Integration Interrupted


Book Description

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the "acting white" slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness, Integration Interrupted argues that when students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful lesson conveyed by schools, not their peers. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research, Karolyn Tyson shows how equating school success with "acting white" arose in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education through the practice of curriculum tracking, which separates students for instruction, ostensibly by ability and prior achievement. Only in very specific circumstances, when black students are drastically underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, do anxieties about "the burden of acting white" emerge. Racialized tracking continues to define the typical American secondary school, but it goes unremarked, except by the young people who experience its costs and consequences daily. The rich narratives in Integration Interrupted throw light on the complex relationships underlying school behaviors and convincingly demonstrate that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how we organize our schools.




Integration Interrupted


Book Description

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the "acting white" slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness, Integration Interrupted argues that when students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful lesson conveyed by schools, not their peers. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research, Karolyn Tyson shows how equating school success with "acting white" arose in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education through the practice of curriculum tracking, which separates students for instruction, ostensibly by ability and prior achievement. Only in very specific circumstances, when black students are drastically underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, do anxieties about "the burden of acting white" emerge. Racialized tracking continues to define the typical American secondary school, but it goes unremarked, except by the young people who experience its costs and consequences daily. The rich narratives in Integration Interrupted throw light on the complex relationships underlying school behaviors and convincingly demonstrate that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how we organize our schools.




Poison in the Ivy


Book Description

The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students’ social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the ‘best and the brightest,’ leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort. Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.




The Power of Anticipatory Images in Student Achievement


Book Description

This book features ten high academically achieving, low-income, inner city students from Newark, New Jersey, who graduated from public high schools at or near the top of their class and continued to excel in college. Using a qualitative research design, the author interviewed the ten students and the person who most influenced their educational progress about what motivated them to achieve at such high levels. Three mutually reinforcing anticipatory images emerged as a common element of their stories. In their own voices, the students describe the anticipatory images they framed, how they developed them, and how they used them to their advantage. Davy advances a theoretical model of the Anticipatory Competent student who continually progresses in the directions of the images projected ahead.




Young, Gifted and Diverse


Book Description

An in-depth look at the rising American generation entering the Black professional class Despite their diversity, Black Americans have long been studied as a uniformly disadvantaged group. Drawing from a representative sample of over a thousand Black students and in-depth interviews and focus groups with over one hundred more, Young, Gifted and Diverse highlights diversity among the new educated Black elite—those graduating from America’s selective colleges and universities in the early twenty-first century. Differences in childhood experiences shape this generation, including their racial and other social identities and attitudes, and beliefs about and interactions with one another. While those in the new Black elite come from myriad backgrounds and have varied views on American racism, as they progress through college and toward the Black professional class they develop a shared worldview and group consciousness. They graduate with optimism about their own futures, but remain guarded about racial equality more broadly. This internal diversity alongside political consensus among the elite complicates assumptions about both a monolithic Black experience and the future of Black political solidarity.




Intersectionality and Higher Education


Book Description

Though colleges and universities are arguably paying more attention to diversity and inclusion than ever before, to what extent do their efforts result in more socially just campuses? Intersectionality and Higher Education examines how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, and other identities connect to produce intersected campus experiences. Contributors look at both the individual and institutional perspectives on issues like campus climate, race, class, and gender disparities, LGBTQ student experiences, undergraduate versus graduate students, faculty and staff from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and the intersections of two or more of these topics. Taken together, this volume presents an evidence-backed vision of how the twenty-first century higher education landscape should evolve in order to meaningfully support all participants, reduce marginalization, and reach for equity and equality.




Despite the Best Intentions


Book Description

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers? Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap,' exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters. An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.




People of Color in the United States


Book Description

This expansive, four-volume ready-reference work offers critical coverage of contemporary issues that impact people of color in the United States, ranging from education and employment to health and wellness and immigration. People of Color in the United States: Contemporary Issues in Education, Work, Communities, Health, and Immigration examines a wide range of issues that affect people of color in America today, covering education, employment, health, and immigration. Edited by experts in the field, this set supplies current information that meets a variety of course standards in four volumes. Volume 1 covers education grades K–12 and higher education; volume 2 addresses employment, housing, family, and community; volume 3 examines health and wellness; and volume 4 covers immigration. The content will enable students to better understand the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities as well as current social issues and policy. The content is written to be accessible to a wide range of readers and to provide ready-reference content for courses in history, sociology, psychology, geography, and economics, as well as curricula that address immigration, urbanization and industrialization, and contemporary American society.




The Digital Edge


Book Description

How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the “technology rich” and the “technology poor” have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world. Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.




Black Women, Ivory Tower


Book Description

A first-of-its-kind compelling exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in higher education. Black women are heading to college in record numbers, and more and more Black women are teaching in higher education. But increasing numbers in college don't guarantee our safety there. Willpower and grit may improve achievement for Black people in school, but they don't secure our belonging. In fact, the very structure of higher education ensures that we're treated as guests, outsiders to the institutional family--outnumbered and unwelcome. Dr. Jasmine Harris shares her own experiences attempting to be a Vassar girl and reckoning with a lack of legacy and agency. Moving beyond the "data points", Dr. Harris examines the day-to-day impacts on Black women as individuals, the longer-term consequences to our professional lives, and the generational costs to our entire families. "I want to arm as many Black girls and women as I can with the knowledge about these spaces that I lacked," says Dr. Harris. "By laying bare my own traumas, and those of Black women before me, I am providing them the tools to protect themselves, with an understanding of how deliberately many institutions will try to undercut them." Trial and error has been required of Black students to navigate systems of discrimination and disadvantage. But this book now offers useful support, illuminating the community of Black women dealing with similar issues. The author's story is not unusual, nor are her interactions anomalies. Black Women, Ivory Tower explores why.