Black High School Students Research Articles

Convergence and Divergence in the Process of Academic Development for Black, White, and Hispanic High School Students

This article synthesizes theoretical perspectives from social opportunity, critical pedagogy, and interactive literacy to interpret data on schooling outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and White students. The analysis draws from the High School and Beyond database to operationalize two dependent variables representing current academic performance and long-term educational commitment. These variables are studied in relation to socioeconomic status, home environment, gender, academic opportunity structure, students' aspirations, locus of control, community orientation, and basic cognitive skills. What emerges are significant patterns of divergence as well as convergence in the process of academic development. Different factors vary in importance with the sociocultural background of the learners. Attention is called to variables whose effects extend across outcomes and over time. The discussion explores the implications for educational theory and practice.

Occupational aspirations of black South African adolescents.

The present study provides a description of the occupational aspirations of 216 black high school students in a special program by the amount of training required (status) and Holland's 1973 typology as well as by gender, age, socioeconomic status, knowledge of self, and occupational knowledge. Analysis indicates that most adolescents aspire to Social and Investigative occupations, and occupations with a high status. Most of this select sample displayed low self- and occupational knowledge. Aspirations appear unrealistic in terms of trends within the labor market, but might be more realistic with effective and relevant guidance programs in schools.

Entrepreneurship Education and Lower Socioeconomic Black Youth: An Empirical Investigation

This study tested the effects of an entrepreneurship education intervention, the New Youth Entrepreneur curriculum, on lower socioeconomic black high-school students' knowledge of basic and advanced concepts in entrepreneurship. Ninety-five high school sophomores (over 85% black) from a lower socioeconomic neighborhood made up the sample for the experimental design: 51 in the treatment group and 44 in the control group. The two instruments used measured participants' knowledge of basic entrepreneurship concepts and higher cognitive levels of entrepreneurship learning, including comprehension, application, and analysis. The treatment group experienced the New Youth Entrepreneur (NYE) curriculum for one period a day for a semester, while the control group was exposed to basic entrepreneurship concepts at an awareness level as part of a general business education course. It was predicted and found that the treatment group significantly outperformed the control group on all dimensions of entrepreneurship tested. The study results confirm that appropriate curricular innovation can significantly influence the acquisition of entrepreneurship concepts and skills by lower socioeconomic black students. They also confirm that these same students can even be energized to the point of moving from opportunity recognition to initial business implementation.

Space, Place and the Problematic of Race: Black Adolescent Discourse as Mediated Action

This article examines Black adolescence and schooling within the conceptual framework of mediated action theory. It analyzes the discourses of six Black high school students that connect the concepts of space, relating to the physical body, and place, defining the arrangement of public institutions, to relations of domination and subjugation, or the political construction of race. The article highlights the resources that mediate Black adolescent development, placing emphasis on those that underlie Black adolescent resistance to supremacy. The article concludes by exploring implications for developing pedagogy that is considerate of youth members of subjugated cultures in United States society. INTRODUCTION Scholarly and popular conventions view race affirmation among Black adolescents and their academic achievement in public schools as conflicting, if not mutually exclusive, phenomena. On the one hand, the literature in the social and behavioral sciences is abundant with studies that link academic achievement among Black students to acting White (Fordham, 1988; Ogbu, 1992). On the hand, the general public attitude in the United States in recent years has ranged from denial of to hostility toward the issue of race, especially as it relates to schooling. Nowhere is this more blatant than in California, the flashpoint of anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action legislation. In that state, social and political dynamics that condemn working and unemployed low-income families to schools with inadequate services and that privilege middle- and high-income families with disproportionately greater resources underlie schooling inequalities. Furthermore, the consistent refusal of predominantly electorates to pass tax levies and bond issues to support schools within their cities where youth whom Delpit (1995) has dubbed other people's children attend maintains these unequal power relations. The parallels between public opinion and scholarship on race and schooling are not merely coincidental. Both scientific and literary scholarship contribute widely to the construction of public and private reality, and the relationship is neither one-way nor mechanical. Rather, it is an extremely complex one in which legitimate knowledge is held as such partly because it tends to resonate with the deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions of the wider, dominant culture about the character and nature of United States society. These beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions shape and constrain-and indeed, are shaped and constrained by-considerations of what it means to be human and what it is to know something-the same considerations that inform research and scholarship. This article is an effort to press these constraints by approaching race and schooling from the perspectives of Black adolescents who elude conflicts in school that lead to their rejection of or from schools and who eschew racelessness as a strategy for academic achievement. Specifically, it examines the views of Black high school students who connect the concepts of space, relating to the physical body, and place, defining the arrangement of public institutions, to relations of domination and subjugation, or the political construction of race. In words, this article describes and analyzes the capacity of Black adolescents to name and resist racism, both as a conceptual force that circumscribes how they perceive reality and as a material force that constrains their conduct in the social and physical world. The larger project from which the data in this study derive began as an attempt to develop theory to account for the presence of race-affirming, academically achieving Black adolescents that I had met and befriended over a 12-year period both as a public school teacher and as a teacher educator in southern California. These experiences indicated to me that there were gaps in the literature on African American youth that portrayed successful students as downplaying the significance of race and students for whom race is salient as underachievers. …

Did teachers' verbal ability and race matter in the 1960s? Coleman revisited

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including verbal ability and race, influenced “synthetic gain scores” of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined. We find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic grain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers as it did for white teachers. Finally, holding teacher characteristics other than race constant, in some specifications black teachers were associated with higher gain scores for black high school students, but lower gain scores for white elementary and secondary students. Because these findings are for American schools in the mid-1960s, they do not directly apply to our contemporary experience. However, they do raise issues that should be addressed in discussions of hiring policies in American education.

The relationship between body weight concerns and adolescent smoking.

Although a number of factors have been found to predict smoking status among adolescents, few researchers have examined how belief in smoking as a weight-control strategy may be related to smoking in this high-risk population. With the goal of discovering whether belief in smoking as a weight-control strategy predicted smoking status, the present investigation surveyed 659 Black and White high school students. Analyses showed that among regular smokers, 39% of White female and 12% of White male smokers reported using smoking to control their appetite and weight. In contrast, not a single Black male or female reported using smoking to control appetite and weight. Although belief in smoking as a weight-control strategy did not predict regular smokers versus never smokers, the weight-belief item reliably separated experimental smokers from regular smokers. The survey also revealed that White female restrained eaters were the most likely to actually use smoking as a weight-control strategy.

The field trial of a new computer-assisted career guidance system in South Africa

This paper describes the field test of a newly developed computerized career counselling system in South Africa. A randomly selected sample of black high school students (n=80) evaluated the system after completing the program at the University of the Western Cape. Evaluation data were collected through interviews and the Program Evaluation Questionnaire. This questionnaire consisted of a number of subscales measuring 1) user satisfaction with the experience, 2) the extent to which the system helped them acquire self and occupational knowledge and identified potential career alternatives, 3) whether they found interaction with the computer rewarding, and 4) the ease with which the system can be used. The Program Evaluation Questionnaire was found to be a reliable instrument (coefficients ranging from 0.54 to 0.84) and indicated that subjects evaluated the system positively in terms of these subscales. The interviews also indicated that subjects would recommend use of the program to others, that they would prefer the computer rather than the counsellor and that they felt that the program had an impact on their career plans.

The Validity of Career Maturity Attitude Measures Among Black and White High School Students

To investigate the validity of five career maturity attitude measures among Black and White high school students, the Counseling Form of the Career Maturity Inventory Attitude Scale and a measure of appropriateness of career choices were administered to 83 Black and 239 White high school students. White students scored significantly higher than Black students on Involvement, Independence, and Compromise in Career Decision Making, and on Appropriateness of Career Choices. Reliability coefficients are mostly in the .50s and .60s. None of the five Attitude Scale subscales are related to appropriateness of career choices of Black students, and only one subscale, Compromise, is significantly correlated with appropriateness of career choices of White students. The data do not support the theoretical expectation that career maturity attitudes are related to appropriateness of career choices, and raise questions regarding the validity of inferences made about the career maturity of both Black and White students. Some practical and theoretical implications of the study are identified.

Postsecondary Enrollment Patterns After Court-Ordered Desegregation: The Case of South Carolina

South Carolina was among the states that instituted programs under court-ordered desegregation in the 1980s to increase the enrollments of Black students in predominantly White public colleges and universities (PWPCUs) (South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, 1982).1 South Carolina's desegregation plans were aimed specifically at enhancing college choice options for Black students through nondiscriminatory admissions practices, financial assistance, academic preparedness, and publicity outreach as well as active recruitment. Although the admissions practices of South Carolina's PWPCUs have become less discriminatory during the past 10 years, enrollment data indicate low enrollment of Black students in them, which suggests a failure of the state's desegregation programs. However, it is questionable whether enrollment per se is a good indicator of desegregation effects. As reported by other researchers (Mudie, 1978; Ready & Nickens, 1991; Yans, Benenson, & Stimmel, 1990), total enrollment levels and the size of the applicant pool are directly related. Black enrollments at PWPCUs vary in accordance with the size of the pool of college-bound Black high school students, and the distribution of this Black student pool among these institutions is only partially influenced by the individual PWPCUs. Basing conclusions about the progress of desegregation efforts solely upon enrollment data fails to take into account the evolutionary nature of the expected response to such efforts. This response is confounded by habit persistence, which is

Pregnancy resolution and family formation. Understanding gender differences in adolescents' preferences and beliefs.

This article examines gender differences in adolescents' personal views about pregnancy resolution and family formation as they relate to a vignette describing their involvement in an unplanned pregnancy within the context of an ongoing, stable relationship. We use a sample of 577 White and Black high school students from a metropolitan, midwestern city to contrast males' and females' preferences and beliefs about pregnancy resolution and family formation. Although similar percentages of males and females preferred abortion and adoption as strategies for handling their own pregnancy, females were more likely than males to select arrangements that involved living with their children, and they were more likely than males to choose single custodial parenting as their first preference. For those young people choosing some form of parental rearing, observed gender differences in the preference for forming a two-parent household were explained by adolescents' beliefs about their parents' and friends' expectations and their personal concerns about having their educational career adversely affected.

Sources of Information about Drugs and Alcohol for Black and White Suburban High School Students

Abstract An anonymous survey questionnaire was administered in school to over 1,100 White and close to 400 Black middle class, suburban high school students. The questionnaire included questions about the source of information and influence about drugs and alcohol. Results revealed that while both groups rated the mass media as their best source of information, Whites were more likely to report this than Blacks. Blacks reported more frequently than Whites that they would go to their family if they had a question about alcohol or drugs, if they thought they had a problem with and needed help with a drug problem, and would most likely believe their family if they were told that they had a problem with alcohol or drugs. Whites were more likely to use their friends for these sources of information. Results are discussed in terms of the need to empower parents to be more influential at preventing alcohol and drug abuse among adolescents and for the need to research whether middle class Black families employ in...

Adolescents' reference-group choices, self-esteem, and adjustment.

Three hundred thirty Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White high school students reported their reference-group label as mainstream, bicultural, or strongly ethnically identified. Compared with other groups, White students were significantly more likely to be mainstream. Across ethnic groups, students reporting a strong ethnic identification held attitudes that were significantly more separatist, reported more ethnic pride, engaged in less cross-ethnic contact out of school, reported more cross-ethnic conflict, and used English significantly less often than other reference groups. Reference-group label was not associated with significant ethnic differences in self-esteem, social competence, or grade point average. The generational status of minority students is discussed as a potential influence mediating the impact of reference group on adjustment.

Adolescent Males' Pregnancy Resolution Preferences and Family Formation Intentions

This study focuses primarily on adolescent Black males and examines the subcultural interpretation of racial patterns related to pregnancy resolution and family formation issues for young males. Toward this end, this research assesses the extent to which parental education is related to young Black males'preferences, beliefs, and intentions, and attempts to determine whether parental education influences Blacks' views in a similar manner and to the same extent as it does for Whites. Analyses were based on survey data from 298 Black and White male high school students in a metropolitan midwestern city and were in formed by Fishbein and Ajzen's social psychological model. Respondents were asked to provide responses to a vignette in which they were responsible for an unplanned pregnancy within the context of a serious relationship. Results suggest that Blacks have views similar to Whites on average; but, when parental education is controlled, Blacks are relatively homogeneous in their views whereas Whites are not. The findings tentatively suggest, however, that Blacks from family backgrounds represented by low parental education may be more inclined to prefer an arrangement that has them live with their child than would Blacks from better-educated family backgrounds. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

A Comparative Analysis of the Self-concept and Academic Achievement of Black and White High-school Students

This study aimed to determine the relationships between the selfconcept and academic achievement of black and white tenth-grade American students. Data on these variables were collected from 440 tenth-grade students in the Pacific Northwest School district. Self-concept was measured by the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI), and academic achievement by the California Achievement Test (CAT). For black students no significant relationship was found between self-concept and academic achievement, although the relationship reached significance for white students. Growing up black in a predominantly white society and the opposite experience are considered in the light of self-concept and academic achievement.

Learning More about the Vocational “Barriers” of Black Youths

This study examined how young black high school students (26 girls and 39 boys) responded to the Barriers subscale of the My Vocational Situation. If replicated, the findings have implications for counselors.

Racelessness as a Factor in Black Students' School Success: Pragmatic Strategy or Pyrrhic Victory?

Signithia Fordham presents an analysis of the tensions high-achieving Black students feel when they strive for academic success. Students are pulled by their dual relationships to the indigenous Black fictive-kinship system and the individualistic, competitive ideology of American schools. By analyzing ethnographic data on six high-achieving Black high school students, the author finds that the characteristics required for success in society contradict an identification and solidarity with Black culture. Students who feel the conflict between"making it" and group identification develop the particular strategy of racelessness.

Gender and Achievement Status Differences on Learning Factors Among Black High School Students

AbstractRecent investigations have established strong causal relationships between higher achievement outcomes among students and their increased use of specific learning strategies and meta-cognitive processes. Moreover, it has become increasingly evident that even the lowest achieving students can be taught to improve their achievement outcomes through the use of specific learning strategies. Yet, among Black high school students in urban schools and especially among Black high school males, achievement outcomes continue to be disappointingly low. The authors felt that an examination of the use of learning strategies among a sample of these students might provide some useful information. The present study examined differences between high, average, and low achieving Black male and female high school students on measures of learning and study behavior, as well as on motivation and attitude. The results indicated significant differences between high and low achievers and between male and female students o...

Black High School Students' Images of Forestry as a Profession

Relatively few black professionals are employed in the field of forestry. It has been estimated that of the 40,000 to 50,000 professional foresters nationwide, less than 1 percent are black.' Why do blacks generally not pursue forestry careers? Unfortunately, research has not provided much information and much that is available is inconclusive.2 Nonetheless, some hypotheses have been suggested. For many blacks, past exposure to the labor-intensive side of forestry plus a lack of educational opportunities may have created a negative perception of forestry.3 Such a perception, passed from one generation to another, may dissuade blacks from pursuing professional forestry jobs. While acknowledging that blacks were always employed in the end of forestry, Berry4 notes that wanting to escape the lower end of this profession should not be confused with wanting nothing to do with forestry. Berry suggests that blacks

Factors Influencing the Decisions of Academically Talented Black Students to Attend College

Recently, college administrators, social research institutes, politicians, and civic leaders have expressed concern about the decrease in the number of Blacks who apply to college. Prominent among the reasons given for the drop in applications and acceptance of Blacks by colleges are: rapidly expanding tuition costs, a shift in student financial assistance from grants to low-interest loans, an increase in the number of minority households below the poverty level, a deemphasis on affirmative action as a mechanism for ensuring equal employment opportunities, continued differential between Black and white high school students' academic preparation and performance, comparatively lower black college entrance examination scores, and a shift in the national mood concerning the importance and means of promoting social equality.1 According to the authors cited here, these factors serve as powerful determinants of students' decisions to attend or not to attend college. The authors also maintain that these factors have a negative impact on the ability of colleges to correct historical recruitment and admissions inequi-

Effects of Assertiveness Training on the Self‐Esteem of Black High School Students

Effects of assertiveness training on assertive behaviors and self‐esteem were investigated among Black high school students. Results showed a significant difference between scores of males and females on the written assertiveness measure. Scores of the 9 females in the experimental group accounted for all of the change, whereas scores of the 18 males actually dropped somewhat. No significant differences appeared on assertiveness or self‐esteem across conditions, however. Possible reasons for lack of effects of the training are discussed. Continued study is necessary to identify ways for Blacks to meet their needs by moving from passive or aggressive approaches to assertive ones.