Parental Education Choice: Some African American Dilemmas

Abstract

The research literature on families and educational achievement as it addresses African American populations is uniquely characterized by attention to educational failure rather than educational success (Slaughter, Nakagawa, et al., 1990). This orientation originated over 40 years ago with the culture-as-social-class conceptual model, which attempts to explain the behavior of lower income African American children and families in encounters with traditional schools (e.g., Davis, 1948). Even the most progressive of contemporary models addressing families and schooling in relation to this population such as those of Ogbu (1974, 1988), Brice-Heath (1988), and Clark (1983) have been compelled to account for the educational failures of urban African American children. Until recently, however, with the emergence of concerns over the increasing numbers of drug-addicted babies in African American communities, there has been no reason to suspect that significant numbers of African American children are born with inherent intellectual deficits. In fact, existing evidence supports the superiority in sensorimotor intelligence of African American children compared to their non-Black peers (Freedman & DeBoer, 1979). There is also ample scientific evidence that African American children are educable, regardless of the educational philosophy or racial composition of the schools they attend; yet, indicators across the course of children's educational lives reveal that parental choice of schools and parental involvement in the educational process are crucial components of effective schooling for African American children.