The Opportunity Gap
According to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008) this is not a nation of opportunity in the truest sense, which has caused many to rename the long-standing achievement gap, replacing it with the appellation: the opportunity gap. In truth, outcomes are rigged; they have been for a long time. Schools are, according to Althusser (1971), ideological state apparatuses that function to inculcate and repress any perceived threat to the status quo. In this sense, schools are not failing—if Althusser is correct, they are an overwhelming success. According to Gramsci (1971) proletariat (i.e., working class/poor) education should endeavor to make students critical consumers of all information so that they are equipped to become critical producers of counternarratives and counter-measures. We should be interested in this goal as well, i.e., to interrogate and disrupt problematic metanarratives around African American male academic struggles by equipping them as well as other hyper-marginalized students to use their STEM knowledge to challenge their forced subaltern positionality. However, the majority of African American males that populate the under-resourced schools that characterize urban enclaves throughout this country do not receive this kind of critical STEM education (Darder, 1998); instead, we have a problematic one size fits all educational approach. This one size fits all approach problematically assumes that all students learn in the same way. They do not. Educators, as much as possible, need to be sensitive to differential learning styles. Instead of questioning our own ideological predispositions or cultural understanding, far too often, educators subscribe to hegemonic stereotypical associations that inform the ways in which we interact with students that come from cultures different than our own. This is incredibly problematic precisely because hegemony naturalizes the process by which mainstream inequity is made to appear normal, endemic or worse, innate, because of the purported intrinsic deficiency within marginalized people (Althusser, 1971; Leonardo, 2010).
If unchallenged stereotypical understandings and associations based on white supremacist, hegemonic depictions of hyper-marginalized students serves to positions many of them in an uphill, life-or death struggle for not only recognition of their personhood, potential, and talent—but their very freedom as well. In fact, Toldson and Snitman (2010) found that “All of the problems related to the school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately affect black males (2010: 2). Likewise, in a 2008 study of “4, 164 black, white, and Hispanic males” the authors found that “59 percent of black males reported that they had been suspended or expelled from school, compared to 42 percent of Hispanic males, and 26 percent of White males [respectively] (2010: 5).” This is especially problematic because the same study, unsurprisingly, revealed: “disciplinary referrals are […] associated with negative attitudes and dispositions toward school […] (2010: 5).”
So, then, because we are becoming increasingly aware of the psychological vicissitudes that many urban and rural hyper-marginalized students face simply by virtue of the families that they were born into our goal as educators should be to provide a safe, critical STEM-focused educative environment for all of our students. And, in doing so, we will intentionally disrupt subtractive schooling practices that produce a false binary between urban non-white students and students of color.