Online Education And College Degree, part 12

Educational issues
African Americans comprise approximately 17% of the enrollment in public schools. However, they constitute about 20% of the students in special education, 30% of the students in vocational education, 23% of the students in alternative schools, and only 12% of the students in gifted and talented programs. African Americans also make up 10% of the private school enrollment. Overrepresentation in special education is greatest in the categories of mental retardation, developmental delay, emotional disturbance, deaf-blind, autism, and multiple disabilities. In contrast with the school population nationally, which is concentrated in suburban schools, more than 50% of African American students attend urban schools. On average, African Americans attend schools of lower quality with higher levels of segregation than other groups, even though it is 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision. In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that schools that were separate were inherently unequal. African American students report concerns about violence and the availability of drugs, alcohol, and weap-ons in the schools that they attend in substantially greater percentages than do other ethnic and racial groups.
One of the more persistent problems in the education arena is the achievement gap between African Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans on the one hand, and Whites and Asian Americans on the other. On average, African American students enter elementary school with weaker math, vocabulary, and reading skills than their White counterparts, even after controlling for parents' education levels, and this gap in achievement widens from Grades 1 to 12. Significantly fewer African American preschoolers and kin-dergartners can identify all the colors and alphabet letters, and twice as many African Americans in this age group are diagnosed with learning disabilities compared with their White counterparts. The event dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of students who dropped out of high school in a given year) for African American students is about 6%, and the status dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of individuals in the population from a certain age group who are not enrolled in school and have not earned a high school diploma) for African Americans aged 16 to 24 is approximately 13%. Dropout rates for African Americans declined substantially from the 1970s, but they stabilized in the late 1990s. In some urban districts, African American graduation rates are below 50%.
Data from longitudinal studies of school-age adolescents indicate that African American students miss more days of school than the aggregate U.S. student population and have the highest suspension and expulsion rates. African American students also report spending more time watching television on weekdays and weekends. African American males are overrep-resented in both incarcerated youth and youth on probation. These disparities are also reflected in both educational and occupational attainment. African Americans have lower college enrollment and graduation rates than do White and Asian students, and the percentages of African American workers decrease as one moves from clerical up to professional positions.
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Explanations of African American Achievement Patterns
Several explanations have been advanced for African American underachievement, although it is likely that no single factor provides a complete explanation of this complex issue. Many of the initial arguments focused on environmental deficits. For example, it was assumed that African American homes were culturally deficient in ways that precluded academic achievement. However, differences related to academic achievement (e.g., quantity and quality of language in the home) were related more closely to class than to racial group. Deficits in the segregated schools that African Americans attended were also identified as a major concern, and one of the major legal accomplishments of the civil rights era was the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision in 1954. This decision led to decades of desegregation plans by school districts, some of which are still in place.
Another long-standing argument has been based in biology and genetics—that is, African Americans have lower scores on measures of g (general intelligence) and consequently lower academic achievement. However, this explanation has been criticized for ignoring data on the increase in IQ scores over the past century (the Flynn effect), the reciprocal relationship between effective schooling and IQ, and the differential contributions of IQ to the variance in achievement across socioeconomic groups. There have also been suggestions that African Americans have different cultural styles than Whites and that there is a mismatch between Black cultural styles and the common methods of teaching in the school system. However, this suggestion has not been supported in empirical studies, in part due to the failure of researchers to adequately define and operationalize culture.
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Socioeconomic status has also been put forward as a reason for African Americans' underachievement, as there is a moderate relationship between poverty and academic achievement. African Americans are one of the poorer groups in the United States, with 25% of African American adults and 33% of African American children living below the poverty line. In addition, more than 40% of the African American population live in households with annual incomes of less than $25,000, and African Americans comprise about 40% of the homeless population. Black males also have the highest unemployment rate, and only 12% of all African American households report incomes of more than $75,000. Although socioeconomic status plays a role, there are data indicating that the achievement gap is present at all socioeconomic levels.
Although there are consistent positive relationships between academic achievement and several psychoso-cial variables across racial and ethnic groups, including academic self-concept, academic self-efficacy, self-regulation, motivation, and future time perspective, there have been few studies of these constructs in African American populations, and the studies that exist have been of limited utility in explaining the achievement gap. African American students consistently report higher self-concept scores and educational and occupational expectations, despite lower academic achievement. There is a growing consensus that the motivation and future orientation of African Americans may be affected by the marginalized status of African Americans in society. African American role models in the public sphere are more frequently entertainers and athletes than academics.
Another set of explanations for African American achievement is psychosocial and implicates African Americans' collective or social identity, also referred to as their reference group orientation. Perhaps the best-known of these explanations is the cultural ecological theory proposed by the late educational anthropologist, John Ogbu. This model has been used to explain achievement differences across racial and ethnic groups around the world, including Australia, Great Britain, Japan, and the United Kingdom, and has also been used to explain achievement differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. In brief, cultural ecological theory suggests that one of the ways in which African American educational success is compromised is due to the group eschewing attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to educational attainment if the attitudes and behaviors are seen as "acting White."
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Another explanation involving reference group orientation is the stereotype threat phenomenon proposed by Claude Steele, a social psychologist. This argument focuses on the pervasiveness of stereotypes in the populations and suggests that the strong negative stereotype about African Americans' intellectual capacities in the population can have a detrimental impact on African American performance in situations (e.g., academic evaluations of performance) where the stereotype is salient. Some researchers suggest that African Americans who care the most about doing well and have a strong sense of bonding to their racial group are potentially at greater risk for stereotype threat. Although much of the early research on stereotype threat was conducted with college-age samples, recent studies have demonstrated the negative impact of stereotype threat on school-age African Americans.
More recently, researchers have found that African American college students who are high in race-based rejection sensitivity are less likely to seek assistance in predominantly White institutions and more likely to be socially isolated, potentially decreasing their chances of persisting until graduation. Finally, researchers who study racial and ethnic identity in African Americans have hypothesized that some racial identity profiles may be more compatible with schooling outcomes than others, although there are limited data in support of this hypothesis. In addition, there are data that indicate that African Americans do not have to abandon their racial identity to be successful in school.
Several other theoretical perspectives implicate atti-tudinal and personal identity variables in academic performance. Self-worth theory suggests that students who are concerned with protecting their academic self-concept may choose not to study for examinations or engage actively in learning, thus providing a clear rationale for poor performance (i.e., not studying), rather than studying and taking the chance that they fail and be perceived as unintelligent. Another motivational perspective suggests that African American adolescents may have to choose between belonging to their racial group or being high achievers, leading many capable African American students to resist showing their true academic potential (i.e., / can, but do I want to?). Other researchers have reinvigorated the literature on teacher expectation effects by demonstrating that students can recognize differential behaviors by teachers toward high and low performers from the early elementary years onward. These findings suggest that the differential treatment of students perceived as more capable and less capable has direct effects on students' classroom functioning. The findings also indicate that minority students, who can recognize that they are members of stigmatized groups from the elementary school years, may be especially sensitive to the messages that teachers are communicating.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.