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HISTORICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL INFLUENCES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION

HISTORICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL INFLUENCES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION. Carol D. Lee Diana T. Slaughter-Defoe Presented By James E. Monroe.

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HISTORICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL INFLUENCES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION

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  1. HISTORICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL INFLUENCES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION Carol D. Lee Diana T. Slaughter-Defoe Presented By James E. Monroe

  2. In this presentation I will discuss how culture and political status on the schooling experience and educational achievement influence African American education.

  3. MAJOR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS IN SCHOOLS • There were several studies published during the Regan-Bush years (1980-1992). • Theses studies indicated that African Americans, particularly males from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, are disproportionately represented in the grade retention, school suspension and drop-out rates of public schools. • Since the beginning of public schooling in the United States, African American children have been labeled, and even misclassified and tracked, relative to educational standing, as a combined result of inequitable resource allocations.

  4. The studies of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance. • Project Head Start • The Chicago School Reform Act

  5. HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CRITICAL CONTEMPORARY ISSUES • J.D. Anderson (1988) states that “there have been essential relationships between popular education and the politics of oppression. Both schooling for democratic citizenship and schooling for second-class citizenship have been basic traditions in American education”. • Freedman’s Bureau • England liberal classical curriculum • Industrial education • Critiqued the limitations of both models. • Atlanta Exposition in 1895

  6. By 1933, 66% of Black high school students in the south were being educated in county training schools based on the industrial model. • By 1935 many of these schools were phased out because of more stringent licensing requirements for those preparing to teach, and the evolution of a public, though segregated, school system in the South. • DuBois’s critique of Black education spanned a period from 1903 through 1960. • By 1930 the Black college still mimicked curriculum and social organization patterns found in predominantly White colleges.

  7. AFRICAN AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT IN EDUCATION • J.D. Anderson (1984) offers an extensive review of data documenting the evolution of African American achievement in education for Reconstruction through the 1980s. • From the Reconstruction era through the dawn of the 20th century, literacy rates were measures using census data on school enrollment. • By 1930 high school enrollment became the benchmark. • According to the Bureau of Education in 1917, in 1915, 90% of African American schoolchildren lived in the South, with only 64 public secondary schools available for Blacks. • Introduction of the standardized IQ Testing

  8. From 1954 on, college enrollment and, later, graduation rates were added as a measure of educational achievement. • The motivation for schooling within the African American community was elevated in relationship to the economic and political benefits achievable from schooling. • In 1982 the jobless rate among African American teenagers was reported at 50% in contrast with 16.5% in 1954. • In the decades immediately following Reconstruction, literacy rates were measured by percentages of school-age children enrolled in school.

  9. The period form 1860 to 1880 reveals the greatest rate of increase in rates of literacy within the African American community, from a 2% literacy rate in 1860 to a 34% literacy rate in 1880. • Thus between 1880 an 1990, although there was a 25% increase in the number of school age children within the African American community. • There was a decrease in the percentage of Black school-age children enrolled in school. • Illiteracy rates in the Black community decreased drastically, from 70% in 1880, to 44% in 1900, and to 19% by 1910, as defined by rates of school enrollment. • By 1910 school enrollment for Blacks and Whites in the North and West were nearly the same. • Between 1917 and 1931 records the greatest increase in high school enrollment.

  10. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1954 • The bench marks that served as measures of educational achievement began to shift. • Greater opportunity for college enrollment among African Americans. • The greatest increase in high school completion, college enrollment, and college graduation rates within the African American community occurred between 1960 and 1980. • Between 1966 and 1976 there was a 275% increase in Black student college enrollment. • Blacks were more likely to enroll in two-year colleges than four-year institutions. • College enrollment and gradation rates decreased between 1980 and 1986, and thereafter increased to slightly more increased to slightly more than the 1980 level.

  11. Around the 1920s, standardized test data began to be used as a measure of educational achievement in the United States. • IQ testing was used from its inception into the United States to justify claims of native mental inferiority among African Americans. • Foreman (1932) and Horace Mann Bond • Studied test scores of African American, children enrolled in Black schools in Jefferson County, Alabama, operated by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. • Foreman and Bond found that average scores for these Black children at the third grade were consistent with national norms. • They concluded that better educational and social environments had a positive effect on educational achievement of African American children. • They challenge the assumptions of Black intellectual inferiority fostered by mainstream research on standardized testing and Blacks.

  12. Dreeben and Gamoran (1986) found that when black and non-black first graders are exposed to similar instruction, they do comparably well. • Irvine and Irvine (1983) assert that any discussion of discrepancies in educational achievement between Black and White students must address the consequences of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that called for the desegregation of public schooling. • Pupil to teacher interactions and relationships. • Picott (1976) collected data that indicated a 90% reduction in the number of black principals in the South between the years 1964 and 1973. • The number and percentage of African American teachers in some northern districts, such as Chicago, increased significantly after 1954. • The concluded that the factors influencing student achievement prior to the Brown decision were reflective of an interaction between pupil ability and social class.

  13. BLACK STUDIES, AFROCENTRICITY, AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION:FOUNDATIONS • Banks (1992) and Karenga (1992) acknowledge the interrelationships among Black students within the university, the conceptual frameworks of Afrocentricity, and multicultural education. • The struggle for Black studies began in the 1960’s and was influenced by the radicalism of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the antiwar movement, and the student movement. • Leadership of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) trained thousands of Black students as well as White students in social and political activism. • The first Black Studies program and department was founded under the leadership of Nathan Hare.

  14. The model for Black studies established by Hare included the call to bring both the college to the community and the community to the college increasing the enrollemnt of Black students as well as their representation in decision making bodies. • By 1969 most of the major universities and colleges had agreed to the establishement of some form of Black studies. • Initially there was resistance on the part of many historically Black college to organize Black studies programs and departments, but after universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia had established such programs. • R. Allen (1974) reported that by 1971 at least 500 colleges and universites had established Black studies programs. • By 1974 the number had dropped to 200.

  15. CULTURAL CONTEXTS INFLUENCING AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION • How African American culture has been used to improve teaching and learning for Black students. • Black English or African American English • Orlando Taylor (1992) argues that there are both standard and vernacular forms of Black English. • Black English is not a deficit but a difference, and proactive research that builds upon the identified strengths of Black English. • In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were many funded educational programs to implement curriculum aimed at compensating for what was termed “cultural deprivation,” largely reflected in the language uses displayed by many African American children.

  16. Attempts were made to organized what were called “dialect” readers based assumption that the phonology and syntax of Black English interfered with the abilities of Black children to learn to read. • A review of the research shows mixed results, with no clear advantage to the use of dialect readers and no substantive support for the claim that use of Black English interfered with learning to read. • In addition to the research on using specific characteristics of Black English to teach and learn academic skills related to literacy, there is also a body of research that considers the socializing effects of competency in Black English and the implications of that socializing for schooling. • Delpit (1986, 1988) warned that misunderstandings often occurred in classrooms when teachers used an indirect communicative and teaching style with African American children.

  17. Ogbu (1987) and Fordham (1988) have argued that African American students sometimes develop an oppositional attitude toward school in part because they equate success in school with “acting White.” • This possibility of learning to act White as a prelude to success in school is inevitably tied to learning to speak standard English and potentially divorcing oneself from appropriate use of Black English. • Marsha Taylor (1982) stresses that “in Black Language, attention is paid not only to what is said but how it is said, where it is said, and who is doing the “saying”

  18. CULTURAL VARIABLES IN LEARNING AND TEACHING MATHEMATICS • Too little attention has been paid to the implications of African American cultural knowledge and/or experiences for learning and teaching mathematics. • Orr (1987) argues that African American English serves as a barrier impending Black children’s understanding of certain mathematical concepts that she claims are counter intuitively expressed in Black English. • Stigler and Barnes (1989) argue that culture may influence mathematical understanding and practices through cultural tools, cultural practices, and cultural institutions. • Both Tate and Secada (1993) encourage teachers to engage students in problem solving that is situated in the real life struggles of the communities in which students live.

  19. Three Major Projects • The Algebra Project • Moses explicitly states that he started The Algebra Project to empower African American, Hispanic, and other “minority” youth to master the rudiments of algebra, which serves as the gatekeeper to the study of higher mathematics and sciences. • The Algebra Project introduces an extensive study of algebra in the middle grades in order to prepare students, predominantly African American, to enter high school ready for advanced mathematics. • It uses the structure of an urban transit system as a metaphor for the directionality of positive and negative numbers in algebra. • The project draws on culturally specific norms by consciously encouraging students to express a descriptive representation of algebraic problems using African American English, Spanish, Creole, or whatever the indigenous language of the student may be.

  20. The Math Workshop Program • Tresiman discovered that African Americans students entering the university who had been high achievers in high school were not faring well in calculus. • Tresiman observed that Asian American students often worked cooperatively in study groups for calculus. • Math Workshop Program foster cooperative learning. • Abdulalim Shabazz, Black mathematician at Atlanta University between (1956 and 1963) trained 109 African Americans students who received master’s degrees in mathematics. • Shabazz explicitly states that his approach links a sense of social activism, social responsibility, and cultural awareness, and includes a history of African and African American contributions to the history of mathematics.

  21. MAJOR POLICIES AND STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION CULTURAL PARADIGM • Musical patterns, language patterns, family socialization • Shade (1983, 1986) found Blacks to be more spontaneous, flexible, open minded, and less structured in their perceptions of people, thoughts and events. • One conclusion has been that the mismatches between the styles of learning exhibited by African American students and the behavioral expectations and pedagogical styles of schools result in low levels of achievement among African American students. • Slavin and Oickle (1981) have found that African American students appear to achieve at higher levels when cooperative learning instructional strategies are used.

  22. Parents chose African American impendent schools for a variety of reasons. • 48% for the learning environment. • 29% for academic reason, • 12% for religious education • 7% for the cultural emphasis, • 4% were concerned about cost. • Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) • African American and African historical experiences. • Change the content of curriculum and textbooks used by all children. • Focus the organization of certain schools on supporting explicit development of African American males.

  23. The following criticisms have been summarized by Hilliard: • No significant history of Africans in most academic discipline before the slave trade, • No people history • No history of Africans in the African Diaspora, • No presentation of the cultural unity among Africans and the descendants of Africans in the African Diaspora, • Little to no history of the resistance of African people to the domination of Africans through slavery, colonization, and segregation apartheid, • The history of African people that is presented fails to explain the common origin and elements in systems of oppression that African people have experienced, especially during he last 400 years.

  24. New York State Board of Regents • Portland Oregon • The Portland African American Baseline Essays • African-centered all male academics • African American Immersion project

  25. EL FIN

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