African Americans and College Choice: The Influence of Family and School

Foreword

Foreword M. Christopher Brown II Accolades, Annotations, and Assessments Kassie Freeman’s book African Americans and College Choice: The Influence of Family and School marks a paradigm shift in the investigation of two areas of scholarly inquiry—college choice and African American students. The general contention has been that all students bring the same schematic processes to the college selection and attendance process. The accepted belief in the academic research community has long been that students are provided with information from sundry sources and in myriad formats that predispose them to attend college or not, influence which institution they select, and precondition their attrition or completion. The scholarly community conceded one differentiator : the earlier one is exposed to the sundry sources or myriad formats the greater the likelihood of college attendance and completion. These pseudouniversal findings led the federal government to enact the “Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs” (GEAR UP) initiative. Not in contradiction to the established research literature, but in a departure from the blinding or blinded universality of the research literature, Freeman explains the significant role of families and schools in African American students’ college choice decision. The acknowledgement of families and schools centers on the students ’ predisposition toward college rather than the decision to attend a specific college. Freeman’s break with the corpus of researchers in the college choice arena coincides with an increasing scholarship on the various forms of capital (that is, human, cultural , social, and economic) operating in and around school settings . Consequently, this new interpretation of the college choice process should not be viewed as a radical repulsion from accepted thinking, but as a refreshing, innovative, and accurate accounting xi of a significant group of students whose experiences have been silenced. Please note that this silencing was more than likely not intentional on the part of prior researchers, but the natural homogenization that occurs when disparate data (especially outliers) are drawn to the line of regression. Interestingly enough, Comer and Poussaint (1992) explored the issue of college adjustment for African American students and other youth. Their research evidenced the social, cultural, and contextual differences that African American youth experience in and around the collegiate span. They further noted the importance of family and community structure as buffer zones for negative encounters. However, there is no treatment of the role of these buffers in influencing and facilitating African American student college attendance. Further, African Americans and College Choice brings the empirical research community and the “mother wit” and collective knowledge of the African American community together (Brown & Davis, 2000). There is some consensus that the family, church, and school form a trinity within the historic African American corporate experience in the United States. The logic goes that the African American family is the fount from which educational development and epigenetic transformations occur. This home life extended to community congregations like the church. The church furthered the intellectual development of African American youth through Sabbath or Sunday schools and pageants that required recitation and quantification (Anderson, 1988). The import of the church extended into two branches. First, the African American religious congregations became a significant founder of and to the extent possible funder of schools, institutes, and colleges designed for the education of Black children (Brown, 1999, 2002). Even to this day, the denominational affiliations persist for a number of historically Black colleges and universities. Second, the Sunday school programming was often conducted by persons who also served as teachers in the local schools and area colleges (Anderson, 1988; Walker, 1996). The third part to the trinity of institutions with educational impact is the schools attended by African American children. These schools were historically segregated by law, and today remain relatively homogenous due to resegregation or economic xii Foreword diameters of the school attendance circumference. The intellectual foresight to explore the nexus between schools and families is most apropos. The role of the church is also an important influence on African American students’ postsecondary choice process. Nevertheless, Freeman has redefined the center of the college choice discourse, particularly, as it relates to African American students . Her findings actually also threaten to recenter the research practice of utilizing familial demographics (that is, socioeconomic status) as a statistical predictor. It is abundantly clear that the importance of whether a student’s parents attended and graduated from college is dwarfed by the index on whether the parents value, promote, and emphasize college attendance. Lewis...