ST. THOMAS, VI — Some of the nation’s most prominent research scholars are gathering this week in St. Thomas to strategize solutions and share best practices on how to improve Black male achievement.
For the second year in a row, the three-day international colloquium has brought together researchers from various academic disciplines who are engaged in cutting-edge scholarship that focuses squarely on how to address what has become one of the nation’s most vexing problems.
“This has always been our vision,” says Dr. Jerlando F. L. Jackson, the Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Equity and Inclusion Laboratory—a research center that is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research on topics of equity and inclusion in education, with a particular focus on higher education.
The idea for a colloquium, he says, came in 2009 when he and Dr. James L. Moore, III, the College of Education and Human Ecology Distinguished Professor of Urban Education at Ohio State University (OSU) authored an article for the International Encyclopedia of Education and pointed out that girls in both the United States and other countries were quickly outperforming boys academically.
The two, who are considered leading experts in a growing field of scholarship that focuses on black males, first put out the call to academicians who traveled last year to the United Kingdom to begin what they now expect will become an annual conversation aimed at better understanding the unique challenges that Black males face, while also celebrating the many accomplishments that often go unreported.
For example, Dr. Rex L. Crawley who runs the Uzuri think-tank at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh says that nearly 90 percent of African American males at his university go on to graduate from the institution, surpassing African American females in attendance.
“The negative stories have already been told,” he says. “We want to focus on the success stories.”
