This research project invites you to better understand how racial/ethnic identity might affect educational achievement. Your assignment is to prepare a RESEARCH PROSPECTUS as if you were to engage in a year-long, ethnographic research project in Oakland Technical High School (you will not do the actual research). Remember that the research prospectus reflects your individual work. If you worked well with other students when gathering scholarly articles for the literature review, you are welcome to peer edit each other's papers, but the final research prospectus must be your own work. I've included a link to the research prospectus criteria above. You can also find this file in the Research Prospectus module. There are basic steps common to every research proposal. 1) Introduction: present your research question and tell us why it is important. 2) Literature Review (the longest section): tell us what other scholars have said about your research question. It would be an excellent str
After School Programs Research Prospectus
After school programs are important aspects of education. Some students attend them for help with academics. Others in an effort to have productive activities in which to engage after school while their parents may be working. The goals of after-school programs (ASPs) are to boost the morale of students, provide inclusivity, and help with academic success for students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and/or minority population, studies vary on how successful ASPs are at achieving these objectives. More rigorous standards should be applied to the development and implementation of ASPs to ensure the success of students of varying ethnicities. For example, some non-English speaking ASP participants are placed in English-only programs that have proven not to be successful for students who do not understand English. Another example is that students often differ culturally and the programs are designed with a “model student” in mind. That model student may not match the reality for students from some cultures. That leads one to question whether after-school enrichment programs help students of different ethnicities perform better. One such program, the Oakland Tech After School Program. African American students make up a significant proportion of Oakland Techs multicultural student population and many attend the ASPs offered at the school. However, recent studies have shown that 66% of African Americans scored below standard in mathematics, and 36% of African Americans scored below standard in English. Oakland Tech had one of the lowest percentages of USC/UC Credits completed at 44.9%. This makes one wonder why this is the case if ASPs are promoted as being useful especially for African American students who are disproportionately the students who attend ASPs. That leads to the research question: Does participation in the Oakland Tech After School Program boost academic success for Black/African American students?
Literature Review
ASPs are supposed to be for students who struggle in school or in society. ASPs help the students to improve their school work, learn to interact with others, and prevent them from falling into bad influences or having to be home alone after school. These are all objectives of ASPs that could benefit most students; however, according to Kathryn Hynes and Felicia Sanders of Journal of Negro Education, African American students are disproportionately enrolled in ASPs (Hynes and Sanders 464). When these researchers compared characteristics of white students and African American students enrolled in ASPs such as living in a single-parent household, living in urban areas, and families that use child care subsidies, there was no explanation provided for the race differences and the gap between the use of ASPs and white and African American students is getting larger (Hynes and Sanders 464). Other researchers approach ASPs from another angle: they study what works with African American students.
Toks Fashola and Robert Cooper of the Journal of Negro Education agree that there are few successful ASPs for African American students. They found four types of ASPs that demonstrate varying efforts to be successful. For example, programs that are intended to increase academic performance, the most successful ones for African Americans are those that have greater structure, provide a link to the school curriculum, have well-qualified and well-trained staffs, and provide tutoring. All ASPs, according to Fashola and Cooper, are better if they include consistency, active community involvement, and well-trained staff and volunteers who respond to the needs of the participants (Fashola and Cooper 135). African American and black students are often relegated to programs that are aimed at increasing their success, but they are often not assigned to classes that may challenge them.
One way to try to understand the experience of African American and black students is to look at their strategies for academic success. Carla O’Connor, et al. of the American Educational Research Journal explains that currently black and African American students exist under “second-generation segregation.” That is that which “occurs when schools desegregated at the building level are resegregated by academic programs to constitute a racially stratified academic hierarchy” (O’Connor, Mueller and Lewis 1232). In this version of segregation, non-Asian minorities are disproportionately tracked into the less challenging courses rather into college track courses. Those minorities are underrepresented in higher level (college track) courses (O’Connor, Mueller and Lewis 1233). This results in an unfair disadvantage for these students when it comes their plans for after they graduate from high school. It also parallels the disproportionate numbers of black and African American stu