A new evaluation of an Oakland, Calif., school district program designed to wrap black male students in a culturally rich and supportive environment is paying off.
The four-year, on-time graduation rate for black males who had access to the African-American Male Achievement Program in their freshman and sophomore years increased by about 3 percentage points since 2010. The centerpiece, the Manhood Development Program, was rolled out to high schools over time. Thus, researchers at Stanford University were able to compare its impact on students who were in the program with similar black male students enrolled in schools that weren’t yet participating.
The study also notes that Oakland saw overall graduation rates among black male students increase from 46 percent to 69 percent between 2010 and 2018, which was a faster rate of improvement than the district-wide graduation rate among all students.
