Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students, ed. Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 131–165.
Ibid., 137. For more information about international comparisons, see Rodger Bybee and Elizabeth Stage, “No Country Left Behind: International Comparisons of Student Achievement Tell U.S. Educators Where They Must Focus Their Efforts to Create the Schools the Country Needs,” Issues in Science and Technology 21, no. 2 (2005): 69–75; Jens H. Haahr, Thomas K. Nielsen, Martin E. Hansen, and Soren T. Jakobsen, Explaining Student Performance: Evidence from the International PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS Surveys (Copenhagen: Danish Technological Institute for the European Commission's Directorate-General for Education and Culture, 2005).
Kevin Foster, “Gods or Vermin: Alternative Readings of the African American Experience Among African and African American College Students,” Transforming Anthropology 13, no. 1 (2005): 34–46; Theresa Perry, “Up from Parched Earth: Toward a Theory of African American Achievement,” in Perry, Steele, and Hilliard, Young, Gifted and Black, pp. 1–108.
Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995); Rakesh Kochhar, The Wealth of Hispanic Households: 1996–2002 (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2004).
Wanda Vaughn, Willis C. Maples, and Richard Hoenes, “The Association Between Vision Quality of Life and Academics as Measured by the College of Optometrists in Vision Development Quality of Life Questionnaire 1,” Optometry: Journal of the American Optometric Association 77, no. 3 (2006): 116–123.
Dalton Conley, Kate W. Strully, and Neil G. Bennett, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2004).
Ibid.
Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red; Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth; Rothstein, Class and Schools.
Ogbu, “Cultural Discontinuities and Schooling,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1982): 290–307.
Price, Achievement Matters.
Annette Lareau and Erin McNamara Horvat, “Moments of Social Inclusion and Exclusion: Race, Class and Cultural Capital in Family-School Relationships,” Sociology of Education 72, no. 1 (1999): 37–53.
Ibid., 42.
Pedro Noguera, City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), 34.
Loïc Wacquant, “Negative Social Capital: State Breakdown and Social Destitution in America's Urban Core,” Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 13, no. 1 (1998): 25–40; Noguera, City Schools and the American Dream.
Michael W. Apple. “Comparing Neo-Liberal Projects and Inequality in Education,” Comparative Education 37, no. 4 (2001): 409–423.
James Scheurich and Linda Skrla, Leadership for Equity and Excellence: Creating High-Achievement Classrooms, Schools, and Districts (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2003).
Rothstein, Class and Schools, 86.
Henry A. Giroux and Michèle Schmidt. “Closing the Achievement Gap: A Metaphor for Children Left Behind,” Journal of Educational Change 5 (2004): 215.
Rothstein, Class and Schools, 86.
Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kris Sloan, “High Stakes Accountability, Minority Youth and Ethnography: Assessing the Multiple Effects,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2008): 24–41; F. Robert Sabol, “No Child Left behind: A Study of Its Impact on Art Education,” (February 2010), http://www.naea-reston.org/news (accessed March 2, 2010); Laura H. Chapman, “No Child Left Behind in Art?” Arts Education Policy Review 106, no. 2 (November–December 2004): 3–17.
Rothstein, Class and Schools.
Jennifer Booher-Jennings, “Below the Bubble: ‘Educational Triage’ and the Texas Accountability System,” American Educational Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2005): 231–268.
Personal communication, 2007.
Ibid.
McWhorter, Losing the Race; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, No Excuses; Price, Achievement Matters.
Hilliard, “No Mystery.”
Kunjufu, Black Students/Middle Class Teachers (Chicago: African American Images, 2002).
Hilliard, “No Mystery.”
Mary E. Dilworth and Anthony L. Brown, “Teachers of Color,” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, ed. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and D. John McIntyre (New York: Routledge, 2008), 424–444.
Michele Foster, “Effective Black Teachers: A Literature Review,” in Teaching Diverse Populations: Formulating a Knowledge Base, ed. Etta R. Hollins, Joyce E. King, and Warren C. Hayman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 225–241; Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994); Hilliard, “No Mystery.”
For a broad discussion of school policies and practices that support excellence for students of color, see Pedro Reyes, Jay D. Scribner, and Alicia Paredes Schribner, eds., Lessons from High-Performing Hispanic Schools: Creating Learning Communities (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999). For culturally and contextually resonant teaching, see Foster, “Effective Black Teachers”; Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers; Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, ed., In Search of Wholeness: African American Teachers and Their Culturally Specific Classroom Practices (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Kathryn H. Au and Cathy Jordan, “Teaching Reading to Hawaiian Children: Finding a Culturally Appropriate Solution,” in Culture and the Bilingual Classroom: Studies in Classroom Ethnography, ed. Henry T. Trueba, Grace P. Guthrie, and Kathryn H. Au (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury, 1981), 139–152; Frederick Erickson and Gerald Mohatt, “Cultural Organization and Participation Structures in Two Classrooms of Indian Students,” in Doing the Ethnography of Schooling, ed. George Spindler (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982), 131–174. For literature on caring schools, see Angela Valenzuela, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); René Antrop-González and Anthony De Jesús, “Toward a Theory of Critical Care in Urban Small School Reform: Examining Structures and Pedagogies of Caring in Two Latino Community-Based Schools,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 19, no. 4 (2006): 409–433. For a discussion of educating students for positions of power versus positions of poverty, see Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: New Press, 1995); Martin Haberman, “The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching,” in The Jossey-Bass Reader on Teaching (New York: Wiley, 2003), 239–250; Hilliard, “No Mystery;” Rothstein, Class and Schools.
Karen Zumwalt and Elizabeth Craig, “Who Is Teaching? Does It Matter?” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, ed. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and D. John McIntyre (New York: Routledge, 2008), 404–423.
Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007); Michele Foster, Black Teachers on Teaching (New York: New Press, 1997).
Na'ilah Suad Nasir, “Identity, Goals, and Learning: Mathematics in Cultural Practice,” Mathematical Thinking and Learning 4, nos. 2–3 (2002): 213–247; Na'ilah Suad Nasir, Victoria M. Hand, and Edd V. Taylor, “Culture and Mathematics in School: Boundaries Between ‘Cultural’ and ‘Domain’ Knowledge in the Mathematics Classroom and Beyond,” Review of Research in Education 32 (2008): 187–240; Na'ilah Suad Nasir, Ann S. Rosebery, Beth Warren, and Carol D. Lee, “Learning as a Cultural Process: Achieving Equity Through Diversity,” in The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, ed. Keith R. Sawyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 489–502; Kevin M. Leander, “Locating Latanya: The Situated Production of Identity Artifacts in Classroom Interaction,” Research in the Teaching of English 37 (2002): 198–250; Stanton Wortham, “Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity,” Sociology of Education, 76, no. 3 (2003): 228–246.
Villegas and Davis, “Preparing Teachers of Color to Confront Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Educational Outcomes,” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, ed. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and D. John McIntyre (New York: Routledge, 2008), 583–605.
Ibid.; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Hilliard, “No Mystery.”
Doug Foley, Kevin M. Foster, et al., eds., Activist Educational Anthropology. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39 (2008), special issue.
Miguel Guajardo, F. Guajardo, and Edyael del Carmen Casaperalta, “Transformative Education: Chronicling a Pedagogy for Social Change,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2008): 3–22.
Julio Cammarota, “The Cultural Organizing of Youth Ethnographers: Formalizing a Praxis-Based Pedagogy,” ibid., 45–58.
Soo Ah Kwon, “Moving from Complaints to Action: Oppositional Consciousness and Collective Action in a Political Community,” ibid., 59–76.
Janice Hurtig, “Community Writing, Participatory Research, and an Anthropological Sensibility,” ibid., 92–106.
Hugh Mehan, “Engaging the Sociological Imagination: My Journey Into Design Research and Public Sociology,” ibid., 77–91.
Sylvia Bozeman, “Undergraduate mathematics: Promising Recruitment and Retention Strategies to Ensure Diversity in the STEM Pipeline,” Congressional Briefing, Washington, D.C. (September 22, 2009).
Diverse Issues in Higher Education, June 21, 2007.
For example, see Doug Israel, Staying in School: Arts Education and New York City High School Graduation Rates (New York: Center for Arts Education, 2009); Sabol, “No Child Left Behind: A Study of Its Impact on Art Education.”
COBRA is an acronym for Community of Brothers in Revolutionary Alliance. VOICES stands for Verbally Outspoken Individuals Creating Empowered Sisters.
“Title I schools” refers to schools that have high numbers of low-income families and that are thus eligible for federal financial assistance. “Title I” refers to federal provisions for providing financial assistance to local educational agencies for the education of children of low-income families as authorized in the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 (Public Law 89-10, 79 Stat. 27, 20 U.S.C. ch. 70) and periodically reauthorized since. The latest ESEA reauthorization is Public Law 107-110: “An act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.” This law was signed in January 2002 and is commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In 2007 the ESEA was due for reauthorization, and in March of this year the Obama administration unveiled a blueprint that will inform the eventual legislation. Details of the blueprint can be found at the U.S. Department of Education, http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/index.html