Health Disparities
As with the achievement gap, there are disparities in health between African Americans and White Americans across the life span. African Americans are either first or second with regard to infant mortality rates, low birthweight infants, and teenage pregnancies. African Americans also have the highest death rates in the United States, both generally and from specific causes such as heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, female breast cancer, and homicide. African Americans make up a substantial proportion of males (34.7%), females (60.5%), and children (61%) dying from AIDS. With regard to mental health issues, African Americans have less insurance and are also less willing to seek treatment, resulting in lower access to mental health care. The dearth of African American providers also contributes to an unwillingness to seek treatment.
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Research Agenda
African Americans make up a substantial portion of the U.S. population. They are a group with a unique place in the history and current sociopolitical context of the United States, and their academic achievement relative to members of the majority culture represents one of the most intractable problems facing educational psychology. Educational psychologists need to develop a comprehensive research agenda on this issue. Although efforts to close the achievement gap continue apace, it is perhaps time to rethink the approach to African American achievement. Data from the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that Whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders in the fourth and eighth grades had higher reading achievement scores, 22 to 29 points higher, than their Black, Hispanic, and American Indian counterparts. Moreover, these scores have remained relatively unchanged for much of the past decade.
Beginning in 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act required school districts to disaggregate student performance data on the basis of demographic variables, including ethnicity, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. One result of this requirement was to highlight the disparities in educational performance among groups at the local level, disparities heretofore seen only in national data. NCLB also proposes eliminating the achievement gap by 2014. However, there are still no explanations of the achievement gap that are accepted as definitive by large segments of the research community. Genetic, biological, environmental, demographic, and psycho-social explanations have both proponents and critics, and there are no studies in which combinations of all of these variables have been systematically examined.
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Educational research indicates that effective interventions (e.g., Sesame Street) often have positive consequences for those who need them as well as for those who could have done without them. Thus, in the absence of interventions targeted specifically at and solely to African Americans, it may be difficult to close the achievement gap. However, the achievement gap between African Americans and Whites may not be the only issue that merits attention. An alternative perspective suggests focusing attention at the achievement levels that African Americans attain. From this perspective, educators should be concerned with ensuring that all African Americans attain at least basic proficiency in the core academic subjects and the skills to pursue advanced educational opportunities.
Research indicates that effective teachers make a difference in student performance and that the impact is cumulative over multiple school years, but it is not clear how these findings relate to African American student achievement. Nor is it clear how teacher education programs need to change to prepare teachers to not only be effective but also convey appropriate messages to African American students. Effective teacher training needs to counter the increased susceptibility of African American students to negative messages conveyed by teachers and help teachers counter aversive racism. More research is needed on the relationships between African American collective identity and psychosocial variables that are proximally related to academic achievement (e.g., self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and anticipation of success) and on the mechanisms that are effective in supporting these variables in African American students. Finally, researchers need to assess how much variance in African American student achievement is attributable to racial identity attitudes, oppositional identity, and stereotype threat, and which behaviors and attitudes are compatible with high academic achievement and African American ethnic heritage.
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As should be clear, there are many questions that remain unanswered with regard to African Americans and schooling in the United States. Effectively addressing the educational issues related to African Americans will require a focused research agenda and collaboration between researchers and school districts with large numbers of African Americans. Educational researchers concerned with equity, and with African Americans specifically, have a challenging and worthwhile task that requires urgent attention.
Frank C. Worrell
EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
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