Black Public School Research Articles

Public School Administration and Brown v. Board of Education

This article reviews educational initiatives of state and federal government that were designed to remedy the effects of racial segregation on Black public school students in the United States after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decisions. Several policy and legal initiatives are reviewed, including school desegregation, compensatory education, decentralization, school reform and restructuring, school finance litigation, state accountability models, school district takeovers, vouchers, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, and privatization.

The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 150 long enough to have prevented the movement of the two Union corps to Georgia later in the spring. The strengths of this work are many and the weaknesses few. Well written with the virtue of conciseness, it thoroughly discusses the issue at hand without becoming bogged down in minutiae. The author’s analysis is persuasive, and he includes adequate and numerous maps. Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign is a well-researched and well-written study of an often -neglected campaign and should be on the shelves of those interested in the Civil War. DAMON EUBANK Campbellsville University The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. By Mary S. Hoffschwelle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xx, 401 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8130-2957-0. The latest volume in the “New Perspectives on the American South” series from the University Press of Florida, The Rosenwald Schools of the American South tells the remarkable story of interracial public-private cooperation to better public education for African Americans in the South through new school construction. In 1912, Julius Rosenwald, Jewish president of Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Booker T. Washington of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute formed an alliance that transformed public education and the built environment in fifteen states across the South. Riding the progressive era wave of school building, the Rosenwald building program helped construct over five thousand schools. By the time the program ended in 1932, its schools housed a third of the South’s black public school students and teachers, accounted for a fifth of the South’s public schools and just under one third of their property value . They helped dramatically increase school attendance, instructional hours, and literacy among African American southerners. Hoffschwelle, author of Preserving Rosenwald Schools (Washington, D.C., 2003) and Rebuilding the Southern Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900–1930 (Knoxville, 1998), here envisions the Rosenwald building program and schools “as an evolving, multilayered network of people and buildings that produced significant landscapes of identity and social change” (p. 1). Rosenwald Schools explores “the processes by which people create, use, and invest meaning in the material world” (p. 3). Hoffschwelle interprets the program “from the inside out, focused on A P R I L 2 0 0 7 151 the internal development of the building program and looking out from it to the broader arena of black education in the South, to understand its distinctive and enduring power as an agency for change” (p. 2). The Rosenwald program motivated public investment and broader involvement in African American education in the South. In the process , it “created a stage upon which many different people could act” (p. 2). Rosenwald preferred matching grants to, as Hoffschwelle puts it, “philanthropy that relieved local people and governments of their own responsibilities” (p. 82). Of the moneys expended on the Rosenwald schools, 64 percent came from tax revenues, 17 percent from African Americans, 15 percent from Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund, and just over 4 percent from other private white donors. Concerned about a lack of professionalism and efficiency at Tuskegee, Rosenwald moved the program to Nashville in 1920 and placed it under the control of white officials. The progressives now in charge stressed the need for “model” schools. The change resulted in increasingly expensive plans that taxed the ability of the neediest black communities to match Rosenwald grants (p. 83). Thus, impoverished African American communities were doubly taxed to build schools for which their taxes should have provided. That so many embraced “sacrificial giving” confirmed their active and enduring commitment to “education as a cultural value and a social right” (p. 17). Rosenwald’s death in 1932 ended the program , forcing new school advocates to seek federal funding. Hoffschwelle stresses the program’s meaning for African Americans. A Rosenwald school building constituted a “new modern place in a southern African American community,” a symbol of “collective achievement ” expressing “not only the architectural vision of its planners but the community vision of the people who used its spaces” (pp. 245, 259). Communities named most Rosenwald schools...

Barriers to Integration in the Mississippi Delta: Could Charter Schools Be the New Vehicle for Desegregation?

This study explored the barriers to educational integration in the rural Mississippi Delta region. In Delta County,1students have generally been divided between a black public school and an all white private academy. An earlier study (Eckes, 2005) revealed that white parents in Delta County chose not to send their students to the traditional public school because they perceived greater discipline problems, less challenging academics, and fewer extracurricular opportunities (“the barriers”). The black parents, however, were choosing not to send their children to the private academy because it did not, in fact, offer greater educational opportunity. Black parents contended that the three articulated barriers were actually euphemisms for racism. In this current case study, the researcher sought to learn whether a new high‐performing charter school, where the three barriers were not present, would encourage racial integration in Delta County. Specifically, the new public charter school offered parents a third option in addition to the private academy and public school. Through interviews and observations, the current case study explored whether the barriers articulated by white parents in the earlier study were simply rhetoric. The current study found that white parents were still not choosing the charter school, even though no barriers were present.

History through Red Eyes: A Conversation with James Loewen

JAMES Loewen is an author, historian, and professor. Through Lies My Teacher Told Me, he has helped to reconstruct the way history is viewed and taught in public schools all across America. During a recent conversation, he shared his views on how American Indian topics and events are traditionally taught and offered his insights into what we can do to accommodate multiple perspectives in our examination of history. Below, I present his comments and insights as he told them to me. My first teaching assignment was at Tougaloo College, a historically black institution in Tougaloo, Mississippi. In my first year, I taught a course developed by the history department that was titled Freshman Social Science Seminar. In it we introduced students to sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and psychology in the context of African American history. This made sense because 99% of our students were African American. The second semester of the course began with events immediately following the Civil War. I had a new group of students in the second semester, and I didn't want to do all the talking on the first day of class, so I asked them, We're starting with Reconstruction. is that period? followed was an Aha! experience for me. Or it might be better called an Oh no! experience. Sixteen out of 17 students said, was that period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the Southern states. But they were too soon out of slavery, so they screwed up, and white folks had to take control again. Now, there are at least three complete misstatements--lies I would call them--in that sentence, and I was just floored by it. Blacks never took over the government of the Southern states; the Reconstruction governments did not, on the whole, screw up; and didn't resume control at the end of Reconstruction. However, a certain group of whites did take control, using terrorist tactics. It was, in fact, the original Ku Klux Klan. So I thought, What must your teachers have done to you to make you believe that the one time your group was center stage in American history, they screwed up, and had to take control back again? If it were true, that would be fine. But it is not true. these students had learned we might call BS--that would be Bad Sociology--in the black public schools. they had learned was being taught by black teachers in all-black schools. But it was white supremacist history because their teachers were just blindly teaching what was in the textbooks. Seeing the outcome made me aware that history can be a weapon and that it can be used against you, just as it had been against my black students. When I put together a team of students and faculty members at Tougaloo and Millsaps College (a nearby all-white college), we confronted the lies and myths in Mississippi history by writing a new history textbook for the Mississippi history course that was required in public schools. But our book just wasn't racist enough, so the state refused to adopt it. Because Mississippi is a textbook-adoption state, we actually had to sue to get it adopted. The case was Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. After eight years in Mississippi, I moved to the University of Vermont, where I continued to teach first-year students in huge introductory sociology classes. There I learned that distorted history was not a phenomenon peculiar to Mississippi. Although in the early 1970s Mississippi exhibited it in a more exaggerated form--as Mississippi exhibited many national maladies in a more exaggerated form back then--this was a national problem. As I had done in Mississippi, I went to nearby high schools to learn where my students were getting the bizarre ideas they brought to college. Many of these ideas had to do with savage Indians. Lies My Teacher Told Me is based on my intensive reading of 12 high school American history textbooks. …

Toward humanity and justice: the writings of Kenneth B. Clark, scholar of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision

This first collection of black psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark's body of work over a half-century reveals his insight into the fields of social science, education, politics, and the law. He tells the inside story of the groundbreaking studies he made of black public school children-showing they lacked self-esteem because they were treated separately and differently than their white counterparts. His social science papers were the basis for the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision of May 17, 1954, that state-sponsored segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Dr. John Hope Franklin, the nation's most prestigious black historian, provides a Foreword. A number of prominent individuals in academics and politics offer brief commentaries about Dr. Clark, including Nobel Prize-winner Gunnar Myrdal , Dr. Cornel West, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Roger Wilkins, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, and many others. There are also brief quotes about Dr. Clark by Congressmen Charles Rangel and John Lewis, and former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach. In addition, the book contains Dr. Clark's views of his contemporaries, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. This is an essential collection from a key figure often overlooked in studies of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Paradox of the Promised Unfulfilled: Brown v. Board of Education and the Continued Pursuit of Excellence in Education

This article illuminates the educational and social paradox created by the U.S. Supreme Court in striking down the legal doctrine of separate but equal. Based upon its interpretation of the social science evidence of damage imagery, the Court viewed the psychological harms of segregation as problems faced exclusively by African American students and their communities. White communities and students, on the other hand, were considered healthy and unscathed by the affects of racial segregation. With this in mind, this article discusses how the implementation of racial balance remedies by White municipal, civic, and educational leaders resulted in the loss of African American public school teachers and concomitant influences on the communities in which they resided. This article concludes with a discussion of the research surrounding the importance of teachers of color in serving increasingly diversified communities and students of color in America's public schools. What was unanticipated by the US Supreme Court in the two Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka cases was the pervasive and irreversible damage that might be inflicted on poor Black children reared in stable yet ecologically constructed social worlds. (Wilkinson, 1996, p. 28) Blacks have a longstanding tradition of excellence in education; for more than a century, teaching has been one of the most highly respected occupations in the Black community. Had it not been for the diligent efforts of the first, second, and third generations of Black teachers who taught in segregated schools, yet inspired their students, the present generation of Black physicians, lawyers, engineers and other professionals may not have chosen those careers. Indeed the Black community recognizes and values the significant contribution these teachers have made to progress. (Dilworth, 1989, p. 54) Underlying the Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas (Brown I) decision in 1954 was an implicit assumption that the desegregation of public schools would invariably better life opportunities for African American communities, neighborhoods, and schools. The legal mandate in Brown 1 to desegregate, however, differed from communities in the North, Midwest and the South. Yet, while local conditions created different circumstances, each community came to terms with desegregation along similar practices of organized resistance (Balkin, 2001; Martin, 1998; Walker, 1996; Wilson, 1995). Organized resistance to public school desegregation took varied forms. One was to remove White children from public schools. In most states, especially the South, this was accomplished through the establishment of private schools for Whites using public monies. In Northern and Midwestern urban areas, Whites increased their movement to more affluent suburbs further segregating poorly resourced neighborhood schools and their students (Pollard & Ajirotutu, 2000; Wilson & Segall, 2001). Most importantly, resistance to school desegregation resulted in the removal of Black teachers and administrators from predominately Black public schools and their communities. Desegregation also meant that African American teachers and administrators lost significant positions of authority to White teachers and administrators who maintained control over the curriculum as well as the social and cultural milieu of the educational process in America's public schools. Fifty years after the Court's decision in Brown I, students continue to matriculate through elementary, middle, and secondary schools throughout the United States rarely meeting or working with an African American, Latino, Asian or American Indian teacher. According to the Applied Research Center's ERASE (Expose Racism and Advance Educational Excellence) Initiative, this trend has particularly affected urban areas where poverty and racial isolation remain concentrated within inner-city neighborhood schools (Gordon, Piana, & Keleher, 2000). …

Introduction: Cultural Capital and African American Education

This Special Issue of The Journal of African American History examines the role of African Americans in providing financial and other material resources for the support of public and private schools established in black communities in the United States from the antebellum era to the 1960s. Over the last three decades there have been regular reports in books, magazines, and newspaper articles describing the precarious financial conditions for urban public school systems with a majority of African American and other nonwhite student populations. Urban public school systems are dependent upon state legislators and local politicians for their funding, and as these school systems became majority black, there has been a greater unwillingness to make sure that the educational expenditures are equalized for students in urban and suburban, rich and poor school districts. The failure of state and local judges and other officials to mandate the equalization of funding for urban and suburban public school districts has m eant that public school administrators in financially strapped urban school systems, many of whom are African Americans, have eliminated many academic programs, such as art, music, science, and math programs, and most extracurricular activities; have been unable to introduce the latest forms of educational technology into the classrooms, and have been forced to hire large numbers of uncertified and underqualified teachers. This has resulted in extremely high levels of academic failure, as measured by newly mandated standardized tests, and consistently high dropout rates, particularly among African Americans and other children of color in financially depressed urban public school systems. (1) The failure of state and local officials to provide equal or even adequate funding for all-black or predominantly black public schools is not a new development in the history of African American education in the United States. In the period from the end of the Civil War to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 outlawing legal segregation in public education, white legislators in most of the southern states (and many northern states) also refused to utilize public expenditures to insure the equalization of funding for black and white public schooling. In fact, scholar and educator W. E. B. Du Bois, in the famous Atlanta University Studies devoted to The Negro Common School (1901) and The Common School and the Negro American (1911), pointed out that African Americans in most southern states were paying more in public taxation than they were receiving in state and local funding for separate black public schools. As a result of this situation, in the period from 1890 to 1910, southern b lack taxpayers were in effect providing the funds for the public schooling of white children. Southern white school officials consistently refused to supply adequate funding for black public education until they felt threatened by the possibility of court-mandated public school desegregation in the late 1940s and 1950s. (2) As a result of the discriminatory funding practices of white state officials, African American children throughout the country attended inadequately funded public schools from the Reconstruction era to the 1960s. Many times the resources needed for basic instruction, including blackboards, pencils, books, chairs, desks, even land and buildings, had to be supplied by members of the local black communities. In many instances, southern white public school officials were only willing to provide funds for the salary of the black elementary school teachers, who were paid much less than similarly qualified white teachers. Everything else needed for the instruction of black children had to be supplied by African Americans in the local black communities. In 1988 historian James D. Anderson in The Education of Blacks in the South, 1861-1935 pointed out that since the end of the Reconstruction era, black southerners had adapted to a structure of oppressive education by practicing double taxation. …

Wealth Redistribution, Race & Southern Public Schools, 1880-1910

This article measures the wealth redistribution effected by southern public schools and the taxes which supported them. It extends and contributes to the existing literature on this subject in three ways. First, the measurement is based on a larger sample of southern states and over more years than previous efforts. Second, this article establishes that from 1880 to 1910 throughout the South the public schools were a conduit for a consistent and significant flow of resources from whites to blacks. Blacks did not pay enough taxes to fully finance black public schools even at the lower levels dictated by white controlled school boards. Third, the establishment of segregated schools and the disenfranchisement of southern blacks did not eliminate this transfer but only moderately reduced it. The effect of Plessy v. Ferguson and the establishment of segregated schools was not as large as previously thought.

A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth

A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. By Andrew M. Manis. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxxiv, 541. $29.95, ISBN 0-8173-0968-3.) Even his friends, admirers, and close family members often found the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth hard to take. Shuttlesworth was vain, egocentric, and overbearing; he gave little thought to the opinions of other people; and, in the judgment of one colleague, he was wild for publicity ... almost to the point of neurosis (p. 196). Compared to Martin Luther King Jr., his comrade in the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was poorly trained in theology and lacked both intellectual depth and social polish. Yet as Andrew Manis argues in this superb biography, Shuttlesworth's faults were inextricably linked to his strengths, and they made this combative clergyman indispensable to the civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth was pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1956 when the state of Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He stepped into the breach and, with a sense of divinely inspired mission, displayed tenacity, ingenuity, wit, and breathtaking physical courage in the teeth of persecution and threats of violence from police, politicians, and Klansmen. Shuttlesworth founded and led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and was also a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He laid the groundwork for SCLC's 1963 protest campaign that provided the civil rights movement--then languishing and in danger of defeat--with a strategic breakthrough. Despite the fact that this victory was a joint ACMHR-SCLC effort, King reaped most of the glory. Although most of the book deals with the years from 1956 to 1963, when his subject mounted a frontal assault on the evil of segregation in Birmingham (p. 123), Manis's account of Shuttlesworth's early years is crucially important in explaining his rough-hewn strength. He was raised by a strict, caring mother and an abusive stepfather, and he received vital encouragement from black teachers in Alabama's black public schools. Shuttlesworth supported himself and a growing family through laboring jobs while he trained for the ministry at Selma University, a private Baptist institution. When the time came the church provided a springboard for civil rights leadership. His riveting preaching and audacious defiance of notorious racist Eugene Bull Connor, Birmingham's commissioner of public safety, enabled Shuttlesworth to build a strong personal following at a time when state repression made it extremely difficult for black organizations to function. …

Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow

Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow. By Adam Fairclough. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 110. Foreword, preface, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.) This brief study embodies the Lamar Memorial Lectures presented at Mercer University in the spring of 2000 by Adam Fairclough, professor of American History at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. Its title reflects the author's sympathetic view of the dilemmas that faced several generations of black educators in the segregated South between the end of Reconstruction and the triumph of the Civil Rights movement. Beginning with a consideration of black education as representing Liberation or Collaboration, Fairclough points out that during Reconstruction blacks teachers personified the fervent belief among freedmen that education meant liberation. After disfranchisement and Jim Crow legislation robbed these community leaders of political power, they still retained considerable influence. Was that influence put to positive or negative use? In seeking an answer, the best available example was Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, who long represented the respectable public face of colored people for most Americans. During the Civil Rights era many historians, including his biographer, Louis Harlan, sided with Washington's implacable antagonist, W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw Washington's appeasement of whites and public devotion to industrial education as a fatally flawed strategy which further denigrated the victims of racism and segregation. Fairclough sets out to challenge not just this view of Washington but the idea that southern black educators, in both private and public institutions, were frequently, if not inevitably, Uncle Toms, supporting a separate, unequal, and demoralizing system for the sake of the prestige, power, and financial security that system afforded them. In his efforts to refute what he considers this unjust and even calumnious generalization, Fairclough takes up Glenda Gilmore's depiction (in Gender and Jim Crow [1996]) of southern black educators as double agents following a strategy of deep camouflage, (p. 52), i.e., bowing and scraping before the white segregationist officials who held their schools in thrall in order to acquire the means to teach their students the skills that would permit them to live with dignity while striving for equality. Fairclough asserts that every example of apparently craven or selfserving obsequiousness should be subjected to a profit-loss accounting to determine the ultimate loyalty of the black educator involved. Their words, Fairclough says, often differed dramatically from their actions and must be placed in the context of a Jim Crow South where the mere existence of black public schools dangled on the whims of white men like the Birmingham school superintendent who believed that the Negro brain ceased to develop at puberty. …

A Different Kind of Education for Black Children

THE NEW GOSPEL OF industrial education and curricular differentiation dealt a deadly blow to the aspirations of African Americans. A half-century removed from slavery, 90 percent still lived in the South, and rampant racial prejudice had left southern blacks dis? enfranchised, ill educated, and powerless to fight for their rights at the ballot box or in the courts. What they did not need was an education that would fit them to their pre? ordained roles in society and their likely destinations as domestic servants, farmhands, and blacksmiths. But those were the recommendations of a major federal survey pub? lished in 1917, titled Education. Education was a two??^===?-^===? volume report issued by the In 1917, of black U.S. Bureau of Education and mly 58percent a underwritten by the private =====^=^= Phelps-Stokes Fund. The proj? ect was led by Thomas Jesse Jones, who was considered one of the nation's leading experts on the nation's black population. Born in Wales and educated in the United States (he had a doctorate from Teachers College), Jones was a worker who had taught social studies for eight years at the Hampton Institute, an industrial and trade school for African Americans and Indians in Virginia. During the 1910 census, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he was in charge of Negro statistics; he was then hired by the Bureau of Education as a specialist in the education of racial groups. Education, published with the prestige and author? ity of the federal government, treated the education of the black population in the South as a problem to be solved by wise public policy and careful philanthropic investment. It made the case for increasing the funding of public schools for black children, while criticizing black educators and parents who wanted a precollegiate education for them. It advocated modern, progressive solutions for southern black public schools, which meant a practical curriculum allegedly adapted to the needs of pupils and their communities. It treated racial segregation as legitimate and inevitable.

Four Decades of Progress...and Decline: An Assessment of African American Educational Attainment

Antoine M. Garibaldi, Howard University* In this, the 18th annual Charles H. Thompson lecture, Dr. Garibaldi charts African Americans' forward and backward movement in education since the 1954 Brown decision, noting both the obstacles and success factors that have shaped the contemporary Black experience in U.S. schools, colleges, and universities. He provides a sweeping review of K-12 data, examining the relationships between race, poverty, school location, course-taking patterns, and parental expectations on Black students' academic achievement. He also assesses African Americans' standardized achievement and college admissions test performance, college enrollment, and postsecondary and graduate degree attainment, highlighting the significant role of historically Black colleges. Over the last four decades, notable progress has been made in the educational attainment and achievement of African Americans. More African Americans are attending elementary and secondary schools; African Americans are graduating from high school at higher rates; more African American students are attending college, graduate, and professional schools; and there are more African American professionals in leadership roles as a result of expanded educational opportunities. Those positive results are due in large measure to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That celebrated case was argued by Howard University alumnus Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice, and a host of other legal and educational scholars who were determined to reverse the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. The Brown decision not only opened the nation's school doors wide, it also provided the impetus for the elimination of separate-but-equal laws in employment, housing, voting rights, and related civil rights areas. Ironically, however, as we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the integration of de jure segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, most of our nation's public schools are more segregated than they were 40 years ago; and legislative attacks on affirmative action threaten the numerous gains in educational opportunity and civil rights made possible by Brown. Thus, there are fewer reasons to celebrate because of the perplexing signs of missed educational opportunities; declines in educational performance; lower than expected four-year college-going rates; and uneven undergraduate, postgraduate and first-professional degree attainment by gender for African Americans. Today I will describe the status of educational attainment of African Americans four decades after Brown, with an attempt to balance the gains and declines in progress so that prescriptions can be developed to remedy the educational problems that exist in our schools and communities. SCHOOL ENROLLMENT DEMOGRAPHICS As shown in Table I, the total U.S. public school enrollment during the 1993-94 school year was 43.5 million students, and the total private school enrollment was approximately 5 million students. Ninety-four percent (94%) of African American students, or almost 7.2 million young people, were enrolled in the nation's public schools, while the remaining 6%, or close to a half-million students (462,105), attended private schools (Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, 1997). African American students represented 16.5% of all public school enrollments, and they accounted for 9.3% of private schools' student bodies. Though African Americans' 16.5% share may seem small when compared to the 66% of White students enrolled in public schools, it is important to note that approximately 30% of Black public school students are enrolled in schools in large central cities with populations of more than 400,000 people, and more than half of all Black public school students (56.2%) live in the South (Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, 1997). …

Dress-Related Behavioral Problems and Violence in the Public School Setting: Prevention, Intervention, and Policy--A Holistic Approach

Among contemporary schoolchildren, wearing certain items or brands of clothing, particularly those associated with celebrity status or gang membership, is accompanied by serious problems including peer competition and ostracism, theft, assault, and even murder. Increasingly, dress code and uniform policies have been implemented in public schools to reduce and prevent such problems. This article describes the nature of dress-related conflicts for Black public school students and parents across socialization and contextual settings. Casting the issue holistically as a health and safety concern, it examines the implications of policies and practices that have been offered to address these problems. INTRODUCTION Many urban and suburban public school systems in the United States have experienced problems among students that involve dress and appearance. At one end of the spectrum, these problems, which frequently include factors related to students' ethnicity, social class, and neighborhood residence, include peer competition, ostracism, and teasing about dress. They also include poor academic achievement and attendance resulting from dress-related concerns. At the other end, serious threats to students' health and safety include those related to gang-affiliated clothing and clothing theft that may be accompanied by violent assaults and even murder. For example, Pan (1995b) and Frazier and Pan (1995) relate an incident involving a high school honor student who was murdered while waiting for a school bus with other students in front of a suburban Maryland school. The student was an innocent bystander, felled during a robbery in which two masked and armed assailants stole another student's jacket in broad daylight. After firing the fatal shots, one of the two then boarded the almost-full bus and robbed another student of a jacket before fleeing. The garments sought by the assailants: knee-length parkas, popular items among Washington, D.C. area teenagers at the time, that sold for about $300. Robberies of such jackets-those with brand names were especially coveted-and of shearling coats and certain athletic shoes were reported with increasing frequency throughout Washington's suburbs (Pan, 1995b). Most of the early reports of dress-related behavior problems at schools suggest that the phenomenon occurs mainly among low-income youth of certain ethnic minority groups, most notably African Americans and Latinos, who represent large numbers of the youth in urban public schools (Alleyne, LaPoint, & Holloman, 1997). In many of these reports, if the ethnicity of the assailants is not explicitly identified, it is certainly implied (a) by the use of certain distinctive labels and stereotypes; (b) by linking the incidents to events occurring in various minority communities; or (c) by targeting reports of dressrelated violence toward predominantly African American, Latino, and other minority audiences (Alleyne et al., 1997). Increasingly, however, similar problems have been reported in suburban schools populated by larger numbers of White, middle-class youth (Pan, 1995b; Thomas, 1994). Behavioral problems related to dress raise important socialization issues for the nation's public schools. The topic recently received national policy attention in 1996 when President Clinton endorsed the use of uniforms as a means of reducing and preventing dress-related violence and other problems in public schools (Clinton, 1996a, 1996b). The president further directed the U.S. Department of Education (1996) to disseminate written guidelines on introducing uniforms in public schools. Later that year, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (1996) also expressed concern about dress-related problems among American youth, suggesting that some youth seem to care more about the designer-brand clothing they wear on the outside than about the quality of the character they develop on the inside. Before and since the president's directives, many schools have attempted to reduce and prevent such problems through the use of dress codes and uniforms. …

Racial differences in blood pressure among urban adolescents

The purpose of this study was to determine if there are racial differences in the blood pressure patterns among urban adolescents. Blood pressure (BP) was measured according to Task Force guidelines in health-screening and education sessions conducted in urban public and parochial high schools. The prevalence of BP ≥ 95th% (HBP) on initial screening was determined in a population of 3,349 students. Differences in prevalence of HBP among race, sex, and age groups were tested for significance by χ 2 analysis. The overall prevalence of HBP in this urban adolescent population was 8.1%. Significant race differences were present in females (blacks = 6.6% versus non-Hispanics = 2.9%, p < 0.01). Within the black females, HBP occurred more frequently among the girls attending predominantly black public schools (7.7%) compared to an interracial parochial school (2.0%) p < 0.001. This difference could not be explained by weight, height, or the occurrence of obesity. The observed BP differences within black females, by school, may reflect a family-environment effect on cardiovascular risk.

“Raising among themselves”: Black educational advancement and the morrill act of 1890

Debate over the curricula of Black colleges and universities dates back to before the turn of the century and involved such noted Black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. The 1890 Land-Grant Colleges eventually established in 17 southern and border states were created to provide institutions for the teaching of the agricultural and mechanical arts to African-Americans. However, due to their being chronically underfunded and understaffed during the early decades of their existence, they focused mainly on teacher training and to a large extent became state normal schools or teacher colleges for Blacks. I argue that the improvements in public education of southern Blacks at the primary and secondary levels during the 1920s and 1930s induced many graduates of the 1890 institutions to become teachers. At the same time the growing numbers and higher quality of these individuals lead to an increase in the returns to time spent in school and induced increasing numbers of Black parents to send their children to school. During the 1930s expenditures per pupil in Black public schools increased, as did the real wages of Black teachers, while average classroom size fell. At the same time both literacy and school attendance of southern Blacks rose. In no small part these changes were due to 1890 colleges and their students.

In Quest of Role Models: Change in Black Teacher Representation in Urban School Districts, 1968-1986

Black public school teachers occupy important positions within school systems as street-level bureaucrats.' They implement decisions made by administrators and policies passed by the school board, and they possess considerable discretionary power in the administration of school policies and rules. Given historical inequities in educational opportunities afforded Black students, representativeness of school faculties is crucial because Black teachers improve the quality of education provided to Black students. England and Meier, for instance, linked the proportion of Black teachers to equal educational opportunities for Black students.2 Minority educators have been shown to provide role models for young students.3 Other research has granted that the presence of a multiracial staff facilitates the integration process by dispelling myths of racial

Stability and Change in Discrimination Against Black Public Schools: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1931

EVERYWHERE IN THE POSTBELLUM SOUTH THE BLACK PUBLIC schools were separate and inferior, but the rate of discrimination against black students varied significantly from place to place and from decade to decade. Most studies of the chronology of school discrimination have dealt with entire states and have focused on rural areas, where the majority of southerners, black and white, lived. But recent scholarship has called notice to the postbellum southern city as a crucial arena for setting the twentieth-century pattern of southern race relations,' and this article focuses on the chronological pattern of stability and change in school discrimination in one major New South city Birmingham, Alabama from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. It seeks also to explore the array of political, organizational, economic, financial, and ideological factors that shaped

Pitfalls and Promises of Effective Schools Research

In a 1980 study funded by the National Institute of Education (NIE) Carlos A. Brossard, Birney Harrigan and the writer conducted an ethnographical study of three high achieving predominantly black public elementary schools in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.1 The study was an outgrowth of a firm belief in the ability of black children to learn in spite of the exigencies of racism and poverty. Many years of experience in teaching black poor children had proved for us the effects of high expectations and effective routines. Moreover, because values determine the norms, standards, rules, regulations, and routines which evoke behaviors, they help construct cause-belief statements. In spite of arguments to the contrary, most scientists are motivated by certain cause-belief ideas stated as assumptions which determine what phenomena they will study, what hypotheses they will test, and what methodologies they will use. In this sense, every scientist is a victim or benefactor of his/her own values, norms, standards, rules, regulations and laws. The culture, defined as the sum total of artifacts generated by the person's (or group's) struggle for survival, which means the socio-economic-political ability to preserve one's body (mental, physical, and spiritual health), to reproduce that body, and to take care of the progeny, confines the investigator or scientist. Five main categories of cause-belief statements have evolved to

On Becoming a Superintendent: Contest or Sponsored Mobility?

The highest professional, salaried position one may seek in the public school sector is that of superintendent. Traditionally, attainment of this position has depended to an appreciable extent on the help and information an aspirant received from professional contacts-the so-called old boy network. A major aspect of this study was to determine the role of such professional contacts as consultants, mentors, and advisors in the selection and placement of Black public school superintendents. A school board has several issues to consider when it has a superintendency to fill. During the selection process, the board may use the professional advice and services of persons outside the district. This might include the hiring of a consultant and inviting nominations or accepting unsolicited nominations from knowledgeable persons. Of the many steps followed in the selection process, four are relevant to this study: hiring an outside inviting nominations, accepting nominations, and assuring equal employment opportunity. The persons from whom nominations are invited or accepted are referred to interchangeably as advisors, sponsors, or consultants. By definition, an is anyone who counsels or gives recommendations. The term consultant, however, connotes a formal contract with a person for professional advice and services. A by definition, is also an advisor. The term refers to anyone who promotes another person or otherwise acts on his behalf. Sponsors are also referred to as encouragers. An advisor or consultant may act as a sponsor by promoting certain candidates. Persons who are invited to make nominations,

The social origins of black American doctorates in the sciences

Most sociological studies of U.S. scientists tend to disregard black Americans. This paper seeks to provide some necessary demographic data on black U.S. scientists on which future studies may build. A sample of 557 black scientists responded to a questionnaire designed to provide demographic data. The results show that the typical black U.S. scientist is a male who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in a lower middle‐class family with both parents present and usually another sibling or two. After graduating in the top quartile of a predominantly black public high school, he enrolled in a predominantly black college where his academic achievement was above average. When the decision was made to pursue the Ph.D. degree, the preference was a university located in the Midwest. After completing the doctorate the pattern was to return to the South to pursue a career in a predominantly black college.