Education of the Black Male in America

Today's education is often viewed as failing in its goal of educating students, especially those students characterized as minorities, including African American, Hispanic, and Appalachian students (Quiroz, 1999). Among the minority groups mentioned, African American males are affected most adversely. Research has shown that when Black male students are compared to other students by gender and race they consistently rank lowest in academic achievement (Ogbu, 2003), have the worst attendance record (Voelkle, 1999), are suspended and expelled the most often (Raffaele Mendez, 2003; Staples, 1982), are most likely to drop out of school, and most often fail to graduate from high school or to earn a GED (Pinkney, 2000; Roderick, 2003).

Research has also shown that this record of poor performance by Black male students during their elementary and secondary school years limits their involvement in education at the college level (Cross & Slater, 2000) and correlates strongly with their disproportionately large numbers in the country's jails and penitentiaries (Males & Macallair, 2000; Yeakey, 2002). Adult Black males lead the nation in being undereducated, unemployed (Boyer, 1988; Hornor, 2002; Pinkney, 2000), and incarcerated (Drakeford & Garfinkel, 2000). Black males are also characterized as having more health problems (Kirk, 1986) and dying at a younger age (Boyer, 1988; Hornor, 2002; Kirk, 1986; Pinkney, 2000), regardless of race and gender, than any other group in America.

The challenges faced by Black males in American society are well known. What may not be widely recognized is the role America's schools play in perpetuating these problems. The purpose of this paper is to make more generally accessible recent research that attempts to isolate factors leading to conflict between Black male students and increasingly White teaching staff in our public schools (Cooper and Jordan, 2003). This paper also describes ways in which schools and school districts are beginning to implement programs designed to resolve these conflicts.

From A historical perspective the unsuccessful journey of the Black male student from public school through to his unfulfilled place in society did not end with Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision that ended de jure school segregation in 1954. Even though a series of civil rights bills in the 1950s and 1960s el...

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