Eliminating the achievement gap for young men of color

Researchers, policymakers and practitioners have worked to reduce the achievement gap for young men of color for decades – but according to the latest research, the gap in graduation rates continues to widen. The Partnership for After School Education thinks it may have a solution: help those disparate groups work together.

“Have you looked at the population you’re serving, have you looked at how successful you’ve been?” said Alison Overseth, PASE’s executive director. “We’ve been doing a whole lot of things that haven’t been working, and if we’re not looking for alternate ways of addressing serious issues, then we’re just kind of idiots.”

PASE, a nonprofit which promotes and supports high-quality afterschool programs, hosted a sold-out conference on Dec. 12 titled “Pockets of Hope: A Summit on Protective Practices for Boys of Color in Afterschool.” The panelists were academics, elected officials and program leaders from various nonprofits who have been working together to support the potential of young men of color, including Assemblyman Michael Blake; Edward Fergus-Arcia, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy with New York University’s Steinhardt School; and W. Cyrus Garrett, executive director of New York City’s Young Men’s Initiative.

Overseth told attendees her relationship with Fergus-Arcia was cemented when the researcher said he was applying for grants and asked her what she wanted to know. “Actually saying – what are some of the questions we actually need answers to, so that we can do what we do better – is really powerful,” Overseth said.

Research may not be accessible to practitioners, Overseth said. Hence the need to democratize research by better sharing cutting-edge findings directly with practitioners. It’s also about researchers becoming partners who develop research ideas with on-the-ground practitioners – rather than just fellow academics. Policymakers must be made aware of the strategies that are working so that they can apply resources to help maximize impact.

“Take the opportunities to actually explore research based on questions that practitioners actually have rather than the research questions that may tickle our funny bones as researchers,” Fergus-Arcia said during the event’s opening panel.

PASE is applying this idea to one of the most intractable challenges in youth development: helping young men of color achieve life goals at levels that are on par with other youth.

President Barack Obama trained his attention on this issue when he created the My Brother’s Keeper initiative targeting achievement gaps among young men of color in health, academics and employment. The White House modeled its effort, in part, on New York City’s Young Men’s Initiative, created in 2011. YMI is a public-private partnership begun under Mayor Michael Bloomberg that works to remove policy barriers to the developmental success of young men of color by finding and supporting successful pilot programs, making an investment for up to four years, and referring the most effective programs to city agencies for scaling up, Garrett said.

During the summit, Blake pointed out that New York was the first state in the nation to financially support a My Brother’s Keeper-aligned initiative. Carl Heastie, the state’s first African-American Assembly speaker, allocated $20 million in the current fiscal year to create a state version of the program.

But barriers to success remain. They include how evidenced-based curricula are integrated into the classrooms of young men of color, assumptions that are built into the research, underprepared staff and under-resourced schools – the list seems endless.

Economic hardship can prompt students to undo their own hard-earned successes. A child may intentionally fail so they can enjoy the safety and security of being in summer school as opposed to being on the streets, Blake said. They may even intentionally misbehave during the day just to secure an additional meal provided by the school during disciplinary hours.

PASE, with funding from the Robert Bowne Foundation and in partnership with NYU’s Steinhardt School, is addressing some of these challenges with the Boys of Color in Afterschool: Protective Practices Institute. It works to democratize the research by thoroughly embedding effective practices into afterschool programs. The Institute, selected 12 afterschool partners – including CAMBA Inc., Good Shepherd Services and the East Harlem Tutorial Program – to discuss, document and share findings with other community-based organizations.

The protective practices are based on the research of Fergus-Arcia, who conducted a three-year study of black and Latino boys attending seven all-male schools across the country. It highlights the importance of properly conceptualizing the questions that inform the research, and of creating a hospitable school climate – because even the best curriculum can fail to achieve expected outcomes if implemented within a climate that is inhospitable to young men of color.

Fergus-Arcia defines school climate as an “ecology of beliefs that exist in the different kinds of spaces kids are living in.” Among those beliefs are colorblindness, the assumption that society is better served by omitting the notion of race and ethnicity; and poverty disciplining belief, which presumes people in low-income communities have psychological and behavioral dispositions that keep them there and must be disciplined out.

It’s this discussion of climate that is part of what drew Overseth to Fergus-Arcia’s work.

“Curricula is often a ‘go do this now’-type thing,” Overseth said. “I think these issues get to … the environment in which it’s all happening. It’s about how you reflect on how we teach – not just what we teach.”

Panelists at the summit agreed that how teachers teach can be critical to creating a climate that is conducive to the success of young men of color.

Garrett said the city’s RFP process must be intentional about requiring programs to include the necessary elements for a healthy school climate, he said.

“If we don’t dictate to you how we want you to fulfill that mission intentionally, then you’re going to interpret it any way you want. And based on the lens that you bring to the work, that’s how it’s going to be meted out,” Garrett said.

Blake said, “You can have a teacher that’s a remarkable teacher, but they can be terrible at educating a black boy. And can be terrified of educating a Latino kid.”

There can also be regional issues because black and Latino young men in the South Bronx are different from those in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and logistical issues if programs are not properly rooted in communities. “I need to be able to tell people where to go and access it, how to get into it,” Garrett said. “How does it work with the flow of the culture in that community?”

At other times, programming isn’t successful simply because it hasn’t been designed with the input of young people.

“As soon as the program doesn’t work we blame the young people for the program not working: ‘They didn’t do this. There wasn’t enough that. They didn’t show up on time,’” Garrett said. “Because the program was actually about us, we designed it. Our pride of ownership in it gets in the way.”

The summit aimed to encourage researchers, policymakers and practitioners to consider the importance of their collaborative work.

“Communities of color will eventually be the majority workforce of this state,” Garrett said. “If disparities are not addressed – we will arrive at an unsustainable situation where we have more people taking money out of the system than putting money in.”

Rev. Alfonso Wyatt, a consultant to nonprofits on techniques for working with hard-to-reach youth, encouraged all stakeholders to become “merchants of hope,” focused on putting out fires, instead of chasing smoke. He recounted attending a picnic where some disapproving older women chastised a young man wearing his pants below his underwear.

“I told my sisters, ‘His pants are not his primary problem, that was merely smoke,’” Wyatt said.  “But if we could ever figure out how to get him to pull up his mind – his pants will follow. Fire!”