Family Engagement in Black Students' Academic Success: Achievement and Resistance in an American Suburban School

This book explores how Black families and students navigate a racially diverse suburban school district in America, challenging sanctioned racist practices and advocating for high-quality education. It highlights the importance of Black American family history, values, and collective efforts in students' success, emphasizing the need for inclusive school decision-making and collective strategies for social justice.

Format: Hardback
Length: 218 pages
Publication date: 16 March 2021
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This timely and comprehensive volume presents powerful stories told by Black families and students who have successfully navigated a racially fraught, affluent, and diverse suburban school district in America. Through rich qualitative data collected through interviews and interactions with parents and kin, students, community activists, and educators, Family Engagement in Black Students Academic Success chronicles how pride in Black American family history and values, students' personal capabilities, and their often collective, proactive challenges to systemic and personal racism shape students' academic engagement. The familial and collective cultural wealth of the Black community emerges as a central driver in students' successful achievement.

Furthermore, the text offers key recommendations to demonstrate how incorporating the knowledge and voices of Black families in school decision-making, remaining critically conscious of race and racial history in everyday actions and longer-term policy, and pursuing collective strategies for social justice in education can help eliminate current opportunity gaps and counteract the master narrative of underachievement that is ever-present in America.

This volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and academics with an interest in matters of social justice, equity, and equality of opportunity in education for Black Americans. In addition, the text provides valuable insights for school authorities in building effective working relationships with Black American families to support the high achievement of Black students in K–12 education.

Weight: 514g
Dimension: 157 x 236 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367721770