Emotionally engaging African American male students in school

After decades of underperformance African-American adolescent male students were increasingly staying in school, graduating, and a small subgroup of these students were achieving at the highest levels (Hrabowski, Maton, Grief, 1998; Noguera, 2008). Several data points were useful for framing the discussion about African-American adolescent male achievement. More African-American males were enrolled in college (1.2 million) than incarcerated (841 thousand) in 2009 despite the pernicious stereotype that the reverse is true (Toldson and Morton, 2011). The dropout rate for African-American male students fell from 30% in 1967 to 10% in 2009 but remained 4 percentage points higher than white males.¹ According to Toldson, Brown, and Sutton (2009) the graduation rate for African-American adolescent males increased from 18% in 1960 to 80% in 2007 but remained 10 percentage points lower than white males. The baccalaureate (four-year college degree) completion rate for African-American males increased from 3% in 1960 to 15% in 2007 but was approximately half the rate of college completion for white males (Toldson, Brown, and Sutton, 2009). Nine academically successful African-American male students served as the key informants of the study. The literature review concerning academically successful students covered four bodies of research; 1) empirical studies of academically successful African-American students; 2) research on resilience - the ability of students to overcome obstacles in their personal and school lives; 3) research that focuses on cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement that has been related to academic success among students and 4) the research on school improvement. A conceptual framework emerged from the literature review that identified three engagement factors and non-school factors that would serve as the basis for my study. Three major findings and several other findings emerged from the study and were aligned with the factors outlined in the conceptual framework. The major findings were that students felt that positive student-teacher relationships, peer acceptance, and participation in extracurricular activities were partially responsible for their academic success. Other findings found that parental guidance, curriculum, and following classroom rules may have contributed to their academic success in some small way.