Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students Review

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Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students ReviewI'm currently researching strategies for successful SAT work with low scoring students. Having read the academically oriented "Black White Test Score Gap", I decided to pick this up to find some additional strategies for working with low scoring students.
This book is divided into three essays and they have three distinct focuses. Theresa Perry's essay is very philosophical. She argues that there is a literacy tradition in black America that is often overlooked as we seek solutions to educational problems. "Freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom" is a tradition that shows how in slavery times and the segregated 20th century we have seen literacy as a key for full citizenship. Perry looks at narratives to find common themes in stories that argue for literacy as a black value.
I found this essay helpful because I can recall my own awakenings reading "Roots" and "Autobiography of Malcolm X" where I felt more empowered and assertive as I realized that my struggles and frustrations were common to the black experience. I felt that the theory and philosophy of this essay was stronger than the solutions, however. I would also like to have seen how mathematical and technological literacy could have been incorporated into this theory.
Claude Steele's "Stereotype Threat" essay is an update on some things he's written in magazines and is a more accessible version of an essay that he authored in "Black-White Test Score Gap". I found this essay to be far more helpful than the more technical description of his work in "Black White Test Score Gap". Here he argues that we have to address self-imposed pressures of high scoring students to help them succeed in testing environments and help them work more efficiently. This articulation of his theory seemed to be aimed more for the educators applying his ideas than the psychologists assessing them. As a teacher, I felt included in the discussion.
Asa Hilliard's presence in this volume was peculiar for me. He's an Afrocentrist and uses the term "Africans" to describe black Americans. Personally, I don't like that term because I value the unique jazz and cultural contributions of black Americans over an afrocentric past. He details success stories at the elementary level and is highly critical of the educational literature. This essay bothered me because it did not offer much that I could use as a high school teacher. Also, this seemed to argue for "superteachers" without speaking to the supply and demand of the highly qualified and highly trained labor he seeks. Yes, it's good to detail how wonderful a school is that you consulted for and how these successes should be researched. This essay basically said "we need better teachers", but did not do enough to show me how we would get them or how he has unique training and empowerment models. I felt this was the weakest of the three essays although I'll probably look up some of the model schools and teachers he mentions at some point.
All in all, this is a good book for educators to read. I'd focus on Steele's essay and the first half of Perry's essay first and skim the second half of Perry and all of Hilliard second. Those who are more Afrocentrist and elementary educators will find Hilliard's essay more helpful than I did.
Decent book, I recommend it with qualifications.
3.5 stars.Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students OverviewThree African-American intellectuals on a crucial educational issue of our timeA huge portion of the school reform debate in America-explicitly and implicitly-is framed around the success and failure of African-American children in school. The test-score "achievement gap" between white and black students, especially, is a driving and divisive issue. Yet the voices of prominent African-American intellectuals have been conspicuously left out of the debate about black children. Young, Gifted, and Black sets out to reframe the terms of that debate. The authors argue that understanding how children experience the struggle of being black in America is essential to improving how schools serve them.Taking on liberals and conservatives alike, Theresa Perry argues that all kinds of contemporary school settings systematically undermine motivation and achievement for black students. She draws on history, narrative, and research to outline an African-American tradition of education for liberation and to suggest what kinds of settings black children need most. Claude Steele reports stunningly clear empirical psychological evidence that when black students believe they are being judged as members of a stereotyped group rather than as individuals, they do worse on tests. He calls the mechanism at work "stereotype threat," and reflects on its broad implications for schools. Asa Hilliard ends the book with an essay on actual schools around the country where African-American students achieve at high levels.Theresa Perry is professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston and coeditor of The Real Ebonics Debate (Beacon / 3145-3 / $14.00 pb). Claude Steele is professor of psychology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Asa Hilliard is professor of education at Georgia State University in Atlanta. "These three very different essays go a long way toward raising the level of the national discussion about 'achievement gaps.'They point us toward a gap in teacher quality, toward a gap in the social structures that support a positive achievement identity in youngsters, a gap in public knowledge of excellence, past and present, in African American education, a gap in appropriate racial socialization.The authors insist on higher goals than just better test scores and they never lose sight of the rootedness of today's problems in historic and contemporary discourses about Black intellectual inferiority. These timely essays do more than restate the problem; they each offer concrete suggestions for resolving it. Collectively, they reform the discussion of 'reform.' "--Charles Payne, Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of History, African American Studies and Sociology, Duke University, and author of I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Movement"I am awed by the lucidity and careful crafting of these essays.The authors -- all scholars of impeccable credentials in their respective fields -- capture with unprecedented cogency the real issues surrounding the so-called 'achievement gap.'No one who reads this book can ever suggest that we don't know what to do to promote high achievement for African American students.The question is, do we really want to do so." --Lisa Delpit, author of Other People's Children, and Executive Director and Eminent Scholar of the Center for Urban Education & Innovation, Florida International University

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