Academic success among African men has increased but many African-American men continue to fall behind the academic achievements of their Caucasian male counterparts. African-American men who achieve academic success have been marginalized in research that primarily focuses on reporting deficit or negative factors that hinder and not promote…

A version of this article, "Blacks in Research? How Shall We Be Portrayed?", was delivered by the author as the 2013 W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture to the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Blacks in Education Special Interest Group (Black SIG). This article examines the portrayal of Blacks…

In the wake of racial violence, teacher educators, literacy scholars, and classroom teachers are looking for ways to teach about in/equities and in/justice. In this article, I position #SayHerName as an entry point for educators and scholars to think about how English education and English language arts classrooms can become spaces to address…

Educational scholarship has called attention to the disproportionate ways Black males are disciplined in schools, which has become the catalyst to their entry into the school-to-prison pipeline through which they are funneled from K-12 classrooms into the criminal justice system. Since the majority of teachers are White, it may be insightful to…

In educational research, policies and practices, African American male youth are often portrayed as a monolithic demographic of uneducable, criminalized, deviant students. This column reviews the works of two African American male scholars, Tyrone D. Howard's (2014) "Black Male(d)" and David E. Kirkland's (2013) "A Search…

The population of students of color has grown threefold, and there are more than 40 cultural and social student affinity groups. More impressive, the graduation rate for African American, Latino, and Native students has increased by 13 percentage points in the last decade. In this brief, the authors dig into a decade's worth of data on four-year…

Sub-cultural groups that depend on a historical account to validate their thoughts and practices may need to revise and repair those accounts as changing circumstances present new issues affecting them. The year 2013 gave us three movies that dealt with racism, mobility, and political action: Lee Daniels' "The Butler," "12…

This article discusses how deficit thinking is manifested through a presumption of incompetence for people of color from preschool to university levels. Examples are presented as a way to demonstrate that leadership programs can support future leaders in curtailing deficit thinking in our schools and communities.

African American males are three times more likely than their White male counterparts to be suspended or expelled in public schools. Changing these odds requires not only addressing disparities in discipline practices, but also lifting up a new narrative of hope, possibility, and brilliance so that young Black men can see and realize their…

This report examines how the nearly 1 million Black youth in California are faring from preschool through college and reveals the distressing disparities that newly released state and national data show persist at all levels of their educational journey. The report also highlights the groundbreaking efforts underway to reverse these trends in…

Our study examined the experiences of three middle school teachers who created their own Black History Month curriculum. Although, the relevance of Black History Month is under scrutiny by opponents who feel it marginalized the history of Black Americans, proponents of this position have failed: to account for teachers who view and use this Month…

The purpose of this study was to explore the dynamics of racial change through the landmark appointment of the Black social scientist, Allison Davis, to the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1942. As archival materials make clear, the appointment came to fruition through the collaboration of powerful White liberals at the Julius Rosenwald…

The author argues that the documentary, "Waiting for Superman," effectively employs bodies and texts in ways that reproduce hegemonic constructions of race, and more specifically, offers an image and imagination of black engagement in education that reinforces neoliberal-multicultural narratives about black disinterest in, and…

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I…

Research Findings: There is growing evidence that home learning stimulation that includes informal numeracy experiences can promote math-related learning in school. Furthermore, national studies suggest that children who start kindergarten with stronger math skills are more likely to succeed in high school. This study used a large sample of…