Underachievement in African American Elementary School Students

Historically, African American youth have underperformed and underachieved academically in comparison to other races. Is this the fault of the children? Could this be the result of poor parenting? Alternatively, could it be the lack of qualified teachers and administrative personnel? Whatever the case may be the black youth of this nation are in a constant struggle in order to attain success. This is even more prevalent for our inner city youth who are the most affected throughout this ordeal. This will be an attempt to identify and begin the process of eliminating some of the underlying causes of the Underachievement in African American Elementary students.

Research Questions

The problem is the underachievement of African American students in public schools. Possible causes of underachievement include family structure, socioeconomic status, and underfunded schools. What role does poverty play in contributing to the lack of progressive and productive education? In addition, is race a factor in the lack of quality education for African American youth in America? Are the resources evenly distributed and delegated? How can parents help to improve education for their children? These are just a few of the variables that I will attempt to answer through my research.

Methodology

The methodology used for this study was observation. Currently, I work with troubled youth in Baltimore City. I also visited five schools in some of Baltimore City's poorest neighborhoods. For the purpose of anonymity, I will not name the schools in this research paper.

Through my experience as a case manager for children , I have realized multiple contributing factors to the Underachievement of African American Elementary Students. The children that I work with are troubled and often have issues in school. When I visit them at their Baltimore City schools, I noticed the lack of relevant, new or even current materials. I have also visited other elementary schools in Baltimore city to complete my study.

In all of the five schools visited for this study, the books that are used to teach our youth are in bad condition and out-dated. Textbooks are important instrument for teaching children. According to Pearson (2009), reading comprehension has been a part of classrooms as long as there have been schools, texts, students, who desire to read them, and teachers wanting to both promote and assess their understanding. Students are working with texts for about 60% of the lesson time and most of their homework consists of studying texts (Johnsen, 1993). The comprehension of a text can range from the most superficial to deep understanding but the school learning requires a rather deep understanding of study texts (Kintsch, 1994). The majority of students comprehend study texts without difficulty but there are always some children for whom reading comprehension is a particularly difficult task (Spooner, Gathercole, & Baddeley, 2006; Megherbi, Seigneuric, & Ehrlich, 2006). Furthermore, Oakhill and Yuill (1996) pointed out that a reason for many students' learning difficulties is poor understanding of written texts.

Through my observations for this study, there is a clear connection between poor materials and poor performance. As a child when you received new things whether it was toys, gifts, etc. it created a level of excitement that previously was not present. The same thought process applies to education, a certain level of excitement must be created in multiple ways to motivate the average student and create a new system in order to implement higher learning that is more progressive.

There was a study done called "The enhanced learning program". "The major goal of the program was to establish an effective, ongoing and well-attended after-school program for any students who were underachieving and/or disengaged, and who volunteered to attend in order to improve their learning. Our focus was on the problem of children's disengagement from their academic learning." (D. Zyngier, 376) I studied the program and the clear goal was to promote learning in an abnormal manner.

The children were given options, they were not just force fed information in the typical manner, they were allowed to choose a focus and study that material.

"The idea is for those students who are perhaps not doing as well as they could, it could be bright kids who are in the pro-gram as well ... It's not for under performance or the kids who are low achievers, it's for kids who perhaps could have the bar raised for them. It's an opportunity to do that. I call it vicarious learning basically, because school for a lot of these kids is a bit of a pain [but] we don't want to replicate school again, so they're doing more school stuff." (Zyngier, 376)

"The programs ran for 8 weeks with sessions from 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm twice weekly. The afternoon started with volunteers playing some vigorous outside games with the children to 'shake out the sillies' before sitting down to a communal afternoon tea to 're-charge their batteries'. Children then had the option to either complete set homework or work towards their chosen learning goals. The majority, in choosing the latter, were excused from homework completion, opting for learning goals as diverse as story writing, project work, spelling, handwriting, numeracy activities like times-tables or computer skills. The volunteers assisted with these choices, which the children's parents would not have been able to help with at their homes." (Zyngier, 376)

After one hour of games, food and individual work on learning goals or homework, the groups participated in enhanced learning that included student choice opportunities in educationally rich activities. The volunteers developed the following twice-weekly Enhanced Learning Workshops:

∙ Animation & movie making

∙ Music, Dance & Drama

∙ Everyday Science

∙ Everyday Cooking

∙ Digital Photography

∙ Art & Mural Development

What I found is that the more input the child has the more engaged the child is likely to be. Children are like sponges, but they do more than just soak up information, they process and relate and desire certain things. I feel like programs such as this will only give life to the overall school systems and promote learning in a new innovative fashion that will produce results.

The goal is to find the right people to implement this type of initiative. They have to be innovators,