The academic underachievement of African-American and Hispanic students is documented by the large gap between standardized test scores of minority and majority students and by the continued high rate of suspension and dropout among African-American and Hispanic teenagers. This underachievement of a large and growing segment of our population is nothing short of a national crisis.

By the year 2010, African-Americans and Hispanics will comprise approximately 30 percent of our population. Labor force projections indicate a severe decline in the number of blue collar jobs and a substantial increase in jobs that require high levels of technical skill. Given this economic picture, the crisis of underachieving minority students will become a central issue in determining our nation's economic survival. We can envision a large unemployed segment of the population and, simultaneously, a severe labor shortage in numerous highly skilled occupations. It is doubtful the United States can maintain world leadership under these conditions. As Americans and in our roles as educators, we must work together to ensure that equitable opportunities exist for all students. Minority children, like all children, should be given the opportunity to succeed.

Many factors have been cited for the underachievement of African-American and Hispanic students, including economics, parents, community and the environment. The Effective Schools Research makes it clear that whatever influence is exerted by these factors, schools can make a difference. Researchers who study effective schools have found schools serving lower income African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods where students' performance on standardized tests is average or above. While we may not be able to control other variables, evidence indicates that schools can have a significant impact on minority students' academic performance.

With this in mind, researchers have analyzed characteristics of effective school districts, school buildings, classrooms and teachers. They have also outlined effective instructional strategies. The Mid Atlantic Equity Center has designed this publication series to address four essential characteristics of effective instruction identified by these researchers, including:

1. teaching students to persist in their learning in Learning to Persist/Persisting to Learn;
2. understanding cultural diversity and its importance in the classroom in Cross-Cultural Communication: An Essential Dimension of Effective Education;
3. helping African-American students to build positive academic self concepts in Improving Black Student Achievement By Enhancing Students' Self Image; and
4. incorporating learning style differences into curriculum and instruction in Learning Styles: The Joy of Diversity.

Both Learning to Persist/Persisting to Learn and Cross-Cultural Communication: An Essential Dimension of Effective Education were first published by the Mid Atlantic Center for Race Equity but are now available from the Mid Atlantic Equity Center.

Learning to Persist/Persisting to Learn, the first in the series, will assist teachers in improving the academic self concept of minority students by helping teachers: (1) to understand why some students fail to successfully complete a task; (2) to identify non persisting students; and (3) to pinpoint curriculum and instructional strategies that can help students to learn to persist. Persistence is a learned behavior, and students from lower income families are more likely than their middle income counterparts to observe adults who lack control of their environment and to view luck or chance as a more significant factor in success than effort or persistence. Learning to Persist/Persisting to Learn helps teachers teach students to cope with adversity and to persist in the successful completion of a task.

Cross-Cultural Communication: An Essential Dimension of Effective Education discusses cultural differences that can lead to communication problems in the classroom and suggests behaviors that affirm rather than devalue a minority student's culture. Since our educational institutions tend to reflect the norms and values of the majority culture, cultural misunderstandings often have a negative effect on a minority student's academic performance. Cross-Cultural Communication: An Essential Dimension of Effective Education assists teachers to recognize and utilize student diversity in ways that enhance academic identity.

Improving Black Student Achievement By Enhancing Students' Self Image helps teachers to better understand the factors that contribute to a positive self image for African-American students and to design and implement instructional strategies that will enhance African-American students' academic self concept. While a positive academic identity is important for all students, it is a particularly critical issue for underachieving African-American students.

Learning Styles: The Joy of Diversity stresses the importance of recognizing differences in learning styles and proposes curricular and instructional strategies for underachieving females and minority students that take those differences into account. We hope that you will find this pamphlet series helpful in your efforts to increase the academic achievement of African-American and Hispanic students. We look forward to your comments on our publications.

Sheryl Denbo, Ph.D, Executive Director
Mid Atlantic Equity Center

I would like to acknowledge Carol Y. Dudley, Cassandra Gilchrist, Carolyn Kingsley, Julie Marshall, Kay T. Payne, and Jacqueline Zakrewsky for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.