Shift in Research on Educating Blacks Urged

Washington

In a new book for educators, policymakers, and researchers, leading African-American scholars are proposing to reframe the way they study and think about educating black children, both in the United States and around the world.

The problem with most of the research and debate on the subject so far, according to the authors of Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century ,is that it portrays black children as “deficient.”

“What we want to do is flip the script and look at children’s strengths rather than their deficits,” said Joyce E. King, an education professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She edited the volume, which was produced by a scholarly panel commissioned by the Washington-based American Educational Research Association, which...