Finding a solution to the low academic performance and graduation rates of African-American and other non-white students is by far the most pervasive issue confronting schools and local communities today. With approximately 40 percent of the nation’s African-American students enrolled in fifty of the nation’s largest urban school districts, this is clearly a problem that needs immediate resolution in major metropolitan areas.
Many factors and potential causes for this substandard performance have been explored over the last four decades (e.g., low expectations of students and teachers, lack of interest in schooling, insufficient parental support, outmoded curricula, peer pressure, and even the cyclic and controversial claims of genetic inferiority), but no universally plausible cause has been identified to explain and reverse the adverse patterns of performance we see occurring in many schools today. Thus, theories are continuing to be formulated in search of the missing pieces to the puzzle of why some African Americans succeed in school and why so many others are placed in classes for the educationally challenged.
Less anecdotal and more scientific information is needed to answer those questions, and Signithia Fordham’s “Blacked Out. Dilemmas of Race, Identity and Success at Capital High” is the latest attempt to address this perplexing issue. “Blacked Out” is an in-depth analysis of the in-school and out-of-school lives of African-American students at a Washington, D.C., secondary school with an enrollment of almost 2,000. Using an array of qualitative data collected for her dissertation research during the early 1980s, Fordham’s thesis is based on: observations and “participant watching”; formal and informal interviews; field notes of students, parents, teachers and other key school staff members; and quantified academic performance indicators.
But this ethnographic treatise combines a mixture of historical, anthropological, personal and social psychological tenets to examine why African Americans respond in different ways to learning opportunities and academic success. The historical and psychological dimensions play pivotal roles in the discussion as the author identifies and sorts out the numerous signs of dissonance, internal conflict and confusion, and daily dilemmas experienced by these African-American secondary students (and their teachers) who must decide how to survive and succeed in high school, yet maintain their “Blackness” and avoid becoming and being perceived as “the Other” (i.e., the dominant members of society).
