Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American
Males by Freeman Hrabowski III, Kenneth Matson, and Geoffrey L. Grieb
Oxford University Press, 1998 New York 242 pages Hardcover: $26
Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American
Males relates wonderful stories of parents striving successfully to
raise academically high-achieving African American boys who are then
encouraged to excel in college and subsequently go on to elite graduate
and professional schools in medicine, mathematics, science, and
engineering.
The book is filled with the actual words. gathered through
extensive interviews, of mothers and fathers saying how they monitored
their sons, homework (even when they didn’t understand it). set limits
on their after school activities, and had high expectations for their
academic achievement. There is a “strong commitment to education”
running through these families and a “supportive learning environment”
in the home. The emphasis on the importance of education was present
whether there was a two-parent family or a single-parent family,
whether the family was middle class or working class.
Yet many obstacles hinder their achievement. For example, unlike
their White counterparts. African American boys are often ridiculed by
their peers for showing that they are “smart” in school. As a result,
there is a tendency by African American boys not to speak out or excel
in school. Additionally, there is the temptation to not choose a
college major in the sciences or math. even though the boys may have
good grades in these subjects, without encouragement or support from
teachers and counselors.
Hence, the need for this book — whose major purpose “is to
identify strategies that parents [and] educators … may wish to
consider as they work with … young African American males.” The book
is, more particularly, the story of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program,
operating since 1989 at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County
(UMBC) “for talented African American males interested in research
careers in science and engineering.”
Although a strong case was made for focusing on males, women were
admitted in 1990 and now make up half the students. The program was
racially integrated in 1995, ostensibly as a result of the Podberesky
ruling in 1994 by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Appellate Court, which found
race specific scholarships to be illegal, and now the program is 80
percent African American. However, none of these major modifications is
discussed in the book.
Meyerhoff has graduated more than one hundred students from UMBC
who have gone on to great success in graduate schools of medicine and
science. The program has achieved its success through “strong academic
advising and personal counseling, emphasis on group study and peer
support, appropriate tutoring and mentoring, [and] involvement with
faculty in research and access to role models in science.”
