African American Education System

Over the course of its history, America was forced to deal with race issues and consequent social implications, unlike any other country. Though legally and legislatively African Americans no longer suffer the implications of racism, the racial inequalities sustained and inadvertently filter into the racial hierarchy that we see today. Despite the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs. The Board of Education, a milestone case that declares separating public schools for African American and white students unconstitutional, the achievement gap widened since the 1990s (Lee, 2002). Various ways measure the achievement gap including average point grade, standardized tests, honor class placements, high school graduation and dropout rates. Statistics …show more content…
White standards and values are the foundations of how the schools are run. African American, as a minority, has to adjust and conform to white norms implemented by institutions. According to Gosa and Alexander, black students have difficulty forming positive relationships with teachers and administrators, and more are seen as displaying problem behaviors at a rate far exceeding that of their white peer. Teachers deem those who are unwilling to accept the values held by privileged classes as "troublemakers" and often place them into lower level class, a form of resegregation. Both the structure of the school and teachers’ beliefs toward a certain racial group support stereotypes. In this case, African Americans are labeled as naturally the least intelligent and motivated. The expectation from the teachers and administrators are based primarily on the stereotypes. Ferguson (2003) argues that teachers’ expectations for success were higher for White students than for African American students. Not only do the teachers have lower expectations for African American students, the students consequently end up having lower expectations for themselves. Black students may assume that because no black …show more content…
Claude Steele first introduced the concept “stereotype threat” as “the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype.” In his experiment to test whether the stereotype threat that black students might experience when taking a difficult test could depress their performance, they mentioned the test was a measure of verbal ability. The result is exactly what Steele expected: Black students performed a standard deviation lower than their white peers. The fact that the removal of such potential stereotype threat improved black students’ score to that of equally qualified white peers further proves the connection between stereotype threat and academic performance. Steele also found out that those most motivated and skilled African American students are affected the most by stereotype threats. A person has to care about a domain to be impaired by such stereotype. These students pay extra efforts into their works ineffectively, worrying that their future may confirm to the stereotype others held to them. Philip Uri Treisman, a math professor at the University of Texas, saw the similar pattern in his Black students: they work long hours, checking and rechecking their calculation rather than the

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