African American High School Seniors Research Articles

“That’s Just Who I am”: African American High School Seniors and Their Mothers Perspectives on Academic Success

Much of the research on African American students tend to focus on the causes and consequences of academic failure. This fixation on negative outcomes continues to perpetuate deficit views of African American student achievement. As a consequence, far less is known about the successful academic outcomes of African American students, generally, and those from single-mother homes, specifically. Social workers can learn a lot about how to support and celebrate African American student achievement by allowing them and their families to give voice to their own lived experiences. Centering and honoring the unique taken-for-granted knowledges of African American students and their families offers social workers a more authentic understanding of students and families, insights that can inform both micro and macro level practice approaches. The purpose of this study was to explore academic success as perceived and experienced by African American high school students and their single mothers. This qualitative study utilized a narrative inquiry approach that used in-depth, semistructured interviews for data collection. The sample of seven African American high school seniors (four girls, three boys) and their single mothers were selected using purposeful sampling methods. Data analysis revealed that students’ inherent drive toward success, a deeply invested mother, and assistance from social-relational supports were key factors to academic success. Implications for social work practice are included.

Small Groups and First-Generation College Goers: An Intervention with African American High School Seniors

ABSTRACT This article describes an eight-session psychoeducational small-group intervention with two groups of African-American youth in an urban, east coast high school setting. Sessions were designed to enhance the self-efficacy and outcomes expectations related to attending college for first-generation college goers in the twelfth grade. The group session topics are described, and outcomes are assessed. Facilitator challenges unique to the group setting are included.

Exploring poetry as method: “Representing faithfully” the narratives of African American high school students and their mothers

In this article, I reflect on my experiences using poetry as a method of data analysis and data representation from a qualitative study of seven African American high school seniors and their single mothers. By applying different techniques of narrative analysis, namely poetic transcription, a deeper understanding of both participants’ and the researcher’s lived experiences were gained. Poetic transcription techniques were used to create found poems for each participant. The poems serve as a means to honor and center the unique experiences of Black students and Black mothers. The article discusses opportunities for poetry in social work research and demonstrates using poetry as a technique for data analysis and data representation.

Using poetry to re-present the narratives of Black students and Black single mothers

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this report is to present partial findings of a qualitative study that explored academic success as perceived and experienced by African American high school seniors and their single mothers using poetic transcription techniques. First, a brief discussion of the literature on Black student achievement and Black single-mother households is provided. Second, an exploration of poetic inquiry is offered to ground the methods. Third, the methods used to create the poems are provided. Fourth, the poems are presented. Finally, implications for using poetic representation with Black students and families are discussed.

Hypocrisy, State Policy, and African American Students With Disabilities: The Guise of Access

We critically examined the odds of earning a college preparatory diploma for African American high school seniors receiving special education services under Texas’s Top 10% Policy (TTPP). Critical policy analysis was used to explore the meritocratic guise of college access for African American youth with disabilities, and through DisCrit, theorized TTPP’s broader effect on the social stratification and creation of policy “winners” and “losers.” Results from multilevel logistic regression models indicate African American students are nearly twice as likely to be identified with disabilities as their peers and are the least likely to earn a college preparatory diploma in Texas.

Understanding African American Students' Experiences in STEM Education: An Ecological Systems Approach

Promoting racial and ethnic minority students' interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers remains a primary workforce goal. To advance this goal, this study examined, through an ecological lens, 18 African American high school seniors' perceptions of their experiences related to their aspirations for STEM careers. All students were enrolled in STEM programs. Using a phenomenological approach to analyze the outcomes of focus group interviews, the authors identified themes at the ontogenic, microsystem, and macrosystem levels. Environmental factors, such as counseling, family expectations, and available resources, played a substantial role in influencing the students' interests, experiences, and perceptions in their pursuits of STEM careers. Implications highlight the importance of counselors in encouraging students of diverse backgrounds to pursue STEM courses and for policy makers to provide resources that support students' STEM goals. Future research is needed to examine the longitudinal effects of high school STEM programs on diverse populations.

Text Message Delivered Peer Network Counseling for Adolescent Smokers: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Although adolescent tobacco use has declined in the last 10years, African American high school seniors' past 30-day use has increased by 12%, and as they age they are more likely to report lifetime use of tobacco. Very few urban youth are enrolled in evidenced-based smoking prevention and cessation programming. Therefore, we tested a text messaging smoking cessation intervention designed to engage urban youth through an automated texting program utilizing motivational interviewing-based peer network counseling. We recruited 200 adolescents (90.5% African American) into a randomized controlled trial that delivered either the experimental intervention of 30 personalized motivational interviewing-based peer network counseling messages, or the attention control intervention, consisting of text messages covering general (non-smoking related) health habits. All adolescents were provided smart phones for the study and were assessed at baseline, and at 1, 3, and 6months post intervention. Utilizing repeated measures general linear models we examined the effects of the intervention while controlling for race, gender, age, presence of a smoker in the home, and mental health counseling. At 6months, participants in the experimental condition significantly decreased the number of days they smoked cigarettes and the number of cigarettes they smoked per day; they significantly increased their intentions not to smoke in the future; and significantly increased peer social support among girls. For boys, participants in the experimental condition significantly reduced the number of close friends in their networks who smoke daily compared to those in the control condition. Effect sizes ranged from small to large. These results provide encouraging evidence of the efficacy of text messaging interventions to reduce smoking among adolescents and our intervention holds promise as a large-scale public health preventive intervention platform.

Effects of Locus Control on African American High School Seniors' Educational Aspirations: Implications for Preservice and Inservice High School Teachers and Counselors

The major purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of locus of control on African American high school seniors' educational aspirations. Controlling for family, student, and school characteristics, the results of the study suggest that African American high school seniors who reported higher levels of locus of control were more likely to have higher educational aspirations than African American high school seniors who reported lower levels of locus of control. Implications for preservice and inservice high school teachers and counselors are discussed.

“Hey, Those Shoes Are Out of Uniform”: African American Girls in an Elite High School and the Importance of Habitus

We examine how race and class influenced the lives of six African American high school seniors who attended a predominantly white, elite, independent secondary school. Race and class contributed to an organizational habitus of the school characterized by white and wealthy privilege. Interaction of that dominant habitus with the dissimilar individual habitus of the students resulted in a form of symbolic violence—symbolic violence the black students knowingly endured in exchange for the social mobility afforded by attending the elite school.

The Effects of Segregation on African American High School Seniors' Academic Achievement

This study examines the relationship between segregated education and school outcomes for African American adolescents in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, school district (CMS), regarded as a model of successful desegregated public schooling. Using 1997 survey data, it investigates the effects of segregated elementary education and racially identifiable tracked secondary courses on the academic achievement of 640 African American high school seniors. Findings indicate that many CMS schools remain segregated at the building level; at the secondary level, all core academic classes were tracked and racially identifiable, with Black students disproportionately found in lower tracks. Both forms of segregated schooling had negative effects on academic outcomes. Importantly, desegregated learning environments benefited the academic performance of Black students who experienced them. A key tenet of the American Dream is that all citizens are entitled to equality of educational opportunity. Since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, the desegregation of public schooling has remained an important component of federal and state education policies designed to expand educational opportunities for racial/ethnic minority youth. The educational rationale for school desegregation rests largely upon claims that it improves the access of minority students to the higher quality education generally available to White Americans and therefore improves both minority students' educational outcomes and life chances. Evidence clearly demonstrates that desegregation improves the long-term life chances of minority students. At the same time, the evidence in support of the claim that desegregation improves short-term educational outcomes has been equivocal. This article investigates possible reasons for the equivocal findings regarding the short-term outcomes of desegregation for African American high school students in a district widely considered to be one of the nation's most successfully desegregated school systems. Although the implementation of desegregation policies has been uneven and unstable across the nation's 16,000 school districts during the past 40 years, one stable and virtually universal feature of U.S. public schools is their organization of learning and instruction by academic tracks in secondary schools and ability groups in the early grades. In theory, tracking is designed to enhance teaching and learning through targeting instruction and course content to the student's ability and prior knowledge. However, there is little consistent evidence that, as implemented, tracking is the best form of classroom organization for maximizing opportunities to learn for most students. To the contrary, ample evidence suggests that tracking hinders mid- and low-ability students' opportunities to learn. Moreover, track placements are strongly correlated with students` race/ethnicity and social class, and within desegregated schools tracking often resegregates students by these attributes. Tracking, then, has the potential to undermine the potential short-term benefits of school-level desegregation for low-income and minority students. The complicated relationships among equality of educational opportunity, desegregation, and tracking lie at the heart of this study of the effects of school desegregation and tracking on the school outcomes of African American high school seniors in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Schools (CMS). The CMS district is an important site for investigating these questions because it has been under a court mandate to desegregate since the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District. Many observers consider CMS to be one of the nation's most successfully desegregated public school systems (Douglas, 1995). Therefore, an empirical examination of the relationship of school segregation and/or desegregation to the academic achievement of Blacks is an especially important endeavor with possible implications far beyond the district's own boundaries. …

Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.