Black High School Research Articles

Race-based programs and good schooling

ou can' t judge a book by its cover -or a report by its authors. In 1997 the College Board organized a "National Task Force on Minority High Achievement" w h o s e m e m b e r s inc luded Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and EdmundW. Gordon, clliefly responsible for the dreadful New York State 1991 curriculum guide, One Nation, Many Peoples: A Declaration of Cultural Interdependence, which provoked a ringing dissent from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.The group contained no dissenting voices from civil rights orthodoxy, and the College Board, itself, tends to stick to very safe ground. And yet Reaching the Top, the report released this past October, is astonishingly good. A work of perfection? Of course not. But it is unexpectedly honest and courageous. Education may be the issue that finally forces the old guard to acknowledge some unwelcome data and embrace traditionally uncomfortable thoughts. Reaching the Top opens with a hitherto largely hush-hush point: by every measure non-Asian minority students--low-income and high-income--are doing very badly in school, whe ther one looks at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, SAT scores, grades, or class rank, the picture remains the same.As the report states, "relatively small percentages of Black, Hispanic, and NativeAmerican high school seniors.., have had scores typical of students who are generally well prepared for collegeTAnd in case the reader doubts the timdamental point, the authors provide ample data to indicate the appalling width of the racial gap in academic performance. Do not focus on the proportion of students who have finished high school or attend college, the report argues. Look at what they know not the number of years spent in school. In itself, that is an elementary but important distinction that too many writers on racial equality fail to make. Skills are the important question, and eliminating the racial gap in levels of academic achievement is the nation's "most important educational challenge," the Task Force states. Eliminating that gap is important for two reasons. Standardized tests and class rank in both high school and college are significantly related to earnings. Of course other factors come into play: "motivation, perseverance, creativity, an ability to work well with others, connections, plain old luck .... "White raci s m a m a z i n g l y i s not on the list. Evidently, as many data indicate, white"privilege" and racial hostility play no significant role in determining wage differentials between racial and ethnic groups. Average earnings between blacks and Asians, for example, will be significantly different as long as the typicalAsian student scores higher on the SATs. In addition, a concerted effort to close the gap in academic achievement is a moral obligation, theTask Force argues."When a great many individuals--and entire groups of peop le -do not have a genuine chance to develop their academic talents fully, our society is much poorer for their lack of educational opportunities," the report states. :'This is fundamentally unjust .... "If the description were accurate, the conclusion would be inescapable. But the argument that"entire groups" are deprived of educational opportunity is ludicrously overblown.As theTask Force admits, many black and Hispanic students go to resource-abundant suburban and other schools, and yet the racial gap in academic achievement is actually widest among middle-class students from educated families.The scores of black and white youngsters whose parents lack even a high-school degree are more alike. Equally important, even in those schools that are educationally wanting, many stu-

Justice Harlan's “Great Betrayal”? A Reconsideration of Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education

In 1899 the Supreme Court of the United States decided the case of Joseph W. Cumming, James S. Harper, and John C. Ladeveze v. The County Board of Education of Richmond County, State of Georgia. The litigation arose after the all-white Richmond County School Board closed Ware High School, a segregated, tax-supported, all-black high school in the City of Augusta, GA. The plaintiffs did not seek integration of the Augusta Public Schools. They did not lodge a complaint regarding the separation by race of children in the primary grades. They did not attempt to compel the board to provide a high school for blacks. Their demand was for injunctive relief that would force the closing of the white high school through the withholding of tax support until the black high school was reopened. This approach succeeded in the trial court but failed in the Georgia Supreme Court. In an opinion written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, the Justice who had just three years before asserted that the constitution was color-blind, the Supreme Court of the United States sustained the ruling of the Georgia Supreme Court denying the request for injunctive relief. Ware High School was not reopened.

Justice Harlan’s “Great Betrayal”? A Reconsideration of Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education

Justice Harlan’s “Great Betrayal”? A Reconsideration of Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education C. ELLEN CONNALLY In 1899 the Supreme Court of the United States decided the case of Joseph W. Cumming, James S. Harper, and John C. Ladeveze v. The County Board of Education of Richmond County, State of Georgia.1 The litigation arose after the all-white Richmond County School Board closed Ware High School, a segregated, tax-supported, all-black high school in the City ofAugusta, GA. The plaintiffs did not seek integration ofthe Augusta Public Schools. They did not lodge a complaint regarding the separation by race of children in the primary grades. They did not attempt to compel the board to provide a high school for blacks. Their demand was for injunctive relief that would force the closing of the white high school through the withholding of tax support until the black high school was reopened. This approach succeeded in the trial court but failed in the Georgia Supreme Court.2 In an opinion written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, the Justice who had just three years before asserted that the constitution was color­ blind,3 the Supreme Court of the United States sustained the ruling of the Georgia Supreme Court denying the request for injunctive relief. Ware High School was not reopened. Historians andlegal scholars cite Cumming v. Richmond County BoardofEducation as the first school desegregation case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.4 It was also the decision that first applied the doctrine of separate-but-equal to public schools,5 and held that separate schools do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.6 Cumming also established the proposition that tax-supported state schools are within the purview of the states and must not be disturbed by the federal government ex­ cept in cases in which federal rights are in­ volved.7 With such significant findings attrib­ uted to the case, it is interesting to note that Cumming has only been cited by the Supreme Court six times since 1899.8 In 1980, historian J. Morgan Kousser used Cumming v. Richmond County Board as the framework for his study of the black elite in HARLAN’S “GREAT BETRAYAL”? 73 A bird's-eye view of Augusta, Georgia, in 1872 shows the building that housed Ware High School (indicated by arrow), the first public high school for African Americans in Georgia and one of only five such schools in the South in that era. This is the only known image of the school building, which was demolished after it was closed in 1897 by the Richmond County School Board. late nineteenth-century Augusta.9 Kousser’s stands as the only in-depth study of the case.10 To the extent that Kousser related the social history of Augusta’s black elite, he was very successful. However, as the 100th anniversary of the Cumming decision approaches, Kous­ ser’s misinterpretation ofsome legal aspects of Cumming and its misinterpretation by some courts makes timely a reconsideration of the case and its legacy. A careful analysis of the ruling in Cum­ ming demonstrates that the decision did not deal directly with the issue of racial segrega­ tion in public schools. Because the existence of a black high school was at issue, lower federal courts and state courts fashioned a separatebut -equal formula for schools out of Plessy v. Ferguson'1 and Cumming, later including Berea College v. Com. OfKentucky.12 In refer­ ring to Cumming, historian Loren Miller says that “[i]n time the fiction grew that the Su­ preme Court had considered and determined th[e] issue with finality, whereas the truth was that it had only skirted around the question and had spoken only by evasions and indirec­ tions.”13 Cumming was misread and misinter­ preted in order to justify society’s desire to maintain segregated schools, a tradition thathas a long and tragic legacy in American society. The roots of Cumming v. Board ofEduca­ tion lay in the black community of Augusta at the conclusion of the Civil War. The desire of the freedmen there to gain an education, cou­ pled with the desire ofthe...

Together in Electric Dreams: Films Revisiting 1980s Youth

Nostalgic depictions of youth are commonplace in Hollywood cinema, but films that retrospectively examine growing up in the 1980s are a recent phenomenon. This focus on 1980s suburban youth is evident in films such as Grosse Pointe Black (George Armitage, 1997), and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (David Mirkin, 1997), and the Wedding Singer (Frank Coraci, 1998). In Contrast to earlier films and television series that reflect the preoccupations of the baby boomer generation, these films present irreverent and at times cynical views of past youth. Contemporary films revisiting 1980s youth also invest in prolonging beyond teenage years behavior that is traditionally associated with adolescence.

“Playing between Classes”: America's Troubles with Class, Race, and Gender in a Black High School and Community

A cultural and relational framework of social class is used to present an ethnographic portrait of class as it unfolds with race and gender in a black high school and community. Traditionally viewed as troubling, these students (and staff) play between classes in ways that impact structural analyses of class and their implications for public policy.

Poverty, Race, and Us Metropolitan Social and Economic Structure

This research evaluates the link between social and economic structural features of US urban areas and the poverty rates of black and white residents in 1990. Using a sample of 112 metropolitan areas (with poverty rates ranging from 9.4% to 45.4% for blacks, and 3.5% to 16.0% for whites) and multiple regression analysis, we find that metropolitan location in the Northeast lowers poverty rates of blacks and whites compared to metropolitan areas in other regions. Moreover, population growth, higher percent black, increased black high school graduation rates, the presence of immigrants, a high percentage of workers employed in manufacturing and relatively few in retailing, low black unemployment, and an older black population are related to lower black poverty rates. For whites, lower poverty rates are related to high racial residential segregation, increased white high school graduation rates, low white unemployment, a large black population, and a high percentage of workers employed in manufacturing and fewer employed in retail sales and professional services.

Prophet or Example: A Review of The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan

Prophet or Example: A Review of The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan TONY A. FREYER In Americans’ search for a useable past John Marshall Harlan occupies a unique place. No other member ofthe Supreme Court authored so many dissents that were precursors ofdoctrines that decades later became part of the nation’s ruling constitutional law. Thus Harlan holds a historic place because he appears to be a true constitutional prophet. This identification began with the Brown decision of 1954. Appointed to the Court by Republican Rutherford B. Hays in 1877, just as the party ended Reconstruction and active support ofthe freedman’s civil rights in the South, Justice Harlan went on to author dissenting opinions that vigorously affirmed a “color-blind” Constitution. His lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), rejecting the Court’s embrace ofthe doctrine that separate but equal public facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, formally declared the “color-blind” principle. Much ofHarlan’s opinion tracked closely the logic the Court followed to reverse Plessy in Brown. From then on, lawyers, judges, and law school students routinely viewed Harlan in prophetic terms. Many scholars have helped to explain Harlan’s seemingly prophetic vision, but Linda Przybyszewski offers the most original and per­ suasive understanding yet. Harlan maintained the “color-blind” idea in most cases concerning civil rights, but not all. In the CivilRights Cases of 1883, the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. On the basis ofthe Equal Protection Clause, Con­ gress had enacted the law to forbid racial dis­ crimination in “public accommodations” such as hotels, theaters, and restaurants. Only Harlan dissented, asserting vigorously that his col­ leagues’ repudiation ofcongressional purpose perverted the true meaning ofthe Equal Protec­ tion Clause. Eighty one years later, Title II of 326 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the Court upheld the same year, endorsed the spirit of Harlan’s dissent. Here again, Harlan seemed to be ahead ofhis time. Yet shortly before his dissent in the Civil Rights Cases, Harlanjoined a unanimous Court in upholding the conviction of black Alabam­ ian Tony Pace under a law that punished blacks more severely than whites for interracial co­ habitation and adultery. Concurring without opinion, Harlan did not attempt to explain why he sanctioned the double standard. Three years after the Plessy dissent expressly stated the “color-blind” principle, moreover, Harlan reached his most puzzling result in a race case. The opinion for the Court in Cumming v. Rich­ mond County School Board (1899) held that a local Georgia public school board’s closing of a black high school, while it kept open the school forwhites, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Harlan noted that the board’s policy did not deny blacks educational opportunities because they could attend a private high school that indi­ rectly received some tax support. Even so, the Court’s most adamant opponent of “separate but equal” had sanctioned that very doctrine in the field ofpublic education. During the years that followed, Harlan nonetheless affirmed the spirit ofthe earlierdis­ sents. When the Court upheld a Kentucky law that declared illegal the policy ofracial equality private Berea College had maintained for over forty years, Harlan passionately dissented. Also, not long before his death in 1911, Harlan joined a Court majority that declared illegal the practice ofdebt peonage in Alabama and other southern states. Initially, when the Court let stand the states’ brutal system because it pur­ portedly involved labor contracts, Harlan dis­ sented. As later litigation revealed the evils of the system and the Court changed its position accordingly, Harlan was vindicated. Outside the field of race, Harlan’s opin­ ions engendered similar puzzles. Throughout his judicial career Harlan staunchly defended the principle ofequal citizenship for ethnic and racial minorities under the Constitution. In Elk v. Wilkins (1884) the Court denied voting rights to a Native American who paid taxes and was otherwise assimilated into white society. Harlan dissented on the grounds that the Constitu­ tion established a national citizenship that in­ cluded all bonafide residents ofAmerican states and territories. Harlan’s most publicized affirmation of a more liberal...

Black High School Students' Participation in School-Sponsored Sports Activities: Effects on School Engagement and Achievement

Myths abound about the role of sports in schooling, particularly for Black student athletes. The literature affords little guidance on the specific relationship between participation in schoolsponsored sports and various outcomes for Black adolescents. Using a nationally representative sample, this study examines: (a) the effects of sports participation on various school engagement and student self evaluative variables, controlling for important background characteristics such as SES and gender; (b) the potential differential effects of sports participation for Black students; and (c) the degree to which sports participation affects Black students' academic achievement. Sports participation was found to improve the school engagement and academic self confidence of alI student athletes. Moreover, a positive intervening relationship was found between sports participation and academic achievement. INTRODUCTION As a key part of the social and cultural fabric of human life, sports permeate social realities at many levels, both globally and individually (Snyder & Spreitzer,1989). Few institutions in U.S. society are unaffected by sports (Edwards, 1973). Values reflected in athletic competition-striving for excellence, fair play, sportsmanship, hard work, and commitment to a goal-are inextricably linked to our nation's mainstream cultural values. Although much has been writter_ about the role of sports in society in a broad sense (Blanchard,1995; Lapchick,1986; Rees & Miracle,1986), the social function of professional and collegiate sports has often been the primary focus of this inquiry. The research literature affords little guidance on the specific relationship between participation in high school athletics and school-related outcomes for adolescents. Even less is known about specific benefits for African American students. To complicate matters, it is not uncommon for research on high school athletics to be combined with examination of other extracurricular activities in attempts to investigate their effects upon schooling (Crain,1981; Holland & Andre,1987; Otto,1982). The assumption that most extracurricular activities affect students similarly lacks empirical evidence. Although past research on sports and schooling has found small, positive effects for participation in athletics on various student outcome measures such as grade point averages, methodological problems have marred the results of many of these studies (Trent & Braddock, 1992). Much of the recent scholarly attention paid to the topic of sports and schooling has been theoretical and philosophical in its focus (Arnold,1997; Sadovskii & Sadovskii,1993). These studies have attempted to portray sports as valued human practices that have many analogues in other areas of social life. Further, they often examine the heuristic and moral qualities of sport, and focus on the degree to which sports reaffirm and break down social norms. Arnold contends, for example, that, like most social conventions, sport is valueneutral-that is, it can be viewed as either good or bad. On the one hand, sports teach perseverance and encourage respect for rules, fair play and teamwork. Indeed, Sadovskii and Sadovskii, in their study of the connections between sports and mathematics, assert that athletics can have a beneficial effect on students' intellectual growth, states of mind, and will power. However, these authors contend that sports can also breed rugged individualism, vanity, intense rivalries, intolerance, and a win-at-all-costs attitude. Purpose of the Study In light of the dearth of empirical research exploring the effects of participation in high school sports upon educational outcome measures for adolescents, the present study sets out to address three aspects of this topic. The first stage of the analysis explores the effects of participation in high school sports on various school engagement and student self-evaluative factors while holding constant important background characteristics such as socioeconomic status (SES) and gender. …

High School Seniors' Perceptions of a Teaching Career

What do you want to be when you grow up? All too often Teacher! is not the response from minority high school students about to graduate. The increasing minority representation in schools prompts the need to encourage talented minority students to consider teaching as a career. Districts face a changing demography while education loses potential minority teachers to business and other fields. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) warned in 1990 that if a national intervention policy were not established to recruit and retain minority teachers, the percentage of minority teachers would continue to decline. The nation may face a situation in which minority educators are only 5% of the teaching force and minority students are over 33% of the student enrollment by 2000 (Hawley, 1989). Hawley wrote that it is as important for White children to see minority teachers in roles of authority and power as it is for minority children. The Study In Washoe County School District, Nevada, minority teachers make up approximately 5% of the teacher force in the district, whereas the student population is about 22% minority and growing steadily. The district recognizes the need to focus recruitment energies on local residents and, more precisely, on high school students. All 19 new minority teachers hired in Nevada in 1991-1992 were Nevada residents at the time of their application. We conducted this study to better understand high school seniors' perceptions of teaching as a career and determine if differences exist in student perceptions based on ethnicity and gender. In a fall 1994 survey of all high school senior students enrolled in regular and advanced placement American Government classes in nine comprehensive high schools of Washoe County, Nevada, we posed questions about what it would take for minority students to reconsider teaching. We based the data analyses on 1,537 usable surveys returned, or 91.7% of the total population. Background Since the early 1980s, a number of researchers have investigated perceptions of high school students about a teaching career. Because the nation's largest minority population currently is Black and there has been a sharp decrease in the percentage of Black teachers during the past 20 years, much research has focused on Black high school students (Jordan, 1988; Page & Page, 1984; Page, Page, & Shelton, 1982). More recently, with the influx of large numbers of Hispanic students into the public schools, researchers have examined perceptions of Hispanic high school students about a teaching career (Mack & Jackson, 1993). Roberson, Keith, and Page (1983) examined data from 58,270 subjects in a national longitudinal study of 1980 high school sophomores and seniors and found that students aspiring to teach are less concerned with financial rewards than are those who choose other professions. In 1982, a survey of 1,478 Southeastern United States high school seniors determined that although most students viewed teaching as a good profession to enter, especially for women, 82.9% of the students perceived that salaries were a discouraging factor in selecting a teaching career; they also saw discipline problems and working conditions in a similar light (Page & Page, 1984). Page and Page reported that female and Black students perceived many factors in teaching in a more positive manner when they made comparisons on the basis of gender and race. Mangieri and Kemper (1984) surveyed 4,349 academic juniors and seniors in six states. Of that number, 1,531 (35%) responded that they were either very interested or somewhat interested in teaching as a career. Approximately 55% more females than mates indicated an interest in a career in teaching. Females' reasons for choosing teaching varied as a function of gender in terms of job security, desire to work with children, and presence of a relative or a friend also a teacher. …

ADOLESCENT EDUCATIONAL EXPECTATIONS

Educational expectations are not perfect forecasts of how much education students will acquire. Nonetheless, we should not treat educational expectations as affective fantasies or status-based value orientations. Educational expectations are educational intentions, generated from rational calculations of the costs and benefits of educational training but subject to constant revision in response to new information. This conclusion is supported by an analysis of the association between family-background-adjusted educational expectations of high-school seniors and earnings returns on educational investments of labor market participants between the ages of 26 and 35 years. After an adjustment for family background differences, White high school seniors had lower educational expectations than Black high school seniors in the late 1970s, but increased their expectations relatively more than Black students in the 1980s. Earnings returns on education follow similar patterns across race and sex groups. If educational expectations are overly optimistic, but still based on reasonable cost-benefit calculations, then they can be considered rational fantasies. Further research is needed to determine whether this last possibility is supported by empirical evidence.

In pursuit of multilingualism in South Africa

Although multilingualism is a fact of everyday-life in Africa and attempts have been made on an official level to establish functional multilingualism in South Africa, the tendency towards mono-lingualism remains evident. This article aims at explicating the challenges emanating from the new language policy for black high school teenagers in the North West Province. It argues that the way in which speech communities responded to multilingualism in the past may still influence their current attitude towards and perception of multilingualism. A language survey conducted among black teenagers shows that the teenagers perceive indigenous languages as vehicles for cultural inheritance, and English as a language of higher functional value. The conclusion arrived at is that the optimization of the multilingual policy depends on the existence of a real demand for multilingual skills in South African society.

Black high school females' images of the scientist: Expression of culture

In this investigation of the scientist's images, black females were the sole participants. The data were obtained via semistructured interviews and were interpreted from a framework that emerged from the analysis of the data. Tesch's organizing system method was used to analyze the data, responses to the questions, “What do the teenaged, academically competent black females believe about the scientist?” and “What attribute (e.g., values, lifestyles) do they ascribe to the scientist?” From the analysis, two cultural orientations—the dominant culture and the African-American culture that exists in the United States—became evident. It was found that descriptions of the scientist differed with the ethnicity ascribed to him or her. These differences corresponded to the tenets of the dominant culture and the African-American culture in the United States. When these images of the scientist are viewed as windows to self-concepts, the results of the study have implications for science instruction, a consistent way through which African-American females are exposed to the sciences. J Res Sci Teach 34: 745–768, 1997.

Black high school females' images of the scientist: Expression of culture

In this investigation of the scientist's images, black females were the sole participants. The data were obtained via semistructured interviews and were interpreted from a framework that emerged from the analysis of the data. Tesch's organizing system method was used to analyze the data, responses to the questions, “What do the teenaged, academically competent black females believe about the scientist?” and “What attribute (e.g., values, lifestyles) do they ascribe to the scientist?” From the analysis, two cultural orientations—the dominant culture and the African-American culture that exists in the United States—became evident. It was found that descriptions of the scientist differed with the ethnicity ascribed to him or her. These differences corresponded to the tenets of the dominant culture and the African-American culture in the United States. When these images of the scientist are viewed as windows to self-concepts, the results of the study have implications for science instruction, a consistent way through which African-American females are exposed to the sciences. J Res Sci Teach 34: 745–768, 1997.

Black south African adolescents' attitudes about studying.

Black South African high school students (N = 523) were questioned about their attitudes and motivation towards studying. Analysis indicated that the students expressed negative attitudes toward studying and were concerned about failing. 34% indicated a lack of interest in most school subject matter.

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.

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.

National Merit Scholarships: A Major Dash of Jim Crow

THE NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLARSHIP is the nation's highest mark of academic excellence for young high school students. To be a Merit Schol? ar is to open the doors of some of the nation's most prestigious colleges. Yet for black high school stu? dents the Merit Scholarship has been quite elusive. Don Davis, associate director of financial services at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, said of AfricanAmerican Merit Scholars: I know for a fact that if we have

Educational Hopes of Black and White High School Seniors in Virginia

Abstract This study presents exploratory research comparing college aspirations and expectations of Black and White high school seniors in Virginia who desire to attend college, (N = 40,848; Whites n = 33,006, or 81% of total population; Blacks, n = 7,842, or 19%). Research questions investigate how expectations and aspirations are influenced by (a) high school counseling, (b) perceived parental agreement with educational goals, and (c) type of curriculum—college preparatory or other. Results indicate that Black students use high school counseling to develop educational goals significantly more than Whites do (p < .05). The races differed significantly in the high school program in which they were enrolled: Over 60% of White students and 40% of Black students were enrolled in a college preparatory curriculum. Yet this did not produce a significant difference between the races in their educational expectations even when they were enrolled in noncollege preparatory programs. Policy implications of these fin...