James Earl Davis

Early Schooling and Academic Achievement of African American Males

African American males challenge schools in many ways.Perhaps the single most important challenge that has garnered recent attention in research reports, policy documents, and public commentary has been the increasing disparity in the educational achievement of African American males relative to their peers.Although other issues, such as the need to develop programs that promote school readiness, improving teacher education, and providing resources to meet increasing academic standards, are important, the implications for achievement differentials are even more far-reaching.The negative consequences of the achievement gap are more acute for African American males who are victimized by chronic, systemic levels of poor performance and behavior problems in school.In short, the potential loss of resources—intellectual, cultural, and economic—resulting from lower achievement reduces the capacity of African American males to be productive, integral, and contributing members of their communities.

The Historically Black College as Social Contract, Social Capital, and Social Equalizer

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have a unique educational history in comparison to other postsecondary institutions in the United States. HBCUs are institutions founded prior to 1964 for the purpose of providing collegiate education to African Americans. There are 103 public, private, 4-year, and 2-year HBCUs. In addition to the 103 HBCUs, there are approximately 50 predominantly Black institutions. Predominantly Black colleges and universities are institutions with greater than 50% Black student enrollment, which were not founded primarily for the

CONSTRUCTING GENDER: An Exploration of Afro-American Men's Conceptualization of Manhood

This article explores the meanings of manhood as articulated by Afro-American men (N = 32). Conceptualization and Q-sort methods are used to examine (1) mens construction of manhood and (2) mens ratings of the importance of selected attributes to being a man. Manhood emerged as a multidimensional construct with four major domains (self-determinism and accountability, family, pride, and spirituality and humanism) and 15 distinct clusters of ideas. The cluster of attributes rated as most important to being a man paralleled the conceptualization of manhood derived from the open-ended interviews for both professional and nonprofessional men. Mens ratings of attributes in the areas of ownership, manliness, spiritual and religious, and power varied by occupational status.

Research at the Margin: Mapping Masculinity and Mobility of African-American High School Dropouts.

Research on the intersection of racial and gender identities is important in understanding the processes of school engagement. This article focuses on how African‐American male adolescents move in and out of schooling and make sense of those experiences. By examining how they construct meanings of masculinity a textured and complex trajectory of schooling is captured. Using qualitative data from a group of African‐American male high‐school dropouts who participated in a national alternative high school program, the author highlights the nuances of racial and gendered identities and their consequences for schooling experiences and outcomes. The results uniquely highlight and map the social mobility between contested traditional and alternative schooling spaces by uncovering these young men’s personal pathways of reflection, regret and social redemption.Research on the intersection of racial and gender identities is important in understanding the processes of school engagement. This article focuses on how African‐American male adolescents move in and out of schooling and make sense of those experiences. By examining how they construct meanings of masculinity a textured and complex trajectory of schooling is captured. Using qualitative data from a group of African‐American male high‐school dropouts who participated in a national alternative high school program, the author highlights the nuances of racial and gendered identities and their consequences for schooling experiences and outcomes. The results uniquely highlight and map the social mobility between contested traditional and alternative schooling spaces by uncovering these young men’s personal pathways of reflection, regret and social redemption.

New possibilities: (re)engaging Black male youth within community‐based educational spaces

Despite the assertion that due to an Obama presidency America has become a post‐racial society, Black males still face a unique social crisis. In this article, we hold that both race and gender continue to work in tandem to produce a certain set of social outcomes for young Black men in America despite this assertion. The educational, economic, and social mobility of young Black men is often limited due to structural constraints that are exacerbated by the intersectional dynamism of race, gender, and social class. As young Black men continue to experience social hardships, they are being pushed further and further away from traditional school contexts. Drawing from qualitative interviews with 24 young Black male participants from EmpowerYouth, a national community‐based organization, this study highlights the importance of alternative sites of education and youth development for Black male youth. Findings from this study indicate that flexibility, applied educational and work experience, and positive healthy adult–youth relationships provided by EmpowerYouth, granted solace for young Black males who traversed through difficult circumstances within traditional school contexts. Our findings speak to the need to create new and relevant educational models that address the unique and complex circumstances of young Black men in America. Ultimately, as young Black males are often considered to be social burdens, this study shows how successful community‐based programs like EmpowerYouth reframe young Black males as a valued segment of society that deserve support, care, and educational sites that are able to respond to their distinct academic and social needs.

Cultural Relevance And Computer-Assisted Instruction

Abstract We describe an exploratory study that focuses on culturally relevant computer-assisted instruction. We present findings from two elementary schools where students engaged in a computer simulation, Riding the Freedom Train. The Underground Railroad was used as a theme to develop the storyline. Findings show no significant differences between the mathematics and science scores of students at the two schools and no significant gender differences. Therefore, having no school or gender effect implies that the software is an effective tool that can be used to engage African-American students in culturally relevant tasks to improve science and mathematics achievement.

Introduction: Risk, equity, and schooling: Transforming the discourse

The issue of risk is addressed across a range of disciplines but has a particularly tenuous history in relationship to schooling and equity. Rist’s (1970) study, written almost 40 years ago, provided a provocative analysis of the ways in which classroom experience mirrored structural hierarchies in society and in which teacher interactions often disadvantage poor students, putting them at risk for school failure. Related analyses, prior to Rist’s study and into the present, have reinforced this point. For example, in Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton (1957) described a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, that is, when a false definition of a situation evokes a new behavior that then makes the original false conception come true. A decade later, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) found that students’ performance was consistent with teachers’ expectations of those who had been identified as high achievers, irrespective of their actual performance. In other words, once an expectation is set, even if it is not accurate, we tend to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation. Aside from the various caveats raised about this study, the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy calls attention to the ways in which strong beliefs are likely to become enacted in classroom practices and interactions such that students fulfill low expectations and, as a result, are placed at risk. More recently, Steele and Aronson (1995) offered evidence about the roles social contexts of assessment and stereotype threats play in individuals’ performance. The common reference to “placing students at

Construct validity in measurement: A pattern matching approach

Abstract Construct validity refers to how well operationalizations in research reflect the theoretical constructs they are supposed to reflect. The multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrix framework proposed by Campbell and Fiske (Psychology Bulletin, 56, 81–105, 1959) is the most widely known and used method for establishing construct validity. In determining if there is construct validity using the MTMM approach, researchers should have some idea or expectation of the interrelationships among constructs and the methods used to measure them. Structured conceptualization can be used to articulate the expected relationships between constructs that are being measured. The resulting theoretical concept map can then be compared with correlations in the MTMM matrix using a pattern matching approach to assess the degree of construct validity evidenced .

Alcohol Use among College Students: Responses to Raising the Purchase Age

On December 1, 1985, New York State raised its alcohol purchase age from 19 to 21. We used a quasi-experimental research design to explore the changes in alcohol use behaviors and attitudes of undergraduates at a large central New York university before and after this legislation was enacted. The overwhelming majority of this undergraduate population is under 21 years old and is thus affected by the new legislation. A comparison of data from the two survey times revealed that 90% of the undergraduates sampled continued to drink at least occasionally. Our analysis of drinking quantity showed a slight moderation in alcohol consumption overall, with the greatest changes occurring for the heaviest drinkers--men and members of Greek organizations. Even with apparent moderation in student drinking, reported negative consequences such as physical injuries were more common. A change in drinking location to less-controlled environments, such as private rooms and unmonitored parties, is offered as one possible explanation.

Race, Gender, and Sexuality: (Un)Doing Identity Categories in Educational Research

In the last few years, identity politics has emerged as a critical watchword in educational theory and practice. Special attention given to the intersection of identity categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality in the academic and popular press attest to a growing interest in the politics of identities. Drawing on the theoretical resources of ethnic, gender, postmodern, postcolonial, queer, and critical ethnographic studies, identity politics, argues Uebel (1997), “scrutinizes the effects of cultural forces on identities and the forms in which identities are imagined. It describes an approach to subjectivity, attentive to the ways we understand individuals as products of a field of determinants, at once psychic, institutional, interracial, bodily, homoerotic, aesthetic rhetorical, national” (p. 1). Two recent books enter the discussion of identity politics from different gendered and racial vantage points and engage the meanings of identities and the unspoken questions that attend to processes and practices in education. One can hardly find more striking, pronounced variant treatments of gender in postmillennium educational studies than Ann Arnett Ferguson’s Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity and Susan Talburt’s Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education. These differences, I argue, are primarily on the surface. What lies beneath, however, are two important projects of gender-based identity constructions, performance, and experience. The research participants in the ethnographic studies from the two books include Black boys in intermediate school and lesbian intellectuals in higher education. These participants are polarized in their developmental stage, position, sexuality, power, and privilege. These identity performance narratives of the “masculine” and the “lesbian,” however, suggest innovative ways of doing research about identity, self, and others. Each author follows a treasured path for good research and writing about gender and education. They start with very interesting and controversial actors situated at the margin, provide an educational context that appears both nuanced in its complexity and commonplace in its influence, and wade deeply into stereotyped and real experiences of their research participants. This formula creates both discomfort and revelation. And, in doing so, they uncover and provoke. Although Ferguson and Talburt impressively accomplish these things in different ways, they do so with a concerted mission of “naming” and “claiming” educational spaces that dictates desires, structure opportunities, and construct identities. A summary of each book follows with a comparative analysis that considers common themes that emerge when doing work on the intersection of identity categories.