Perry, Theresa; Steele, Claude & Hilliard III, Asa. (2003). Young, gifted and black: Promoting high achievement among African-American students. Reviewed by Robert Q. Berry III, Old Dominion University

	Perry, Theresa; Steele, Claude & Hilliard III, Asa. (2003). Young, gifted and black: Promoting high achievement among African-American students. New York: Beacon Press. Pp. vii + 183 $25     ISBN 0-8070-3154-2 Reviewed by Robert Q. Berry III Old Dominion University July 30, 2004 The appearance of a gap in achievement is of concern to many educators, researchers, and policymakers. Evidence of disparities in achievement has shown up in assessment scores, course enrollment patterns, and allocation of resources. When examining the disparities and the achievement level of African American students, researchers have discussed significant academic and social challenges confronting African American students in their quest for education. Researchers’ examination points to a serious stifling in the educational system for African American students’ achievement, aspirations, and pride. African American students’ schooling is characterized by low achievement rates, curriculum inequities, tracking practices, and differential patterns of expulsion and suspension (Hilliard, 1994; Martin, 2003; Price, 2000; Weissglass, 2000). African American students are disproportionately represented in low ability group classes; over represented in special, vocational, and general education programs; underrepresented in gifted and talented academic programs; and underrepresented in upper level mathematics, science, and computer classes (Berry, 2003; Patton, 1995). Such data interact with the fact that African American students are frequently the victims of negative attitudes and lowered expectations from teachers, counselors, and administrators (Rousseau & Tate, 2003). Being the recipients of lowered expectations from school personnel, African American students often experience alienation and distancing in school. Young gifted and black: Promoting high achievement among African-American students is a book written by three leading African-American scholars: Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III. In this book, these scholars put forth their perspectives on the experiences and achievement of African American students in schools. The book is divided into three essays and each essay is the work of a single author. That is, each author contributed one essay to the book. Although the work on the authors are presented in this single volume and work of the authors share common perspectives and purposes, the authors contend that juxtaposing their work against one another adds to the conversation concerning the achievement of African-American students. They believe that the contemporary conservation about African American achievement ignores the unique challenges faced by African-American students in school and devalues the social identity of African-Americans. They “argue that a proper understanding of the forces acting on African-American students point to a variety of educational practices that we know can mitigate these obstacles and promote excellent achievement” (p. vii). Perry begins this book by presenting her essay, “Up from the parched earth: Towards a theory of African-American achievement.” This essay has three parts (a) Freedom from literacy and literacy for freedom, (b) Competing theories of group achievement, and (c) Achieving in the post-civil rights America: The outline of a theory. In the introduction, Perry presents short narratives of successful African-Americans who participated in a Educational Opportunity Program. She presents these narratives because “there are schools and programs all over the United States in which African-American youth routinely achieve at high levels. At these institutions, being working-class or poor, having parent who have not gone to college, being poorly prepared academically, being African-American—these variables are not impediments to academic achievement” (p. 3). Given the facts that there are programs and institutions that are able to promote success among African-American students, she in interested in trying to understand African-American school achievement from the perspective of African-American youth as thinking, feeling, and social and intentional beings. Perry argues that before one can theorize African-American school achievement, one must have an understanding of what the nature of the task of achievement is for African-Americans as African Americans. Essentially, she means one must understand the African American experience. Furthermore, she argues that there are prevailing assumptions among educators that the task of achievement for African-American as a group is that same as it is for any other group. Because learning is contextual, Perry argues that there are extra social, emotional, cognitive, and political competencies required for African-American youth. I agree with Perry’s assertion because by having an understanding of the what it means to be African American one can effectively explore the schooling experiences of African American students without situating these students as the other or viewing their experiences from a deficient position. At the end of the introduction, Perry discusses the achievement gap and examines the contemporary conversation about African-American achievement. Perry identifies problematic aspects of the contemporary conversation about the achievement gap and she discusses how the contemporary conversation is limited in it focus because it presents the achievement of African-American students in a deficient manner. She contends that aspects of these conversations are dangerous because it blames African-American parents, African students, and the African American community as primary factors for the underachievement of African American students. I believe this relevant because by blaming the African American community for the underachievement of African American students many educators never question the nature of schools as a contributory factor for African American students’ underachievement. Consequently, the conversations about African American achievement recycle the dangerous ideology that the African American moral, cultural, and intellect is deficient. In part one of her essay, “Freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom: The African American philosophy of education,” Perry uses narratives of eight African-Americans to demonstrate the African American philosophy of schooling. She contends that it is out of the lived experiences that African-Americans have developed a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of education. It is through the lived of experiences of struggle, denial of access to education and schooling, and racism that serves as a powerful motivating factors that leads to a philosophy of education. Perry argues that this philosophy is passed on in both oral and written narratives and institutionalized in the school communities created by African Americans. Slave narratives and contemporary narratives are presented. Abolitionist Frederick Douglas and female slave Harriet Jacobs are the two slave narratives presented. The slave narratives present Douglas and Jacobs’ struggle to learn to read and to serve their families. Activist Malcolm X, former United States surgeon general Joycelyn Elders, poets Haki Madhubuti and Maya Angelou, lawyer-turned-writer Gwendolyn Parker, civil rights activist Septima Clark, and neurosurgeon Ben Carson are the contemporary narratives used to examine an African American philosophy of education. The common elements that tie the narratives together are that “academic achievement, doing well in school and pursing learning… is always accomplished in the face of considerable constraints (p. 49). These constraints are impoverished conditions, absence of schools, laws that made reading and writing a crime, and ideology of intellectual inferiority of African Americans. The use of the narratives can serve as a tool of empowerment for readers. Through these narratives readers can identify the strengths, skills, and other significant factors it takes to overcome delimiting barriers. In part two of her essay, “Competing theories of group achievement,” Perry presents two theoretical frameworks used to explain and predict the school performance of racial minorities: cultural difference and Ogbu’s social mobility. Cultural difference theorists argue that the disproportionate school failure of African Americans and other racial minorities can be attributed to mismatch and/or conflicts between students’ home culture and school culture. Perry uses the cultural difference theory to discuss the conflict between students’ home language and communication styles, and language and communication styles valued in schools. In addition, Perry discusses Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. Ogbu’s social mobility theory contends that being a member of a racial minority group do not predict school performance, but, it is the terms of the group’s incorporation into the mainstream society and the group’s social position in that society predict and explain school performance. Perry offers interesting criticism of Ogbu’s theory by connecting the narratives used in part one of her essay to demonstrate that African Americans have a legacy of using education for freedom, racial uplift, citizenship, and leadership. In part three of her essay, “Achieving in post-civil rights America: The outline of a theory,” Perry outlines a theory of achievement for African Americans. She begins by discussing the African-American community during the pre-civil rights era. She contended that these communities served as counterhegemonic communities that were organized in opposition to white superiority and African-American inferiority. In the post-civil rights era, Perry contends that the ideology of African-American inferiority is more robust. Perry’s theory of achievement for African-Americans is predicated on African-American children negotiating three distinctive social identities: (a) membership in a castelike group; (b) membership in mainstream society; and (c) membership of a cultural group in opposition to which whiteness is defined. Perry places race at the center of her discussion of her theory. Perhaps a connection to critical race theory would strengthen her theory of achievement by providing explanatory model of how African American negotiate the three social identities. Claude Steele’s essay,”Stereotype threat and African American achievement,” he discusses how stereotype threat can be a cause for the underachievement of African American students. Stereotype threat is defined as “the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of going something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype” (p. 111). He contends that everyone experiences stereotype threat. To measure stereotype threat, Steele described a study in which he and his colleagues administered a section of the Graduate Record Exam in English literature to African American and White students with similar intellectual abilities. They found that when the African American students were told that the test was of a diagnostic nature there was a significant difference in performance but when the test was of a non-diagnostic nature there was not a significant difference in performance. Steele and his colleagues demonstrated that stereotype threat affects the performance of white males when the white males were told that they were taking a mathematics test that Asian generally did better on than Whites. When looking at the effect of stereotype threat across gender, Steele and his colleagues found women who had similar mathematics ability as men were affected by stereotype threat on a mathematics test. By showing that stereotype threat, effects everyone, Steele strengthens the notion that stereotype threat is can be a prevailing factor for African American students’ underachievement is school. This important because, as Perry noted in her essay, cultural capital advantages those who come to school grounded in the ethos of the ideals valued most by schools. Steele suggest that the effects of stereotype threat cause extra apprehension on Black students and that performance is less about their ability than it is about “having to perform on a test and in a situation that may be primed to treat them stereotypically” (p. 123). Steele offered three strategies that may help in dealing with stereotype threat: (a) pedagogy and relationship between students and teachers, (b) institutional and contextual changes designed to promote diversity, fair, and justice for all groups, and (c) expandable personal theory of intelligence in which one views their intelligence through effort and experiences. Asa Hilliard III concludes the book with his essay, No mystery: Closing the achievement gap between Africans and excellence. In this essay Hilliard call for reconceptualizing the achievement gap. Traditionally, the achievement gap is defined as the differential in performance among ethnicities and gender. Hilliard conceptualizes the achievement gap as the difference between what is defined as excellence and actual performance. He challenges the traditional definition because by defining the achievement gap as the difference between white students’ performance and African American students’ performance whiteness is normalized. Furthermore, he contends that white students’ performance is mediocre at best and that the standard for excellence should be better than mediocre. Hilliard suggests that that the traditional definition of the achievement gap may show a gap in the opportunity to learn rather than the gap in intelligence. Instruments used to measure intelligence cannot accurately measure intelligence because the instruments favor students who have the privileged opportunity to be exposed to the items on the instrument. Hilliard offers examples of excellence that serves as models for addressing the gap between performance and excellence. The common element between all three essays is that teaching, learning, and achievement for African American students is contextual. The contextual nature of each essay indicates that the experiences of African American students impact their achievement. Consequently, these students need to have positive experiences in school, need models of excellence, and must develop positive self-identity. Perry, Steele, and Hilliard essays compliment each other and offer varying perspectives to the issue of the achievement gap. References Berry, III, R. Q. (2003). Voices of African American Male Students: A Portrait of Successful Middle School Mathematics Students. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC. Hilliard, A. (1994). Misunderstanding and testing intelligence. In Goodlad, J. & Keating, P. (Eds.). Access to knowledge: The continuing agenda for our nation's schools (pp. 145-157). New York: College Board. Martin, D. B. (2003). Hidden assumptions and unaddressed questions in mathematics for all rhetoric. The Mathematics Educator 13(2), 7–21. Patton, J. M. (1995). The education of African American males: Frameworks for developing authenticity. Journal of African American Men, 1(1), 5-27. Price, J. N. (2000). Against the Odds: The Meaning of School and Relationships in the Lives of Six Young African-American Men. Stamford, CT: Ablex. Rousseau, C., & Tate, W. F. (2003). No time like the present: Reflecting on equity in school mathematics. Theory into Practice, 42(3), 210-216. Weissglass, J. (2000). No compromise on equity in mathematics education: Developing an infrastructure. In W. Secada (Ed). Changing the faces of mathematics: perspectives on multiculturalism and gender equity. Reston, VA: NCTM. About the Reviewer Robert Q. Berry III received his PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2002. His is currently an assistant professor in the mathematics education department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA.