Literacy Among African-American Youth: Issues in Learning, Teaching and Schooling.

Abstract

Literacy Among African-American Youth: Issues in Learning, Teaching and Schooling, edited by Vivian L. Gadsden and Daniel A. Wagner. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1995. 336 pp. $55.00, cloth; $22.95, paper. In this edited volume, Gadsden and Wagner have brought a coterie of minds to bear on a range of literacy issues confronting African American youth, their parents, schools, and communities. The result is a book that explores the linkages between illiteracy, poverty, and race; and that addresses issues that have been the concerns of educators, researchers, policy makers, and parents for several decades. Several contributions stand out as particularly noteworthy. Among these is Herman Beavers's introduction to the first section of the book. In this brief but brilliant piece, Beavers describes the early efforts of African Americans to attain literacy. He notes, as does James Anderson in the lead essay to the book, that enslaved and free Blacks struggled to gain reading and writing skills in the face of inexorable forces bent on keeping African Americans illiterate. Fueled by a seemingly unquenchable desire to gain access to the word (the title of this section), their efforts were laudable. However, as Beavers and other contributors to this section suggest, the rewards were few and illusive. Other articles in section one examine literacy among African American youth in the contemporary context. Albeit heavily weighted in the analysis of linguistic patterns and the relationship between those patterns and reading ability, William Labov's chapter focuses on the disturbing levels of reading failure among these youth. It is followed by an essay by Dorothy Strickland, who suggests that class, not race, may play the most important role in explaining illiteracy. Her chapter presents innovative curriculum and policy reforms aimed at offsetting the negative impact of poverty on literacy attainment among Black youth. Section two focuses on African American youth literacy in the home, community, and school contexts, and includes a comprehensive investigation of these contexts by Diane Scott-Jones. Scott-Jones thoroughly rebuts models that attribute the alarming rates of illiteracy among these adolescents to deteriorating family life and that write off huge numbers of these youth as ineducable. She further advocates greater involvement of families and communities in the schools as well as increased government interventions to eliminate illiteracy. …