Using interview and observational data in one rural southern high school, this study explores how students are organized by race and how they negotiate those arrangements in predominantly Black school context. Although predominantly Black schools can provide safe spaces for Black students to thrive socially and academically without suspicion of…

The summer between high school and college as a point of intervention to help more students successfully transition from the K-12 sector to higher education is gaining notice. This qualitative study builds on recent research on the "summer melt" and offers a fresh perspective of students from an urban Los Angeles public high school who,…

National reports recognize a growing gender gap in postsecondary enrollment as a major challenge impacting the lives of young men, particularly African Americans. Previous gender and race specific research is largely inconclusive. It is, for example, unclear from previous research how persistent the gender gap is across various school contexts,…

Sixty years have passed since the pivotal 1954 Supreme Court case of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" and almost fifty years have elapsed since the Higher Education Act of 1965. The Brown decision dismantled public segregated schools in many parts of the country, especially in the South, and racial access in schools…

Data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction archive are used to assess the joint effect of race and gender on advanced academic (advanced placement and honors) course enrollment within a school district with an open enrollment policy. Using student SAT scores; the authors compare expected levels of advanced course enrollment for…

Racial inequality in education is a serious problem in the United States. The latest government attempt to address this problem was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). This study used the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002) to examine the relationship between race and composite reading and math scores among Black and White…

Closing the racial achievement gap has been a cornerstone of recent education reform, especially as accountability measures are increasingly relied upon to drive academic performance standards. This article questions the term "achievement gap" and its implication that White students perform better on standardized tests due to greater effort and…

This study examined the relationship between participation in school-based sports and drug use among Black and White high school students, using data from participants in the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS, NCES, 1988) and follow-up surveys in 1990 and 1992. While previous research produced inconsistent results, the present…