Black Males

In a recent opinion piece, Mary Carey, the founder of a volunteer group representing children who can't read, points to the low literacy rates of black males as the cause of the UNC academic scandal. She raises important issues about race, literacy, and our education system. Unfortunately, Ms. Cary oversimplifies aspects of both student achievement and reading instruction that we as literacy educators need to correct and explain. Above all, we want to point out that the UNC Scandal is about adults cheating, it is not about young black males who cannot read. Young black males were a small percentage of those implicated in the cheating scandal, which was perpetrated by many non-athletes and many non-Black students, and many women. To use the UNC scandal as segue to talk about black males' reading achievement is disingenuous at best and racist at the worst. However, there are some important points that we feel need to be addressed. As experienced educators and literacy scholars, our classroom experiences and scholarly research address many of the issues that are related to this topic. So, while we feel that Mary Carey conflates issues when she uses her commentary about the UNC cheating scandal to focus on literacy rates of black males, we believe that there are many important issues that should be addressed. Our intention is to bring up some issues from her commentary, provide research-based understandings, and suggest some possible solutions. Race Certainly, race is an issue and understanding how race impacts literacy rates is paramount to literacy levels of black males. We cannot effectively focus on low levels of literacy rates without addressing the larger issue of race and education. Achievement in public schools reflects systemic issues that affect achievement for many minorities. While some research demonstrates that after background characteristics are controlled, African American and White students enter school with equal reading readiness, research almost unanimously demonstrates that reading achievement gaps widen for African American students as they progress through school. Research has also demonstrated a discrepancy in participation of programs that support future opportunities for African American students, such as advanced placement programs, high school graduation rates, and admittance to college programs. All of this points to the idea that schools may sustain or add to racial disparities and thus create achievement gaps. We believe that a key answer is to recruit more diverse teachers into education and specifically the teaching force, which is predominantly white and female (n=83%). Teachers must help African American students develop healthy racial identities and show students that academically successful people are part of all racial and ethnic groups. Also, it's important to incorporate diverse perspectives into the curriculum in the way of curriculum materials, texts, and approaches to learning. For many students who may be struggling with reading, the ways in which students respond to reading instruction can reflect larger issues, including what it means to be a reader and whose ideas or perspectives are accepted in school settings. We need more

For African American youth of low socioeconomic status (SES), who fear losing communal and ethnic solidarity to Blacks who are moving into the middle class, insults related to selling out are often unconscious reactions to possible abandonment (Comer & Poussaint 1992). Sticking together based on a common racial identity is especially important for African American students who are bused
into White schools in White neighborhoods. As the Black middle class continues to grow and to move into the suburbs, many positive role models who have the ability to transmit social capital in the form of educational outcomes move also. This is why the success of the few African Americans who are academically successful make those who are not feel even more like failures (Comer & Poussaint 1992). Add the fact that both Blacks and Whites reinforce success for athleticism, and you have yet another impetus for African American males to gravitate toward sports for cultural affiliation and personal validation.

This article examines how two African American urban middle school learners and their father engaged in using a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) video to create Christmas ball lights, and the effect it had on their learning. Cultural Historical Activity Theory was used to focus on the ways activity systems played in human interaction. Findings conclude how their learning was based on the roles they played, how agency and apprenticeship were constructed, and how familial experiences were supported by one another. The article concludes with implications for teachers of urban middle school learners that contribute to students’ learning in informal settings.

This study examines parental involvement practices, the cultural wealth, and school experiences of poor and working-class mothers of Black boys. Drawing upon data from an ethnographic study, we examine qualitative interviews with four Black mothers. Using critical race theory and cultural wealth frameworks, we explore the mothers' approaches to supporting their sons' education. We also describe how the mothers and their sons experienced exclusion from the school, and how this exclusion limited the mothers' involvement. We highlight their agency in making use of particular forms of cultural wealth in responding to the school's failure of their sons.

This paper examines the process by which stereotypical mainstream representations of black males (as hard, as anti-school, and as disconnected from the domestic sphere) were reimagined in all-black, all-male manhood development classes for 9th graders in urban public high schools. Findings show that instructors debunked stereotypes and created new definitions of black manhood through the practice of modeling manhood, critiquing existing notions of black manhood, establishing a caring community, and role modeling new ways of being. [black manhood,

Drawing upon the authors’ experiences working in schools as teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and community members, this study utilizes a Critical Race Theory of education in examining the school-to-prison pipeline for black male students. In doing so, the authors highlight the particular role educators play in the school-to-prison pipeline, focusing particularly on how dispositions toward black males influence educator practices. Recommendations and future directions are provided on how education preparation programs can play a critical role in the transformation of black male schooling.

The recent deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other Black males have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black communities and spirited academic discourses in higher education regarding the educational and social plight of Black males in America. Connecting the deaths of Black males to our lived experiences in the academy, we use a text messaging performative writing style to demonstrate how Black males are not only gunned down in the streets of America by police but also are metaphorically gunned down in the academy. That is to say, white colleagues and students attempt to use what we call the bullet of rejection, the bullet of silencing, and the bullet of disrespect to destroy us and our academic agenda. We conclude with a call to action for teacher education programs as a way to deepen their understanding of the racialized experiences of Black males in the academy and Black males in America.