Racial climate reform in independent schools: How coping self‐efficacy buffers systemic and proximal racial stress for students of color

Abstract

AbstractThe journey for students of color (SOC) in predominantly White independent schools (PWIS) is paved with significant educational opportunities and challenging racial conflicts. Little is known about how SOC manage the stress of negotiating these struggles and successes in daily relationships with peers and teachers or within the school climates where the policies and practices often reveal a bracketed commitment to diversity. For decades, programs like Prep for Prep have provided academic and social supports to prepare low‐income SOC for matriculation in PWIS. Using Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory, we investigated the racial stress and coping experiences of 593 SOC from the Prep for Prep leadership training program. After measuring development on the racial coping self‐efficacy scale, three factors identified that SOC range in their confidence in reading or noticing racial microaggressions in their schools, recasting stressful racial conflicts from “impossible” to “manageable,” and resolving racial tensions by confronting microaggressions. Results found that a moderated mediation model explains that the relationship of SOC school climate perceptions to school belonging and affect toward school are mediated through racial coping stress. SOC with high racial coping self‐efficacy (RCSE) show less negative influence from that stress on their academic and social experiences compared to those low in RCSE. Implications for supporting SOC by buffering racial stress within PWIS are discussed.