(AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWSWIRE)The issue of the educational achievement gap between Black and white students has increasingly become a hot button issue, with some scholars arguing that Black students lag behind for fear of "acting white," while others claim that Black students lack resources and support at home. Now in Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students, Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III reframe the very nature of the debate by stressing the complex social identity issues that African-American children face in school and with regard to testing.

In three linked but separate essays, Perry, Steele, and Hilliard explore how African-American students experience school in a society that has historically devalued their intellectual abilities. They call for a new understanding of the unique obstacles Black students face in American schools and point to a variety of educational practices that can mitigate those challenges and promote academic excellence.

If one considers the long and persistent denial and limiting of educational opportunity to African Americans, and African Americans' corresponding achievements," writes Perry, "the historically grounded and educationally useful question is, 'How have African Americans over generations, succeeded in maintaining their commitment to education and producing a leadership and intellectual class?'" From stories of slaves who understood that literacy was essential in achieving freedom through the narratives of Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, Jocelyn Elders, and others, Perry underscores the degree to which pre-Civil Rights era African-American schools, churches, and organizations provided Black children with a consistent and deeply rooted counter-narrative to the dominant society's ideology regarding their intellectual inferiority. Today, asserts Perry, "African American children go to K-12 schools in the post-Civil Rights era with little acknowledgement from teachers, administrators, and parents that they are being battered at every turn by the ideology of African American inferiority."

After analyzing the strength and weaknesses of the two most influential explanations of group achievement--cultural difference and social mobility--Perry emphasizes the degree to which schools transmit knowledge in cultural codes (particularly with regard to language), affording automatic advantage to those who possess cultural capital and disadvantages to those that don't. The dominant culture, she says, has already picked the winners. The problem is not that schools demand fluency in the dominant culture, she continues, the problem is that they demand this cultural fluency as a prerequisite to skills development and intellectual competency. Students who are not fluent in the dominant cultural get early negative assessments about their academic abilities. In historically Black southern segregated schools, she notes, "developing academic competencies and fluency in mainstream culture were pursued as simultaneous rather than sequential processes."

Calling on parents and educators to utilize the historic motivations behind African-American schooling ("freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom, racial uplift, citizenship, and leadership") and using the Educational Opportunity Program as a model, Perry illustrates that African-American students can achieve in environments that have a leveling culture, a culture of achievement that extends to all of its members. She finds that African-American students succeed in Catholic schools, Black colleges, and Department of Defense schools. "Institutions that are culturally responsive and that systematically affirm, draw on, and use cultural formations of African Americans will produce exceptional academic results from African-American students," Perry writes.

Beacon will publish Young, Gifted, and Black on March 28, 2003. For more information, to receive a copy of Young, Gifted, and Black, or to arrange an interview with one of the authors, contact Kathy Daneman, Publicist,at
kdaneman@beacon.org or 617-948-6584.