Teachers' and Counselors' Perceptions of Academic Abilities Among Minority Students in New York City

• In Event: Racialized and Gendered Constructions of Ability and Behavior

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how identity distinctions such as “African,” “American,” “immigrant,” and “native” are used to reify and perpetuate perceptions of academic abilities among African, African American, and Latinx students. Focusing on teachers and counselors, this paper highlights how their perceptions of the aforementioned identity categories shape their understanding of African, African American, and Latinx students’ academic abilities. Ultimately, it illustrates how perceived “cultural” distinctions between these racial-ethnic student groups perpetuate the narrative of immigrants' success for African students while further uphold troubling beliefs about African American and Latinx students’ academic abilities.
 
Data, Methods and Theoretical Framework
This paper draws from a larger multi-sited critical ethnographic research on how perceptions of Blackness and Africanness influence the school experiences and academic achievement of West African immigrant students in high school. It was conducted at two New York City public non-charter high schools that I named Bronxville Academy and Bronxville International from November 2016 to September 2017. The study includes over 270 hours of participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 28 students and 16 teachers and counselors, and an analysis of school demographics and student academic data. The study uses postcolonial theory and anti-Blackness as theoretical frameworks to understand the experiences of WAISs as past colonial subjects and current residence of a racist, anti-Black nation. The findings reported in this paper is based mainly on data from the sixteen teachers and counselors from both schools. 
 
Findings
Teachers and counselors at both Bronxville Academy and Bronxville International viewed African immigrant students as high achieving and better behaving students than their African American and Latinx counterparts. In Bronxville Academy, teachers and counselors explicitly differentiated between the different racial-ethnic groups of students (African, African American, Black Caribbean, Latinx) at Bronxville Academy. Perceptions of these groups' academic abilities based on their racial-ethnic identities’ have been constructed in the school. In general, participants viewed African students as having a “African culture” and immigrant work ethics that pushed for hard work in school and academic success, even though African students’ GPAs did not reflect this perception at Bronxville Academy. These participants, however, viewed African Americans as having a type of American culture that devalues education while Latinx students were viewed as having an immigrant culture that lacked ambition and motivation to succeed in school.
 
Significance
While colonial ideologies and racial-ethnic prejudices have been studied at length as it relates to the school experiences of different minority groups, it rarely focuses on multiple racial-ethnic minority groups in the same context. The differentiated perceptions of African students’ academic abilities from that of African American and Latinx students is important to highlight because it shows how the same identity category produces different perceptions depending on which body it is attached to. For example, while immigrant-ness was viewed as a positive attribute of African students, it was considered an hindrance for Latinx students. Moreover, the finding demonstrates how the increase in immigrant minority population complicates yet maintains dominant racial and ethnic ideologies and structures in the U.S.

Author

• Mercy Agyepong, New York University