The Future of Education

Africans and their descendants across the diaspora face systemic oppression that contribute to academic and career-related disparities that interrupt their capacity for full-filling lives across their lifespan. Such disparities include, but are not limited to, educational opportunity gaps that affect different academic outcomes for Black students compared to their counterparts. Although these issues are systemic, families, schools, and communities work tirelessly to equip students with skills and knowledge to help them navigate systems of oppression in an effort to increase their chances for career and economic success. This qualitative study involved use of the Community Readiness Model (CRM; Oetting et al., 1995) with a predominately Black public high school in a rural region of the southeast United States. Responses of 12 school community members concerned the school’s readiness to prepare students for colleges and careers. The community readiness framework has been applied to diverse communities in countries such as Liberia (Johnson et al., 2005) and Mexico (Scherer et al., 2001) and in regions such as the Caribbean (McCoy et al., 2007) and the European Union (Alhassan et al., 2016; Barrett et al., 2015). Target issues have varied from health concerns such as HIV/AIDS (McCoy et al., 2007) to those more saliently impacting education, such as activity programs to address youth obesity (Ehlers et al., 2013) and graduate training to address suicide (Cureton et al., 2018). Participants consisted of various community members to include school administrators, alumni, teachers, parents, and community employers. Using consensual qualitative research to analyze their responses, six preliminary themes have emerged: (1) efforts in the school’s community to address college and career preparation; (2) how much the school community knows about the current college and career preparation programs and activities leadership to support these efforts; (3) the school’s community's attitude toward addressing college and career preparation how the community feels about the efforts; (4) how much the school’s community knows about college and career preparation; and (5) the resources being used or that could be used to address college and career preparation. There is a dearth of empirical research that examines the unique practices employed by predominantly Black and rural schools to prepare students for colleges and careers. This study addresses three broad areas. One, it presents an examination of the state of rural Black students in the United States. Secondly, it explores the first use of an assessment, Community Readiness Model, as a tool schools may use to examine their college and career preparation efforts. Finally, it provides implications for school-based faculty and staff.

Keywords: college and career readiness,  Black students, rural students.

References:
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