Young African American and Latino children in high-poverty urban schools: How they perceive school climate

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1996 by Slaughter-Defoe, Diana T, Carlson, Karen Glinert

CONCLUSION

It is important to search for the main effects of race and culture in any study within a society that is as stratified as that of the United States. Within American society, race, color, and ethnicity are important parameters of social stratification. However, not only are they important to society generally, they are also important to education. As Orfield (1993) recently concludes, since 1968, segregation remains especially high in our nation's large cities, and it reaches serious proportions in mid-sized central cities; further, many African American and Latino students also attend segregated schools in the suburbs of larger metropolitan areas. Thus, racial and cultural segregation is reemerging, and it is doing so in contexts of poverty and substandard educational settings. Orfield argues, and we agree, that not only is there very little research into these newer developments, but little is known about how multiracial and multiethnic educational settings affect the learning and development of participating school children.

The implications of these trends in the social conditions of education for the processes of school reform, inclusive of their implications for prevention models such as the Comer School Development Model and related educational policy developments that are childcentered in focus, are relatively unexplored. Perhaps, as we move in the 1990s toward testing the efficacy of Dr. Comer's idea and the model developed from it in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even if we do not obtain all the answers, we will raise the right questions.

IThe primary author is co-principal investigator of this evaluative study of the SDP, along with Northwestern University colleagues Thomas Cook (principal investigator) and Charles Payne (co-principal investigator). The study is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust.

2In each subsequent year of the study, at least 50% of these initial trainees returned to work with the project and have served as mentors and role models to new recruits. As a result, the training can now be accomplished in one-and-a-half weeks, and the available pool of field testers will require only minimal training to prepare them for work in subsequent project years.

REFERENCES

Anson, A., Cook, T., Habib, F., Grady, M., Haynes, N., & Comer, J. (1991, April). The Comer School Development Program: A theoretical analysis. Urban Education, 26(1), 56-82.

Bennett, C., & Harris, J. J. (1981). A study of the causes of disproportionality in suspensions and expulsions of male and Black students; Part 1: Characteristics of disruptive and non-disruptive students. Washington, DC: U.S. Office of Education.

Campbell, E. L. (1982). School discipline: Policy, procedures, and potential discrimination: A study of disproportionate representation of minority pupils in school suspensions. New Orleans, LA: Mid-South Educational Research Association.

Chapa, J., & Valencia, R. (1993). Latino population growth, demographic characteristics, and educational stagnation: An examination of recent trends. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences,