Ways to Increase Black Male Success in College Continue To Baffle Educators - Higher Education: “Explaining the barriers preventing more Black men from succeeding in higher education raises the most controversial and politicized issues of race, gender and class,” says Dr. Juan Battle, a psychology professor at CUNY. He is one of many studying the “Aspiration-Attainment Gap,” where as many Black elementary school students as White aspire to go to college, but far fewer, particularly males, ever obtain a degree. “Black researchers don’t agree on the causes, and we certainly don’t agree on the solutions,” he adds.The clashing perspectives range from those of Dr. Halford H. Fairchild, a professor of psychology at Pitzer College, to the ideas of Kevin Todd Porter, author of the recent book, Angry Little Men: Hypermasculinity, Academic Disconnect and Mentoring African Males, to those who feel the biggest barrier is a perceptual problem.
According to Fairchild, Black males are the targets of a system of White supremacy and oppression stretching from special education classes to the prison industrial complex. “One has to have an historical sensibility—that the issues of today are the result of decades, centuries, of educational practices.
