Why we need to smash up the concept of the achievement gap in tiny little pieces
A little less conversation, a little more action will prove black and brown minds matter
It’s time for researchers to stop using terms like the achievement gap and student success.
The sobering data on men of color in colleges is a reflection of college and university performance – so take the scrutiny off of student achievement.
Outcomes for male collegians of color are lagging because postsecondary leaders aren’t held accountable for changing them.
Related: Rich school, poor school
This month I attended Ensuring Success for Men of Color: Leveraging Evidence to Drive Better Policy, Practice and Effective Investment hosted by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. Heads and representatives from national, university based centers, institutes and think tanks came together with funders and postsecondary officials to “reframe” or “change the narrative” of men of color in college.
The frequency in which data on black and brown male collegians have been framed almost precludes the need for me to repeat, but I will for the sake of argument.
Black and Latino men four-year graduation rates are 33.2 percent and 44.8 percent respectively. Their white and Asian male peers graduate at a 57.1 percent and 64.2 percent clip.
In response to data, a swell of academic literature has the “effect of centering the lack of success of young men of color as the defining commonality…and contributions [of men of color] as exceptional, not expected.” (as stated in the conference proceedings).
Common titles like Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life and Narrowing the Achievement Gap: Strategies for Educating Latino, Black, and Asian Students insidiously de-emphasize institutional responsibility for graduating men of color and as a consequence, measures of institutional accountability based on inclusion are ignored.
The authors of these and similar texts acknowledge and deconstruct institutional factors. However, we mitigate our efforts comparing black and brown weakness to supposed white strength. We undermine our cause when we try to fix black and brown boys and men of color.
If scholars want to rid themselves of deficit approaches (looking at weaknesses) moving forward, then we must stop using the deficit language in our speech and research. Acceptance of constructs like the achievement gap, drop out, student success and data driven may legitimize you in the academy, but they are complicit in promoting the verbal and statistical rhetoric that avoids the problem of institutional accountability.
The inferred white male referent in the achievement gap construct contributes to the centuries old logic that others should be compared to whites. On its face the idea of student success lets institutional factors of the hook, which have been shown to be at least half of the Why we need to smash up the concept of the achievement gap in tiny little pieces - The Hechinger... - Linkis.com:
