Guest Editors' Comments: Preparing Students for the New Millennium

Abstract

As Cooper (1996) has earlier argued, U.S. society remains stratified by both race/ethnicity and class. Being African American continues to have particularly negative connotations and consequences (Peters,1981). Despite the academic achievement and educational gains made by African American students in recent years, the achievement gap between students of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds in the United States continues to exist (Miller, 1995). Given such adverse social conditions, researchers have maintained that African American children especially must be guided to develop a positive sense of self and ethnic identity in order to be successful (Boykin, 1986; Johnson, 1981). If Black youth are to be sufficiently prepared to meet the challenges of the new millennium, it is important that they come to see themselves as intellectually and affectively competent in both academic and social circles, and that they are able both to enter as well as graduate from institutions of higher education. Differing educational outcomes have caused many scholars to investigate the relationship between student achievement and such issues as schooling context, curriculum, and instruction (Cooper, 1999, 2000); educational policies and practices (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Elmore, 1996); parental involvement (Epstein, 1995; Sanders, 1996, 1998; Sanders & Herting, in press); and even intergroup relations (Schofield, 1991; Slavin & Cooper, in press). Many researchers and policymakers have denounced the use of deficit models to explain the negative schooling experiences of African Americans and are engaged in research exploring and isolating the multiplicity of factors that contribute to the academic success of Black students (Sanders, in press). They are choosing to shift the framing of their inquiries from a focus on the academic failure of African American students to an examination of alternative structures, organizations, and practices that lead to greater academic achievement. This line of inquiry flows from the educational resilience construct described by Wang and Gordon (1994) and Winfield (1991) that focuses on success rather than failure. It views educational resilience not as a fixed attribute of some individuals, but rather as the culmination of processes, mechanisms, and conditions that can be replicated across various school and family contexts. Utilizing such an approach helps to identify potential individual, school, and community factors that lead to and foster academic success among African American students (Winfield, 1991). How can African American students be prepared for the new millennium? Researchers and policymakers have volleyed this question about as if successful African American students constitute a rare, and only rarely sighted, species that had not yet been classified. They seem to accept almost intuitively that successful African American students are somehow different from their peers and from their non-African American counterparts. Volumes of research have been produced on the sociological factors that contribute to this presumed difference-factors such as poor and underfunded schools, economically depressed communities, single-parent families-all aimed at explaining the seemingly inevitable failure of large numbers of African American students. Yet, some of these students do succeed. Given the dearth of research on successful African American students, this issue of the jNE offers a refreshing look at an often-neglected population. The educators and researchers whose articles are collected herein contend that the successful African American student is more than a statistical anomaly, and they boldly face the task of understanding and explaining how and why these students succeed. Specifically, they each examine the question, What are the factors that contribute to the academic success of African American students? The nine articles that follow explore a different facet of the schooling experiences of high-achieving African American students, including the cultural, social, and personal. …