Schools in New York City improved outcomes for Black and Latino boys through a multipronged approach that includes culturally relevant education, improved school relationships, and robust academic and college preparation.

As I walked the halls of the school, cheers and applause erupted from one of the classrooms. Inside, a group of 30 boys (and a few of their teachers) were celebrating. Many were out of their chairs, some were walking around excitedly, nearly all of them smiling in anticipation. What could generate such a reaction?

The class turned out to be a peer mentoring group of Black and Latino young men in grades 9-12. For months, they had been meeting twice a week after lunch to talk about their classes, their lives outside school, and their plans for college. They had visited a historically Black college together and were planning another trip upstate. Some had bonded over the Brooklyn Nets, some over gaming, and others over anime. But today, they were celebrating each other. This afternoon’s ceremony recognized the students in each grade who had earned the highest grade point average (GPA) that semester and those whose GPA had improved the most. Though the certificates they received that day were modest, the support and love of their peers was palpable.

I revisited that group many times over the next few years as part of a five-year study of an effort across 40 New York City schools to improve outcomes for Black and Latino young men. Peer mentoring, and other relationship-based programs, were a part of this complex, districtwide initiative.

Gender and racial gaps and COVID-19

Since the early 1980s, women have outpaced men in educational outcomes. Young women are more likely to have a college degree, graduate from high school on time, and outperform their male counterparts on reading tests in the lower grades (Reeves & Smith, 2022). The gender gap is even more pronounced among Black and Latino students. The five-year graduation rates for Black and Latino males, for example, are 15 and 10 percentage points behind that of Black girls and Latinas respectively (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022b).

These disparities have only widened in the last few years as Black and Latino youth are more likely to have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Since 2019, the academic growth of boys of color has been significantly less than is typical, and the gaps are growing between boys of color and girls in their racial/ethnic groups and between boys of color and their white and Asian peers (Lewis et al., 2022). Though college enrollment declined across racial and gender groups during the pandemic, the decrease was three times larger among male students (Sedmak, 2020). Specifically, enrollment rates dropped 14.3% among Black men and 10.3% among Latinos (Graham, 2022; Kim, 2022).

As districts and schools across the country invest federal resources to close pandemic-related gaps (Hill & Destler, 2022), educators should consider the ways schools contributed to racial and gender gaps (long before the pandemic) and aim to create schools where boys can feel safe and thrive.

How schools alienate boys of color

Research has long shown how schools and classrooms can alienate boys of color, limiting their opportunities to thrive academically (Fergus, Noguera, & Martin, 2020; Howard, 2014; Huerta, Howard, & Haro, 2020). Teacher perceptions of student behavior play a prominent role in these dynamics. For example, Black and Latino males are more likely to be referred for disciplinary action, suspended, or expelled than their white and Asian peers for the same infractions (Rios, 2011; Skiba et al., 2011). Educators also often have negative perceptions of the academic ability of boys of color (Redding, 2019). Boys of color are more likely to be overrepresented in special education classes and underrepresented in gifted and talented courses (Ford, 2010; Harry & Klingner, 2014) — designations that teachers and administrators often have discretion over.

Some of these biases are rooted in the racial and cultural mismatch between teachers and students. While students of color make up slightly more than 50% of the total student population in the U.S., the teacher workforce is 82% white (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). The lack of teachers of color is important given the mounting evidence showing the positive effects of same-race teachers, including increased attendance, reduced suspensions, and better academic performance (Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015; Gershenson et al. 2022; Goldhaber, Theobald, & Tien, 2019). Given these circumstances, it shouldn’t be surprising that boys of color report less satisfaction with school (Barbarin et al., 2013).

Testing new approaches

In August 2011, New York City launched the Young Men’s Initiative (YMI). Similar to My Brother’s Keeper, started by President Barack Obama in 2014, YMI focused on improving outcomes for young males of color in education, health, employment, and criminal justice. Under the umbrella of YMI, the Expanded Success Initiative (ESI) was launched to improve college readiness among Black and Latino males through a multipronged framework focused on academics, youth development, and school culture. ESI provided 40 participating public high schools (serving more than 20,000 students) professional development and resources to create and expand targeted programming for male students of color.

As my research team studied ESI for more than five years, we learned a great deal about what it takes for schools to better serve boys of color, especially at the middle and high school levels. Three areas of school change were prominent: 1) developing culturally relevant classrooms, 2) fostering positive school relationships, and 3) offering robust academic and college preparation.

It’s important to note that while the initiative was designed to target boys, some of these boys challenged traditional notions of gender, and some girls pushed to be included in the programs. Schools may want to consider how their language and programming can be inclusive, while still attending to the historical and persistent disparities faced by boys of color.

Developing culturally relevant classrooms

Culturally relevant education (CRE) empowers students by incorporating their cultural backgrounds in all aspects of learning (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and enabling them to think critically about systems of power and sources of social inequities (Dover, 2013). The use of CRE has been shown to increase students’ engagement and motivation, their perceptions of their own ability, and their academic achievement (Aronson & Laughter, 2016).

ESI schools infused CRE into classrooms in three specific ways:

  • Expanding the curriculum to reflect students’ identities and realities.
  • Engaging students in critical reflection about their communities and society at large.
  • Providing students opportunities to see themselves as agents of change.

First, educators took a hard look at their current textbooks and materials to assess areas for improvement using tools such as the Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecards developed by New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. In response to this assessment, teachers sought to expand their traditional high school canon to include texts written by authors of color and featuring male protagonists of color. One teacher explained this move:

I didn’t realize that all the literature I was teaching in my class was so much focused on the female’s perspective and experience. I didn’t realize how tuned out my boys were. That was causing them to withdraw from the curriculum. They weren’t as motivated. They weren’t being as successful as they could. With that, I was able to reflect and recreate my curriculum to make it more balanced. I started looking at more books, and novels, and short stories, and articles that will not only be successful and interesting for my girls, but also include the boys.

Beyond encouraging the use of representative texts and materials, CRE also challenges educators to engage students in work related to real-world events and issues that matter to them. For boys of color, the number of police shootings and New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy became prominent topics of discussion in classrooms and peer mentoring groups. A 12th-grade history teacher, for example, decided to temporarily forgo a planned lesson to engage students in a discussion after a grand jury failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri:

When the indictment — well, lack of indictment — came back, I set aside whatever I had planned because the idea was whatever I taught them that day, in 20 years they’ll forget. If I took the time to talk about what had happened and actually let them talk about what had happened and ask questions that they didn’t know who to ask or where to get the answers, that’s something that they were going to walk away with and that was going be something meaningful to them that they were going to carry much further than the causes of the Civil War.

By the latter years of the initiative, some ESI schools also were implementing learning experiences inside and outside the classroom that helped boys of color see themselves as agents of change in their communities and beyond. These included having students write to local leaders, design technological solutions to issues like food insecurity, become active in the Black Lives Matter movement, or participate in local protests and other actions.

Fostering positive school relationships

Female students are more likely than male students to report positive relationships with teachers and more academically oriented relationships with peers in schools (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). Yet studies focused on Black and Latino boys in particular have highlighted the positive impact of relationships on academic success (Fergus, Noguera, & Martin, 2020). For these reasons, ESI schools sought to promote positive interactions between adults and students as well as between peers.

One of the most effective approaches to cultivate community and connectedness in ESI schools was peer mentoring groups. In these groups — typically facilitated by two teachers and largely led by students — 11th- and 12th-grade boys served as mentors for 9th- and 10th-grade boys. Week to week, the students set their own agendas for topics of discussion (e.g., relationships, going away for college) or workshops (e.g., financial literacy, getting internships). These programs provided a unique space in school for boys to share openly about things they care about and helped establish school as a place they could come to for friendship and brotherhood. One 11th-grade student shared:

I think that this program teaches you how to be compassionate for other people and to create something that you can’t get anywhere else. . . . To have these guys [to talk to] every day that I came to school just made me want to come to school that much more because I got to be with my brothers in a sense. I got to be with my family.

Teachers in ESI schools also created formalized spaces where they could get to know their male students outside the academic classroom. One of these programs was known as the Umoja (“unity” in Swahili) Network for Young Men. In Umoja, which targeted the lowest-performing boys in each grade, participants met twice a week, bonding with other students, while also receiving emotional and academic support from teachers they may not interact with in their own classes. One of the teachers reflected on how this space affected his relationships with students:

I would just say from my personal experience, having the ability to have this class with boys or young men, it’s affected the way I view them. Through meeting with them twice a week, I get to connect and communicate with them on a more candid level. It’s not just simply academic. We actually get to talk about a lot of things that they probably wouldn’t talk to a teacher about on a normal basis. I think it’s affected how quickly I’ve been able to immerse myself and feel comfortable with the students.

Efforts to create a more positive school climate for boys of color also included a shift in how schools addressed discipline and suspensions. To reduce disproportionality in suspensions and other disciplinary measures, educators asked themselves questions like these to identify common patterns:

  • Are specific teachers more likely to remove students from class?
  • Is there a time of day that is especially challenging for teachers and students?
  • Are the students repeatedly removed from class struggling with other issues?

A principal shared, “If you look at the list of the kids who get kicked out of class and never get asked back, those tend to be Black boys. We need to think about that as a school and why that is happening.”

ESI educators received training in how to deescalate conflict between adults and students as well as between students. Some schools also implemented more formal alternatives to suspension, including restorative justice programs, youth court, and student-led facilitated social justice panels. These programs allow students to take active roles in handling conflict, understand the root causes of the infractions that students commit, and decide upon appropriate strategies for repairing the harm to the community.

Offering robust academic and college preparation

After years of disengagement in school, some male students at ESI schools were facing significant gaps in skills. To target these gaps, ESI schools offered one-on-one or small-group tutoring before and after school. Research has shown that 9th grade is a critical time for getting students on track to succeed in high school and college (Kemple, Segeritz, & Stephenson, 2013). At ESI schools, summer bridge programs were especially effective at preparing incoming 9th-grade students and helping teachers identify students who would need additional academic support.

Struggling students may need extra support, but they shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to engage in honors and Advanced Placement courses and other higher-level offerings, especially when they serve as important signifiers for college admission. We know, for example, that students who have taken four years of math and science are more likely to enroll in college (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022a), Yet Black and Latinx students are less likely to be exposed to advanced math and science courses, such as calculus and physics (Office for Civil Rights, 2018). With these trends in mind, some ESI schools restructured students’ course schedules to ensure that they could complete at least four years of math and science before graduating.

After a trip to a historically Black college, one principal recalled a student saying, “Wow, I never knew we could go there.”

ESI schools also became more explicitly focused on preparing boys of color for college, starting in the 9th grade, versus aiming only for high school graduation. This effort included taking students on college trips, providing information about the college application process and financial aid, partnering with higher education institutions that allow high school students to take college classes and earn college credit, infusing college-level activities into existing academic courses, and hosting college workshops for families. Some schools also partnered with external organizations, including Equal Opportunity Schools, FirstGen Fellows, National College Access Network, OneGoal, and QuestBridge.

Attention to students’ college-going identity — their ability to see themselves in college — plays an important role in  students’ decision to enroll, especially among young men (Huerta, McDonough, & Allen, 2018). After a trip to a historically Black college, one principal recalled a student saying, “Wow, I never knew we could go there.” One 12th-grade student reflected on how college trips in the 9th and 10th grades motivated his college pursuits:

[It] was a visual aid, how college life would be from the early-on stage. . . . My first college trip was to upstate New York, when we visited SUNY Cortland and Mercy College. We visited a bunch of different schools, and it was really interesting just to see lecture halls and to see dorms and all of that. . . . That’s where it made me start thinking about where I wanted to go.

Exposure to college and current college students (especially if they are alumni of their high school) helped students uncover any unspoken barriers preventing them from enrolling in college. These included doubts over adapting to a different environment, being separated from family, paying for college, or being an undocumented student. Schools addressed these concerns directly by connecting students to current students on campus, providing students information on need- and merit-based scholarships, and educating families about resources for undocumented students on college campuses.

From alienation to connection

Black and Latino young men in ESI schools reported a stronger sense of fair treatment and belonging than their peers in non-ESI schools, particularly in grades 11 and 12. They also were more likely to report discussing their plans for the future with an adult. And just over two-thirds of the Black and Latino young men in ESI schools graduated with a Regents diploma within four years of entering high school.

While schools have historically been spaces of alienation for boys of color, thereby limiting their abilities to succeed academically, ESI schools showed how making classrooms more relevant to their lives, improving their in-school relationships, and removing academic barriers can help transform schools into inviting places where boys of color feel welcome, supported, and loved.

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This article appears in the April 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 7, pp. 6-11.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Adriana Villavicencio

ADRIANA VILLAVICENCIO is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine.