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Achieving the elimination of racial differences in test performance, as set forth in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), requires education policies that engage the reality that African American test performances are not only about race but also about gender and residential status. In an effort to inform education policymaking with research that explores race–gender and residential inequality, I assess the growth of reading gaps in school and non-school contexts using a national and city sample of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal, Kindergarten Cohort 1998–1999. I found that inequality in test performances was greater in the city than elsewhere, and African American boys shoulder a disproportionate educational burden related to city residency and enrollment in city schools. Additionally, children in city neighborhoods – where drugs and burglary are big problems – experience large shortfalls in reading in school and non-school contexts. I conclude with a discussion of the study’s implications for future educational policy, practice, and research, especially NCLB, which mandates that public schools achieve parity among racial groups by the end of the 2013–2014 academic year.

With the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination in employment with respect to the hiring, promotion and pay of minorities and women became illegal in the United States.¹ Yet, 40 years later, earnings differentials still persist between certain minorities and white non-Hispanics and between women and men. For example, although the ratio of black men's earnings to those of white men and of black women's to white women's have increased considerably over the past 50 years, the black–white ratio was still only 78% in 2003 among men and 87% among women (Fig. 1). Hispanic–white wage differentials are larger than the black–white differential among both men and women (Figs. 2 and 3). And despite a significant narrowing in the gender gap, the ratio of women's earnings to men's was about 76% in 2003 (Fig. 4).²

Purpose – This chapter draws on tenets of the “new” sociology of childhood, which posit that children are affected by social structures in the same way that adults are, to formulate an explanation for the black–white test-score gap.

Methodology – It builds on an analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes, which recorded the experiences of early elementary school students in a racially homogeneous school in a low-income African-American neighborhood.

Findings – The case is made that the children were oppressed by adults in the school. Being in school was almost a wholly negative experience for children. Students' active strategies to protect the self were ineffective, which led to their shutting down emotionally. Like adults in similar social contexts, children's energy was devoted to self-protection rather than to being a student.

This chapter focuses on two aspects of the achievement gap – underachievement and low achievement among Black males in urban school contexts. More specifically, the authors explain several problems/issues confronting Black male students in P-12 gifted and talented, advanced placement, and special education programs, along with the school-to-prison pipeline – inequitable discipline in the form of suspensions and expulsions. We parse underrepresentation and overrepresentation for this student group. A central part of this discussion is grounded in the achievement gap literature on Black students in general with implications for Black males in particular. Another fundamental aspect of this discussion is the need for educators to adopt an anti-racist (social justice or civil rights) and cultural competence approach to their work, which means being equity-based and culturally responsive in philosophy and action. Suggestions for closing the achievement gap and otherwise improving the achievement of Black males are provided for educators. We also compel educators to go beyond talking about equity by setting quantifiable equity goals for minimum and maximum percentages (and numbers).

This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, differences between blacks and whites in the United States concerning the intergenerational transmission of occupational skills and the effects on sons’ earnings. The father–son skill correlation is measured by the correlation coefficient (or cosine of the angle) between the father’s skill vector and the son’s skill vector. The skill vector comprises an individual’s occupational characteristics from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). According to data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), white sons earn higher wages in occupations that require skills similar to those of their fathers, whereas black sons in such circumstances incur a wage loss. A large portion of the racial wage gap is explained by the father–son skill correlation. However, a significant unexplained racial wage gap remains at the lower tail of the wage distribution.

For more than a century, state and federal governments and organizations have used different measures to determine if students and groups of students have achieved in a particular subject or grade level. While the construct of achievement is applied irrespective of student differences, this equal application turns out to be anything but equitable. In this chapter, we work to understand the way achievement plays out for Black students by deconstructing how the word achievement works. In doing so, we track the history of education, testing, and curriculum as it has been applied to Black youth and youth of color.

Social psychological perspectives on educational stratification offer explanations that bridge the macro and micro social worlds. However, while ethnoracial disparities in academic achievement are evident during the earliest grade levels, most social psychological research in this area has examined high school or college student samples and has used a black–white binary to operationalize race.

We use longitudinal structural equation models to examine links between academic self-efficacy beliefs and school performance among a national sample of diverse third- through eighth-grade students in the United States.

Contrary to hypotheses derived from the student identity literature, we find no evidence that elementary and middle school students from different ethnoracial backgrounds vary in the degree to which they selectively discount evaluative feedback in their academic self-efficacy construction, nor in the extent to which they demonstrate disrupted links between academic self-efficacy and subsequent academic performance.

The study examines the extent to which race-linked social psychological processes may be driving academic achievement inequalities during the primary schooling years.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1998) this article analyses the labour market status of African‐American women in management positions. The results show that among supervisors with a high school and college education, black women earn lower wages than black men even after controlling for detailed background, personal, and human capital characteristics. The lower earnings of black female supervisors can partly be attributed to the fact that they are segregated in predominantly female jobs. Additionally, in contrast to black males and white females, black females do not earn significant wage premiums associated with supervisory duties.

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) aims to reevaluate standardized-state testing. Previous research has assessed its impact on schools, educators, and students; yet, youth’s voices are almost absent. Therefore, this qualitative analysis examines how youth of color perceive and experience standardized-state testing.

Seventy-three youth participated in a semistructured interview during the summer of 2015. The sample consists of 34 girls and 39 boys, 13–18 years of age, of African American, Latino/a, Jamaican American, multiracial/ethnic, and other descent. It includes 6–12th graders who attended 61 inter-district and intra-district schools during the 2014–2015 academic year in a Northeastern metropolitan area in the United States that is undergoing a racial/ethnic integration reform.

Youth experienced testing overload under conflicting adult authorities and within an academically stratified peer culture on an ever-shifting policy terrain. While the parent-adult authority remained in the periphery, the state-adult authority intrusively interrupted the teacher-student power dynamics and the disempowered teacher-adult authority held youth accountable through the “attentiveness” rhetoric. However, youth’s perspectives and lived experiences varied across grade levels, school modalities, and school-geographical locations.

In this adult-dominated society, the market approach to education reform ultimately placed the burden of teacher and school evaluation on youth. Most importantly, youth received variegated messages from their conflicting adult authorities that threatened their academic journeys.

International assessment data consistently indicate that when compared to their peers from other major developed nations, American students, irrespective of their race, underperform in reading and mathematics (Darling Hammond, 2010; NCES, 2011; PIRLS, 2011; PISA, 2009; TIMSS, 2011). Within an American context, African American males generally have the lowest reading scores as compared to their White peers (Husband, 2012; NCES, 2011; Schott Foundation, 2010; Spellings Report, 2006). Existing research indicates that these disparities in academic performance are a result of inequalities in access to quality education and differences in the treatment of students, which are deeply imbedded in historical patterns of racial, gendered, and class discrimination. However, past studies also indicate that these same students optimize their learning experiences and become high performers when they receive high quality instruction and school enrichments. Thus, this chapter examines the use of Readers Theater as an instructional model that may help to enhance the school achievement of student groups, such as African American males. The chapter documents the challenges that Black males face in schools and proposes performing arts education as a mediating mechanism and reading enhancement tool. Additionally, it includes an in-depth description of Readers Theater and examines several studies on this instructional method and its potential impact on African American males and their reading skills.