Perpetual Projects of Potential: A Literature Review Tracing 60 Years of Research Questions on Black Men and Boys in Urban Education

Influence of Contexts and Policies

The Moynihan Report in 1965 stemmed from the fascination with Black people not as a contributing ethnic group in the United States but from their “inexplicable” poor economic standing (Gans, 2011; Moynihan, 1965). In essence, the economic standing of Black families was less the result of centuries of government-sanctioned enslavement and human trafficking, successful policies to restrict and eliminate Black communities, divestment in the Black community, Jim Crow laws, racism, or the inadequate funding toward schools in Black communities, but it was solely due to Black males not being employed and relying too heavily on the “inadequate” matriarchal power Black women held (Salas, 2018; Stack, 1997).

Poverty was a characteristic of the pathology within the Black community, noted Moynihan. The case for the so-called “National Action” that Moynihan called for originates from a long-standing Eurocentric premise of saving the man and extinguishing the beast (Morrison, 2014). This perspective and the report(s) that culminated from it ushered in a new era of policies, regulations, and ultimately research that saw poverty as more of an intrinsic trait of specific racial and ethnic groups (Kantor & Lowe, 1995; Price et al., 1977) than a structural feature of a perverse capitalistic society that thrived off discriminated groups. Vestiges of the Moynihan Report (e.g., that Black families were forged from a pathology tied to slavery and Jim Crow, which caused low employment) were visibly evident in the various war campaigns on poverty and drugs that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s.

The Nixon administration initiated the War on Drugs with the explicit goal of criminalizing Black people, and this criminalization continued through policy initiatives during the 1980s, particularly with the Reagan administration's “Just Say No” campaign (Moore & Elkavich, 2008). Black males were the problem, and to fix the problem, you must save the Black male from the dire community in which he exists (Rosino & Hughey, 2018). While neither of these aspects is true on face value, it offered many researchers the ability to provide uncritical inquiries of Black men and pass it off as rigorous empirical research.

Early Childhood and Elementary

According to Wilson (1978), the biggest flaw in American developmental and educational psychology is the omission of theories related to Black early childhood. In the mid-1960s, during the peak of LBJ's Great Society and following the Moynihan Report (1965), educational scholars increasingly pursued questions about the learning of Black boys in terms of cultural deficiencies and remedial requirements. For example, Clark's (1965) study, conducted in a New York City “Higher Horizons” program with third to sixth graders, questioned the extent to which boys and girls in a school differed in their aspirations for white-collar and professional occupations and their ability to identify specific white-collar and professional occupations.

This inquiry reflected Great Society's optimism about enhancing career aspiration; yet, Clark (1965) found that 59% of academically achieving boys expressed a lower level of aspiration comparable to girls. More troubling, in his conclusion, Clark stated, “This study provides little encouragement for the view that inspirational efforts in the elementary school raise or channel the aspirational level of culturally disadvantaged boys toward occupations for which college graduation is a requisite” (p. 173).

Keislar and Stern (1968), in a study funded by the War on Poverty's Office of Economic Opportunity, explored linguistic interventions. They questioned whether instructing “culturally deprived Negro Head Start children” (p. 170) in their familiar dialect would improve learning compared to using Standard English, an experiment epitomizing the era's educational approach to remedy presumed language deficits. By the 1970s, as national policy shifted from expansive social programs towards concerns of social order influenced by Black activism, research too pivoted to behavior and socialization. Busse et al. (1970) investigated whether classroom enrichment produces a decrease in aggressive behavior and an increase in cooperative behavior among Black preschoolers—aligning with emerging law-and-order narratives that focused on curbing aggression in urban youth. Black boys’ early schooling was a site to correct alleged deficits in ambition, language, and behavior.

This underlying narrative remained in research on Black children during the Reagan-era retrenchment of social programs and the punitive War on Drugs, often represented in inquiries that emphasized individual inadequacies above structural circumstances. Farrell and Olson's (1983) study sought to “determine if there were any differences in racial identification (and preferences) by contemporary dark-skinned and light-skinned black children” (p. 285), essentially revisiting the Clarks’ 1940s doll test to gauge lingering self-concept issues. A key trend across these studies is the portrayal of Black children, specifically Black boys, as objects of intervention.

Negative descriptions of Black boys echoed the Moynihan Report's institutionalized deficit narrative, which pathologized Black family life and, by extension, Black boys’ capacities. Whether framed as disadvantaged pupils needing uplift via special programs or emerging delinquents that justified the War on Drugs' punitive policies, questions guiding research often presupposed failure in Black boys themselves. Even popular culture reinforced this framing, as seen in McGruff the Crime Fighting Dog during the 1980s Just Say No campaign—a national symbol linked to crime prevention and drug resistance to suspicion of urban youth, particularly Black boys. This collectively illustrates Wynter's (1995a, 1995b) argument regarding scholars and Ellison and Morton's (1952) claim about the public's inner eyes—a “logic” that legitimizes the prevailing notion of Black boys as fundamentally flawed and in need of rectification.

Secondary

With regard to the educability of Black boys in secondary school settings, researchers published accounts in UE that posed questions on the premise that low rates of literacy were the root cause of this demographic's incapacity to realize their potential. Paradoxically, this was an era of both using scholarship to pathologize poor and working-class urban residents and Black radical reimagining. The latter included White-authored texts that seized control of how the public imagined Black young men and boys engaging in lines of inquiry about speech, such as Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Abrahams, 2018).

Simultaneously, however, the Black radical canon was producing texts that asked nuanced questions about the experiences of Black men, such as Fanon et al.'s (1968) The Wretched of the Earth, Cleaver's (1999) Soul on Ice, and Greenlee's (196) The Spook Who Sat by the Door. It was within these traditions of pathologizing cultural linguistic practices (Holder, 1966; Woodworth & Salzer, 1971) and fearing the influence of Black liberatory literature on youth (Fiddmont & Levine, 1969) that UE scholarship on Black boys in secondary education was published. Collectively, these pieces in UE demonstrated how White researchers utilized questions around Black boys’ literacy rates to rationalize their unfulfilled potential.

First, Holder's (1966) study examined a literacy program for Black youth implemented by the Job Corps—an initiative launched as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's (1964) War on Poverty and enforced through the U.S. Department of Labor in 1964. This study highlighted UE's early focus on questions related to Black males’ potential to be employed by highlighting the strengths and opportunities to improve weaknesses in federal programs that targeted Black men and boys. The study's inquiry pathologically framed the families of Black boys as the primary cause for their stymied potential. For example, Holder (1966) said, “He comes from a family of six, which lives in crowded, substandard housing and his parents are unemployed or hold an unskilled job” (p. 163) … and “a disturbing family situation had not permitted the development of his potential abilities” (p. 165).

Moreover, the study attributed fault in instructional approaches to improving Black urban youth's literacy. According to Holder (1966), “When they hear their idols speak—whether it be President Johnson, James Baldwin, Cassius Clay, Martin Luther King … it is most apparent that they do not speak in the tones of Miss Social Prestige” (p. 165). Second, Woodworth and Salzer's (1971) subsequent study asked how White teachers’ perceptions of Black sixth-grade boys’ speech demonstrated how their potential was stymied via negative perceptions of intellectual inferiority.

Finally, Fiddmont and Levine's (1969) study and survey on Black boys served as surveillance to report on their potential to become radicalized or members of the Black Power movement following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Collectively, this scholarship exemplifies the intersection between expedient social science and State pursuits, as these lines of inquiry came directly in the wake of the Moynihan Report (1965) and LBJ's subsequent Great Society programming. The report's pathological social science utilized its power to name and evaluate the Other to generate a program intended to “launch the Other from the long dark night of its prehistory into civilized time” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 150).

Postsecondary

Kazemek and Rigg's (1983) study set out to rebut the continued questioning of Black males’ intellectual ability by interrogating “a program that treated the young men in it like boys” (p. 336). Being the only article discovered during this period to center Black males in postsecondary education, it examined how Black males in the Job Corps program were positioned within a framework that prioritized behavioral management and rote learning over intellectual engagement. The participants, aged 18 to 21 and from the urban centers of Chicago, Gary, and Detroit, entered the program as candidates for remediation, selected based on “their potential for success in the program” (p. 337). The instructional design reinforced this orientation by employing rigid, repetitive skill drills that presumed deficiencies in motivation, attention span, and cognitive endurance.

The teachers, predominantly White and from rural backgrounds, functioned more as monitors than educators, enforcing an approach that mirrored earlier interventions these students had encountered in Head Start and special reading programs, which narrowly defined their academic development. The curriculum's assumptions about learning reinforced broader epistemic constraints, offering only tightly controlled pathways of progression and denying recognition of the knowledge these students brought with them.

The study situated the Job Corps program within a longer history of racialized educational stratification, one in which institutional responses to Black male learners have consistently been framed through remediation. As Kazemek and Rigg (1983) noted, “It was simply a continuation of the same basic plan that has been devised over the years for dealing with poor and minority students” (p. 342). The ideological underpinnings of this model treated literacy not as a tool for self-determination but as a mechanism for reinforcing predetermined social and economic roles. The researchers proposed an alternative, suggesting “‘andragogy,’ the art and science of helping adults learn, as opposed to ‘pedagogy’, the art and science of teaching children” (p. 336). They advocated for the use of newspapers, magazines, and letter writing as means of fostering engagement with literacy beyond the constraints of controlled instruction.

These recommendations challenged the rigidity that had defined these students’ educational trajectories, offering a model in which learning is tied to relevance, autonomy, and critical engagement. This study underscored Goldberg's (1993) notion of racial knowledge of how Job Corps functioned as an institutional mechanism to reinforce narrow understandings of Black men's capabilities. As such, their development was always conditional, their competence always in question, and their aspirations always subject to external approval.

Black Male Teachers

Besag's (1970) comparative study utilized broad survey data to examine the professional characteristics and attitudes of Black and White teachers in urban contexts. This study was guided by the following research question: “Are inner-city teachers inferior?” (p. 70) Besag's (1970) limited data framed Black male teachers as either having no desire to remain in the classroom or primarily aspiring to become school leaders. For example, the study reported that “male Negroes (81%) and female Negroes (74%) are more prone to think of leaving classroom teaching than are male Caucasians (71%) or female Caucasians (52%)” (Besag, 1970, p. 277). Although this lone study was published several decades ago, it has helped to anchor in place an enduring deficit discourse about Black male teachers—they are both the problem and solution to the never-ending quest to help Black boys realize their potential (Pabon, 2016).

While Besag (1970) ultimately reported that “Negro teachers are not less qualified than Caucasian teachers” (p. 275), the framing of the question created an opening to rationalize Black youths stymied potential as a direct cause of their inner-city teachers, particularly Black male teachers who were framed as disengaged and uncommitted. Thus, the subjective understanding of Blackness in general and Black males in particular remained attached to notions of bioevolutionary genetic inferiority and ecological dysfunction (Wynter, 1995a). Moreover, “urban” reconstituted Black educators in which “the notion of slumliness stamped the terms in and through which the urban space of the racially marginalized was conceived and literally experienced … by those more or less white” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 191).

Collectively, these early studies demonstrated how scholars were perpetually looking for somewhere to place the blame for Black youth's unfulfilled potential, whether that be their dysfunctional families (Holder, 1966), their speech (Woodworth & Salzer, 1971), their radical leaders (Fiddmont & Levine, 1969), or their Black teachers (Besag, 1970). There was a willingness to utilize questions to look everywhere except for systemic practices of de facto White supremacy.

Influence of Contexts and Policies

If the Moynihan Report was the spear that smeared the legacy of Black males as exceptional fathers and foundational community members and leaders, A Nation at Risk, and No Child Left Behind were the spears that ostracized Black children even further in schools across the United States. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) incorrectly determined that students across the United States were underperforming. Based on ideology rather than data (because at this point the proverbial achievement gap between Black students and White students was closing rather than widening), legislators at the state and national level leveraged their authority to shred away at the system of public education itself (Hursh, 2017; Madaus & Clarke, 2001).

A Nation at Risk wrongly highlighted that public schools were failing, which allowed policymakers and educators to place the blame solely at the feet of Black boys whose academic performance was some of the lowest. School reform due to the A Nation at Risk report was working in conjunction with criminal justice initiatives from the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, which transformed schools from places of learning to vestibules toward prison. The rise in “delinquency” at schools was only surpassed by the number of students suspended or expelled for often subjective offenses (disrespect, disengagement, and dress code violations; Walker, 2014).

In an attempt to rectify school reform and ensure that all children would receive the support they needed, the Bush administration ushered in No Child Left Behind (2002). This educational policy ensured that no child could be held back for academic deficiency, tied federal funding to students’ academic performance, and simultaneously provided schools and teachers with the ability to remove students for any disruption that could inhibit the learning opportunities of others. In fact, it offered a runway for millions of children to be jettisoned, with the majority being Black children (Darling-Hammond et al., 2007). Terms such as “zero-tolerance” emerged across states’ student code of conduct policies, and much like during the era of the Moynihan Report, Black boys were targeted the most (Skiba & Peterson, 1999; Skiba & Rausch, 2013; Williams, 2024). The United States had reached a point where funding for schools was bolstered by the removal of Black boys, while the funding for prisons was bolstered by the entrapment of Black men.

Early Childhood and Elementary

Studies in UE during the national policy shifts of A Nation at Risk, Just Say No, and No Child Left Behind situated Black boys in early childhood and elementary school as vulnerable learners who needed to develop strategies to cope with educational and social structures that placed them at risk. These studies balanced critiques of structural and environmental inequities while simultaneously searching for solutions to ensure Black boys’ ability to survive within these systems.

Two seminal contributions of this time, Noguera (2003) and Davis (2003), framed their inquiries around the structural and environmental factors shaping Black boys’ academic outcomes, still their guiding questions reflected the policy climate that positioned these students as academically fragile and socially at risk. Noguera (2003) examined, “how environmental and cultural forces influence the way in which Black males come to perceive schooling and how those perceptions influence their behavior and performance in school” (p. 433), a question rooted in the prevailing discourse of Black boys as a decidedly concerning educational subgroup. Similarly, Davis (2003) tackled “the mechanisms at work that are responsible for African American males’ achievement lags and apparent disengagement in early years of schooling” (p. 516), questioning both internal and external causes of failure. This epistemic framing extended into studies such as Ford (1992), which examined urban African American students’ perceptions of the American achievement ideology, implicitly reinforcing the expectation that their success depended on their ability to navigate and conform to existing educational structures, rendering their own understandings as illegitimate (Wynter, 2003).

Gallant and Moore (2008) assessed first-grade Black boys through the lens of teacher perception, asking, “To what extent do teacher ratings of male students’ performance on the language and literacy [and mathematical thinking] domain of a curriculum-embedded performance assessment differ based on students’ ethnicity?” (p. 175), reinforcing an external evaluation model that measured Black boys’ abilities against predetermined educational norms rather than centering their lived experiences. The underlying questioning across these studies was not whether Black boys could succeed academically but rather how they could adapt to systems that routinely marginalized them.

Moreover, these studies probed Black boys’ ability to cope, adjust, and respond to institutional structures that positioned them as obstacles to American educational progress. Swanson et al. (2003) illustrated this trend in their study, asking, “Do adolescent males who perceive negative social and educational experiences regarding Black males adopt reactive coping attitudes?” (p. 619), vacillating with the notion that Black boys’ responses to systemic inequalities were a phenomenon to be examined or a consequence of exclusionary policies. The research cited that Black boys performed well in early grades but experienced a rapid decline in academic achievement by the fourth grade, coinciding with the introduction of high-stakes testing. That decline falls in contrast with a study by Sanders and Reed (1995), whereby a one-to-one mentoring immersion program in Milwaukee produced no significant differences than traditional school students in intellectual achievement responsibility across elementary grade levels.

Black boys’ confidence was often identified as defiance, with bravado perceived as an oppositional stance to challenging circumstances rather than an expression of self-assurance. This theme extended beyond traditional schooling environments into out-of-school settings, as seen in the work of Fuerst and Fuerst (1993), Fashola (2003), and Woodland (2008), which questioned the role of early childhood intervention programs and after-school initiatives in shaping Black boys’ academic and social development. These studies reinforced the belief that additional support structures were necessary for Black boys to achieve success, further situating them as dependent on carefully managed educational and behavioral interventions.

Fitzgerald (2009) deepened this discourse by exploring the disproportionate use of psychotropic medication to regulate Black boys’ behavior, corroborating previous work “in which educators rel(ied) on the use of nonprecise questions (that) only takes into account the ‘negative aspects of a child's behavior while negating the positive features’” (p. 228). Across these studies, we came to understand in-school and out-of-school urban settings as “laborator(ies) in which these epistemological constructs may be tested” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 155) as Black boys were subjects of ongoing assessment, management, and recalibration. While these studies aimed to identify solutions for the challenges Black boys faced, they still generated questions pertaining to the need for adaptation to an educational system unwilling to accommodate them.

Secondary

The discourse on Black boys in secondary school settings paralleled the policies aligned with A Nation at Risk (1983) and zero-tolerance mandates connected to No Child Left Behind (2002). Research questions became bound to these policies with two distinct lines of inquiry—potential deviance and potential achievement. Collectively, these policies set in place a renewed emphasis on disciplining and controlling Black children's bodies in school settings, and this was particularly pronounced with regard to Black boys. First, research inquiries were particularly concerned with explaining the connection between deviance and discipline (Fenning & Rose, 2007; Fitzgerald, 2009; Voelkl et al., 1999; White-Johnson, 2001).

Voelkl et al.'s (1999) research inquiry was informed by a 1994 Gallup Poll, which showed that “more than one third of the respondents regarded crime as the most important problem facing the country” (p. 70). Thus, what emerged yet again was the expedient analyses of social science “to legitimize State pursuits and to rationalize established relations of power and domination” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 153). The guiding premise of Voelkl et al.'s (1999) study was that delinquency was related to dropping out of school, so if schools could decrease the number of dropouts, then they could decrease crime. Thus, easing America's anxiety around crime, not educating Black boys, was paramount.

The research question and subsequent findings showed how the study bound what could be known about Black boys. One of Voelkl et al.'s (1999) research questions asked, “Is the relationship between school experiences and delinquency the same for White and African American students?” (p. 72), and the authors reported that African Americans who had poorer school grades and/or dropped out of school reported higher levels of delinquent behavior; these factors were not predictive of delinquency among White adolescents” (p. 84). Other studies focused on how inequitable systems reproduced disparate outcomes instead of framing the curtailment of Black boys’ potential as a personal problem.

White-Johnson (2001) critiqued research on the drop-out phenomenon by centering the voices and perspectives of Black boys and their parents. The reframing of what could be known about these boys was evident in two of their research questions, which asked:

“1) To what extent and in what ways have African American male students’ beliefs about their teachers’ perceptions of them contributed to their decisions to drop out of high school? … 3) To what extent and in what ways were their decisions to drop out influenced by factors that attributed to the structural conditions (defined as the social, political, and economical hierarchy) of society?” (White-Johnson, 2001, p. 345)

Unlike Voelkl et al. (1999), White-Johnson's (2001) participants demonstrated how their potential was obstructed by structural barriers that alienated Black boys. The researchers’ use of questions that required Black boys’ perspectives served as a direct challenge to legitimizing knowledge (Wynter, 1995a). As Goldberg (1993) noted, “admitting the Other's subjectivity is at once to give up epistemological and political control” (p. 153).

Fenning and Rose's (2007) subsequent literature review on the subject reported that Black boys were overrepresented in exclusionary discipline and teachers feared their inability to control them as a demographic. Rather than implementing positive behavior supports as posited by Fenning and Rose (2007), Fitzgerald (2009) argued that society has sought to control the undesired behavior of Black school-age boys through psychotropic medications (e.g., Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall). This scholarship questioned how Black boys were framed as being capable of realizing their potential through impulse control—something they were believed to be incapable of doing on their own. The belief in the biological inability of Black people to control their impulses speaks to colonial discourse, which has framed the embodiment of Blackness as the genetically dysselected and irrational human Other (Wynter, 2003).

Further underscoring why Black boys were not achieving, research used questions that pointed to poor family structures and lack of grit (Roderick, 2003), cultural mistrust (Irving & Hudley, 2005), and possessing low postsecondary aspirations for living in low socioeconomic status urban contexts (Strayhorn, 2009). Only Hudley's (1997) study showed how Afro-centric curriculum implemented by a culturally relevant teacher could positively impact Black boys’ achievement. While Fashola (2003) and Woodland (2008) emphasized the positive impact that after-school programs could have on Black boys’ ability to maximize their potential, both studies were undergirded by the premise that those programs mitigated endangered Black boys’ potential to be criminals. For example, Woodland (2008) referenced a Carnegie Foundation report that indicated juvenile crime peaked between 3 pm and 6 pm, so after-school programs were justified for their potential to decrease juvenile crime. Again, what could be known about Black males in this study was bound by a national report. We did not discover studies in UE during this policy era that explicitly centered Black males in postsecondary education, so our analysis will proceed to Black male teachers.

Black Male Teachers

Within the era of policies heavily influenced by A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind, there was no mandate that placed an emphasis on the salience of Black male teachers, and this deprioritization was evident in the scant amount of scholarship on this demographic in UE. Beyond national policies, however, the broader landscape of Black education scholars was developing a succession of research that brought the salience of Black teachers from the margins to the center by emphasizing cultural synchronization (Irvine, 1989), multicultural education (Banks, 1993), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), and critical analysis of teaching diverse populations (Delpit, 2006). These seminal texts established the salience of teachers’ background characteristics as a critical factor in education reform, and the only pieces mentioning Black male teachers came in the wake of this scholarship (Hudley, 1997; Sawyer, 2001).

According to Wynter (2003), “one cannot ‘unsettle’ the coloniality of power without a redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of the human” (p. 268). Thus, the latter scholarship by Black authors moved the discourse on Black educators beyond a White-controlled scholastic regime of truth (Wynter, 1997) in which they were battered down by notions of damage imagery and a culture of poverty. Scholars continued to advance this project of revisionist ontology (Hudley, 1997; Lynn, 2001; Sawyer, 2001).

Hudley's (1997) work provided one of the first instances in UE in which a Black male teacher was interviewed to give their critical assessment of teaching Afrocentric curriculum and the needs of Black boys. Sawyer's (2001) analysis of a mentoring program showed an early effort to find ways to get Black boys in urban contexts interested in teaching as a career. Two guiding questions from Sawyer's (2001) study asked, “What role have mentors played in contributing to the development of the mentoring process? And, has their involvement in this program had any influence on future plans with regard to becoming teachers?” (p. 46).

During this same year, Lynn (2001) was guided by a dissertation committee of leading critical race theorists (Carbado, 2010; Solorzano, 1997) in producing the first dissertation on urban Black male teachers using portraiture methodology and critical race theory. Two questions that guided Lynn's (2001) study asked:

1) What are the life stories of Black men social justice educators who teach in urban schools that serve mostly Black children in the community of Strivers Point in South Central Los Angeles, California? … 3) What can we learn from the work and lives of Black men educators? In particular, do their stories lead us toward some new thinking about oppression and domination? (p. 12)

Subsequently, UE began to advocate for Black male teachers. For example, Jordan and Cooper (2003) said, “Black male teachers perhaps have several important advantages in educating Black boys … modeling appropriate behavior, strategic use of shared knowledge, and in some cases, common social experiences.” (p. 391). Interestingly, Jordan and Cooper (2003) also critiqued the sudden rush toward race-matching Black male teachers with Black boys as a magical elixir to educational reform. In a section titled The Possibilities and Limits of Black Male Teachers, Jordan and Cooper (2003) said:

Perhaps a wrinkle in this conjecture is that although Black male teachers and Black male students may share common cultural experiences, teachers are virtually, by definition, middle class. Complete cultural congruence or synchronization between Black teachers and Black students almost never exists and can have possible drawbacks (p. 210).

Although Black male teachers were relatively invisible in UE from the Moynihan Report (1965) to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2002), the foundation had been laid for the next iteration of policy reforms under President Barack Obama's administration, which would prioritize the potential of Black male teachers as the solution to education reform in a way previously unseen.

Influence of Contexts and Policies

The year 2014 marked the first time in U.S. history where the federal government offered some guidance toward decoupling the public education system from the criminal justice system. More specifically, the Obama administration proffered funding to support programs (such as My Brother's Keeper) to address the challenges facing men of color and, in particular, Black boys (Dee & Penner, 2021). While reluctant, certain school districts throughout the United States began fostering more humanizing approaches toward disciplining children.

A key element in this change was the rapid availability of data for schools and school districts to analyze and make evidence-based decisions on whether their policies and approaches were supportive or punitive toward certain racial groups (Blake et al., 2016). Regarding the criminal justice system, during this era, policies were put in place to eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing recommendations and reduce the disparity in sentencing for drug offenses (the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010) and shut down many of the apparatuses that funded private prisons (Beasley & Ferraro, 2018). This resulted in federal imprisonment decreasing by the year 2011, which was the first time since 1980 that a reduction had happened in consecutive years (Federal Bureau of Prisons, n.d.). This shift in policy reform toward Black citizens and Black boys and men particularly offered a different path for researchers, a path that sought the expertise of Black boys and men in creating solutions that actually worked.

Early Childhood and Elementary

UE studies around this time shifted toward investigating systemic structures while still intervening with Black males. James (2012), “Students ‘at Risk’: Stereotypes and the schooling of Black boys,” examined the social construction of African Canadian males but found tendencies similar to those of Black boys in the United States. James (2012) claimed that normalizing fatherlessness, troublemaking, and underachievement legitimized “at-risk” discourse, which masked entrenched racism. James (2012) attempted “sketching and confronting the conditions that tied problems and apparent solutions together in ways that help to produce more inclusive questions and more comprehensive answers” (p. 467).

Accordingly, Carter et al. (2017), Silva et al. (2014), and Collins (2011) each examined racial disparities in school discipline, exposing the mechanisms through which Black boys were disproportionately subjected to punitive measures. Carter et al. (2017) pursued the questions of, “Why is it so difficult to face issues of race?” (p. 209) coupled with, “What should we do (to) bring[ing] race into conversations about disparities?” (p. 218) and argued that systemic biases remained entrenched despite policy-level reforms. Silva et al. (2014) conducted a quantitative analysis of behavior reports for 244 students, questioning “whether there is an association between punishment and reward cards and the race or gender of the students within one school's EBS (Effective Behavioral Support) program.” (p. 788). They found that Black boys were disproportionately disciplined for subjective infractions.

Collins (2011) extended this critique, specifically the labeling of Black boys as “bad,” by questioning the social construction of school failure and resistance while refusing to locate the problem within individuals. Graham et al. (2014) addressed the larger question, “Why focus on African American boys in elementary school?” (p. 195) by describing the correlation between poor academic achievement and behavior problems of those in urban settings with Best Foot Forward, an intervention program for third through fifth grade Black boys “labeled as aggressive that was based on motivational change” (p. 195). These studies illustrate how even in a policy era that promoted inclusion and restorative practices, Black boys remained positioned as subjects to be named and evaluated (Goldberg, 1993). However, their findings also provided empirical leverage for advocacy efforts to dismantle racialized disciplinary practices.

The research questions driving studies in this period increasingly reflected a willingness to interrogate not just Black boys’ educational outcomes but the intricacies of broader structures shaping their experiences. Dixon-Román (2013) challenged the traditional framing of parental involvement, emphasizing that Black families possessed valuable social and cultural capital often overlooked in deficit-based analyses. By pursuing questions such as, “To what extent do parental practices of social capital with school institutional actors covary with the developed achievement of Black males?” (p. 851), Dixon-Román (2013) findings indicated that not only do Black families matter but their income matters also. Shepherd (2011) examined how racial and gender biases influenced teachers’ evaluations of Black boys’ verbal responses, further underscoring how school environments remained sites of entrenched racial expectations.

Meanwhile, B. Brown et al. (2017) research questions were, “How does an urban charter school for African American males attempt to define the students’ identity?” and, “How do the representational practices of the school reflect the school's overall mission?” (p. 183). The team examined the relationship between racial identity and achievement ideology in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, recommending reform in institutional messaging to promote Black boys as potential innovators rather than underperforming students. Therefore, a consistent trend in these studies was the shift toward recognizing and examining Black boys’ academic success and agency, even as structural constraints continued to limit their educational opportunities.

Secondary

Under the policy initiatives of President Barack Obama, Secretary Arne Duncan, and Attorney General Eric Holder, researchers made a quantum leap in the way they framed questions around the potential of secondary-age Black boys in UE. In addition to the way these leaders called for more humanizing, antideficit approaches to supporting Black young men and boys, two other elements in the broader landscape were pivotal factors. First, the paradox of colorblind ideology (Bonilla-Silva, 2021) in the face of successive televised executions of Black young men and boys—Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Michael Brown (2014), Tamir Rice (2014), Alton Sterling (2016), and Philando Castile (2016)—galvanized public opinion.

Second, the same year Trayvon Martin (2012) was executed, Milner (2012) brought his race and equity-conscious expertise to UE as the newly appointed editor. The confluence of this trio of factors was immediately evident in the (re)framing of Black boys’ potential across three domains of urban education—school culture, parents, families, and communities, and achievement.

Regarding culture, Carter et al. (2017) explicitly called for race-conscious interventions in schools, and it was one of the first pieces to provide context to the nexus between Black boys’ historical ontology and their contemporary experiences. Caton (2012) utilized the perspectives of Black boys via counter-storytelling and critical race theory to analyze how 10 Black boys who dropped out of school described the influence of zero-tolerance policies on their schooling experiences. Caton (2012) called for schools to intentionally trouble the hegemonic uses of surveillance to carry out national policies by posing the following questions: “what is the impact of the intersection of race, gender, and immigration status on the zero-tolerance policies? How has the teacher's gender influenced the implementation of the zero-tolerance policies?” (p. 1079).

Scholars also utilized Black boys’ perspectives on school culture to illuminate the benefits of starting racially affirming groups (Gbolo & Grier-Reed, 2019) and to identify when school environments (Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011) and counselors (Owens et al., 2011) were not addressing their needs. Within previous policy eras, researchers spoke for the Other by using “practices of naming and knowledge construction [to] deny all autonomy to those so named and imagined, extending power, control, authority, and domination over them” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 150). Conversely, the potential of Black boys was (re)framed in this era as something to be maximized by leveraging their assets and needs to build an inclusive school culture.

Next, Black parents, families, and communities in urban contexts were pathologized under previous eras of policy in UE. However, within this regime of initiatives, Black families (Allen, 2013, Allen & White-Smith, 2018; Dixon-Román, 2013; McGee & Pearman, 2014) and community-based mentors (Jackson et al., 2014; Woodland, 2016) were radically reframed in relation to Black boys’ potential. These constituents were no longer the pathological or ecological conduits for producing the proverbial bad Black boy (Ferguson, 2020); rather, they were endless reservoirs of various forms of capital. This reframing was evident in the formulation of research questions such as Dixon-Román (2013) who asked, “what are the social and cultural practices that may be associated with the development and reading achievement for Black males?” (p. 830).

With regard to community mentors, Jackson et al. (2014) utilized the following asset-based questions to guide their inquiry: “(a) how do the young men and mentors, as participants, experience [Umoja Network for Young Men] (UMOJA)? (b) which features of the mentoring program most contribute to the academic, social, and emotional growth of the members?” (p. 397). This body of work demonstrates a significant turn from the emergence of UE when urban Black families were framed as an underclass population characterized by a “set of pathological social attitudes, actions, and activities” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 169).

In addition to reframing Black parents, families, and communities, UE lines of inquiry on secondary-age Black boys corroborated Harper's (2015) call for “the field to move beyond deficit-oriented research questions and study designs that cyclically reproduced knowledge about underachievement” (p. 141). While two studies portrayed Black boys as having limited self-perceptions (Conchas et al., 2015) and pathologized single-parent Black families (Orrock & Clark, 2018), the majority of studies published in UE took a best practices approach to frame how Black boys in secondary education settings exhibited academic achievement (Ellis et al., 2018; Harper, 2015; Knight-Manuel et al., 2019; Tatum & Muhammad, 2012; Terry et al., 2014; B. L. Wright, 2011; C. G. Wright, 2019).

For example, C. G. Wright's (2019) guiding research question asked, “what role does racial-ethnic identity play in the schooling experiences of socially and academically successful African American male adolescents?” (p. 616). Ellis et al. (2018) hypothesized that “Black males’ racial centrality has a significant positive influence on school efficacy” (p. 908). Collectively, this body of work marked a significant turn in the way researchers developed lines of inquiry to frame the potential of secondary-age Black boys.

Postsecondary

Obama-era educational reforms ushered in a surge of scholarly focus on Black male collegians in urban contexts, exemplified by UE's 2017 special issue on “Black Males in Urban Post-Secondary Education.” Key studies from this issue investigated how institutional environments helped shape Black male students’ success. For instance, because most Black men are enrolled in community colleges, not four-year institutions, Wood and Newman (2017) examined “factors that are predictive of faculty-student engagement for Black men attending urban community colleges” (p. 1059), assessing the effect of racial stereotypes as well as faculty validation.

Marks et al. (2016) surveyed 886 Black male students at urban private colleges to explore psychological domains including academic attitudes, mental health, and masculinity. Such research queries reflect an underlying conceptualization of Black male students as individuals with promise who required targeted support and study due to sociohistorical circumstances. The literature often enumerates a myriad of barriers facing Black men (e.g., racism, poor preparation, socioeconomic stressors), positioning their college journey as contingent on mitigating these obstacles. Hilton and Bonner (2017) asked, “How does one select an institution that will enhance the learning, growth, and development of today's urban Black male collegian—leading to successful matriculation and graduation?” (p. 1052). Hilton and Bonner (2017) noted that although more Black males were attending college, graduating was a significant challenge.

Marks et al. (2016) found Black male students to be “mentally healthy, possess predominantly positive attitudes, and tend to engage in constructive and/or productive behaviors” (p. 1080), countering what is known about the most extreme ontological Other (Wynter, 2003). The emerging pattern was a nuanced discourse that both recognized Black male collegians’ strengths and treated their outcomes as a special realm of inquiry, indicating their experiences in diverse urban institutions had become a prominent research priority in the 2010s. This trend is evidenced by the increase of studies across community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universites, and private universities, all grappling with how to translate Black men's potential into academic success.

This body of work aligned closely with concurrent policy shifts of the Obama administration—including My Brother's Keeper (aimed at improving life outcomes for boys and men of color), data-driven school reform, and criminal justice restructuring—by reframing how educators and institutions approached a subject understudied, Black male student success. Studies on Black male student-athletes epitomized this alignment. Singer (2016), investigating Black male college athletes’ narratives, for example, centered the voices of Black football players at a predominantly White institution, revealing that participants “viewed education as more than classroom learning and obtaining a degree, and perceived racism as alive and well in college sport" (p. 1065).

Similarly, Smith et al.'s (2017) study offered a historical analysis of Black male habitus in sports and schooling, emphasizing that the challenges Black men face in academia often mirror those in athletics. These works fit into the broader discourse of this time by acknowledging systemic inequities (from stereotyping to resource gaps) and calling for responsive support to address opportunity gaps—a scholarly echo of My Brother′s Keeper Alliance′s emphasis on mentorship and community support and of data-driven reforms’ insistence on evidence-based interventions. Indeed, the turn toward quantitative assessments like the Community College Survey of Men to identify engagement factors (Wood & Newman, 2017) exemplified the data-informed approach championed during this period.

Meanwhile, the focus on countering racism and fostering belonging in educational settings complemented criminal justice reforms by aiming to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline through college completion. In sum, post-2010 research questions of urban Black male collegians not only proliferated in response to these national policy priorities but also attempted to impact an evolving institutional discourse: one that saw Black male students less through a deficit lens and more as bearers of significance whose success hinged on enlightened, context-sensitive policies and practices.

Black Male Teachers

While this era of policies ushered in expansive ways to reimagine the potential of Black boys beyond tropes of mental incapacitation, criminality, or pathology as previously noted in the journal of UE, Black male teachers became essentialized as having a singular value—serving as role models for endangered or at-risk Black boys in urban contexts.

Interestingly, throughout the 60 years of the journal, Black male teachers progressed from invisibility, to insignificant, to a magical elixir to the proverbial problem of Black boys in education. According to A. L. Brown (2012), to be sealed within this discursive enclosure is to be constructed as a pedagogical kind which is a “Black male teacher [who] has been situated directly in the context of the Black male student and received by the educational community to secure, administer, and govern the unruly Black boy in school” (p. 299). Thus, the paradox of the renewed emphasis on Black men and boys under this era of policies was that it was both a boon and a bane for Black male teachers as the responsibility for remedying decades of inequity was suddenly hoisted upon their shoulders. Moreover, the subjective understanding of Black male teachers’ utility has remained entrenched in epistemological foundations of dysfunctional, matrifocal households since the mid-20th century (Goldberg, 1993).

Pabon (2016) captured this reductive framing by critiquing how education stakeholders like Secretary Duncan wait for Black superman—"a cohort of soldiers who will use their Blackness and maleness to lead Black male youth to academic success regardless of the structural and systemic challenges they face” (p. 917). However, rather than developing a line of inquiry that reified this trope, Pabon (2016) asked the following research questions to trouble the discourse: “Research Question 1: What can we learn from the personal narratives of four Black male teachers working in urban schools? Research Question 2: What implications about teacher education and teacher retention emerge from their narratives?” (p. 922). The findings indicated how Black male teachers’ potential to be the romanticized supermen was stymied as they “are undersupported and being pushed out by the very schools that claim to need them so much” (Pabon, 2016, p. 933).

Bristol (2018) also critiqued how recruiting campaigns miss the mark by not seeking to “understand how Black male teachers experience schools and how these experiences influence their decision to stay in or leave the profession” (p. 335). One research question guiding Bristol's (2018) study asked, “how do these school contexts and experiences affect Black male teachers’ plans to stay in their schools or in teaching” (p. 340). Framed in this way, the promise of Black male teachers was predicated on their potential to be retained.

Such findings of minimal support and exclusion were corroborated by S. V. Scott and Rodriguez's (2015) study of Black male teachers in preservice programs. Their study framed Black males as a powerless and oppressed group confined to stigmas and stereotypes whose absence of role models has negative implications for Black students’ achievement. Nonetheless, a sample of their research questions indicated intentionality to center participants’ voices and perspectives: “Research Question 2: In what ways do African American male preservice teachers define and describe their motivation to pursue careers in education? Research Question 3: What role, if any, does race play into their decision to become an educator?” (S. V. Scott & Rodriguez, 2015, p. 695).

The way that Black male preservice teachers were bombarded with microaggressions, low expectations, and rejection within preservice programs in which Whiteness was the norm demonstrated a clear tension between the ideals of policies and the way constituents live with the possibilities and constraints of its implementation. Meidl (2019) similarly framed their inquiry on Black male teachers around the need for them to serve as role models to influence young Black boys to become teachers which harkened back to Sawyer's (2001) mentoring program.

Influence of Contexts and Policies

The year 2020 brought not only a health pandemic with COVID-19 but also the senseless murders of 164 Black people at the hands of police (The Center for Justice & Accountability, n.d.). The most visible death, George Floyd, was broadcasted millions of times because of the far-reaching arm of social media; yet, Floyd's name was part of a long list of Black boys and men (Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Michael Brown).

Floyd's death signaled a tipping point in eroding some of the racial and cultural dissonance that had grown since the Civil Rights Movement, which ironically was galvanized by the unfortunate death of Emmet Till. Corporations began transforming their mission and values to reflect a commitment to ending racism (Brownen-Trinh & Orujov, 2023; Johnson, 2021). The federal government worked to increase the number of minority businesses that received federal contracts. Juneteenth, the official day slavery ended in the United States, was canonized as a federal holiday. Even the percentage of Black male teachers in K–12 classrooms increased from 1% to 2% (Bryan & Milton Williams, 2017).

However, in June 2023, the Supreme Court indicated that race-conscious admission programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment (Pereira et al., 2024). It took less than 3 years to extinguish the progress made immediately after George Floyd's death. That decision tore the proverbial hinges off the door that safeguarded the protections in education and employment that began in the Obama administration. Simultaneously, as that door was breached, private and public institutions were attempting to insulate themselves from political ire and pent-up backlash by removing and restricting the ways they funded initiatives and programs that supported Black communities and businesses. The so-called convergence of social change and corporate-funded initiatives was unraveling in preparation to return to a more politically and economically anti-black ecosystem in the United States.

Early Childhood and Elementary

The three studies in UE during this period reflect an acute awareness of the precarious position Black boys occupy within educational institutions, particularly considering the heightened visibility of anti-Black violence following the murder of George Floyd. Proffitt (2022) explicitly interrogated how Black boys, especially those labeled with disabilities, are conceptualized within schools, asking, “How do schools frame Black boys with and without disability labels as problems within the context of urban education?” (p. 687). This research was built upon decades of scholarship that problematized deficit-laden framings but goes further in positioning Black boys as vulnerable resources—individuals whose experiences should guide institutional transformation rather than serve as justifications for punitive interventions.

In a similar vein, Bryan (2020) theorized “Black playCrit literacies” to examine the racialized and gendered policing of Black boys in both formal and informal educational spaces, asking, “How does the racialization of play shape Black boys’ experiences inside and outside urban literacy classrooms?” (p. 750). By foregrounding the case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, shot and killed by a cop while engaging in play at a park, Bryan situated literacy not merely as a set of academic skills but as an embodied practice shaped by structural forces that cast Black boyhood as inherently dangerous. Bryan (2020) stated, “Black boys are not afforded the same innocence in childhood play as their White counterparts, as their movements and interactions are criminalized before they even enter formal schooling” (p. 754).

Croom (2018) contributed a critical lens to the discourse on literacy instruction and race, examining the racialized nature of pedagogical practices in urban education. His study posed the question, “What is the racial significance of this teacher's language during literacy instruction?” (p. 268), highlighting how race is not merely a backdrop to literacy instruction but an active and consequential social practice. Croom's work bolsters both Goldberg's (1993) and Wynter's (1995a) assertions demonstrating how instructional language both reinforced and constructed racial positioning, underscoring how Black boys’ literacy development is shaped by teachers’ racialized assumptions and hierarchies.

These inquiries marked a notable departure from earlier research that framed Black boys as passive recipients of intervention and instead sought to center their experiences and agency as epistemic resources for educational change. This shift aligns with the broader moment in which institutions, under public pressure, momentarily acknowledged systemic racism and sought to integrate racial consciousness into policy and practice. However, the very fragility of these efforts, many of which were reversed within a few short years, illustrates the persistent instability of reforms that rely on institutional goodwill rather than substantive structural shifts.

Secondary

The successive occurrences of Black men's executions going viral on social media while the world was relegated to their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic created a shift in public opinion that fervently humanized, centered, and, dare we say, even celebrated Black boys. However, the authors of this article contend that Bell's (1991) notion of racial realism undergirded America's brief elevation and adulation of Black boys. We understand this reaction as a form of interest convergence for the self-preservation of private and public institutions—including schools—so temporary concessions of atonement were made.

On the one hand, mitigating public humiliation through public displays of moral atonement occurred through the creation of Advanced Placement African American Studies in 2022 (Thomas et al., 2025). Additionally, a cultural juggernaut moved the nation in general, and researchers in particular—#Blackboyjoy. Research on secondary-age Black boys reflected this sudden emphasis on their enrollment in advanced classes and a celebratory, asset-based orientation.

While a lone study portrayed Black boys as lackadaisical and oppositional (Kolluri, 2025), these studies overwhelmingly posed research questions that challenged the notion that Black boys were intellectually incapacitated (Proffitt, 2022) and emotionally vacuous (Harris et al., 2022). During this era of policies, scholarship posed questions regarding how Black boys excelled (Greer et al., 2022; Lackey & Lowery, 2023; White-Johnson, 2021) despite inequitable power arrangements (Carey, 2025).

Greer et al. (2022) endeavored to reframe how Black boys, 55% of whom “had either taken or planned to take one or more honors, AP, or International Baccalaureate courses” (p. 1269), perceived their environments and engaged in acts of achievement. Findings demonstrated how their potential was propelled through ongoing cultural proficiency for teachers working with Black boys in conjunction with equity audits of school policies that had disproportionate outcomes. The guiding research questions asked, “(a) what practices predict the achievement, engagement, and school climate perceptions of Black males in urban high schools, and (b) how do Black boys describe those practices?” (Greer et al., 2022, p. 1268).

Rather than framing Black boys as an oppositional demographic toward college readiness curricula and programs (Kolluri, 2025), Lackey and Lowery (2023) asked the following questions to examine how power and biased policies stymied the potential for Black boys to enroll in such courses:

(1) How do written policies and commonly used practices guide the implementation of AP enrollment criteria in two urban high schools? (2) What patterns are revealed regarding decision making, enrollment criteria, and African American male enrollment in AP courses in two urban high schools? (p. 2631)

While previous policy eras framed studies published in UE around questions on the perception and intelligibility of “Negro dialect” (Keislar & Stern, 1968), B. L. Wright (2021) and Adeyemo (2022) reframed Black literacy. In reference to this stigmatization, Goldberg (1993), said “their literature, language, and general cultural expressions are judged not as works among works of art in general, but the works or languages or expressions of the Other” (p. 151).

Speaking back directly against studies similar to Keislar and Stern (1968) from previous policy eras, B. L. Wright (2021) grounded their research question in a direct critique of the past stating,

The practice of “blaming the victim” conveniently subverts the focus on race(ism) because it fails to acknowledge the conditions of economic and societal inequities that produce these systemic … African American males are relegated as a one-dimensional, depleted, and ruined population who are besieged by, and destined for, “problems and pathologies” with little or no hope of being seen or understood differently. (p. 452)

Thus, B. L. Wright (2021) unapologetically advanced an antideficit approach by asking, “what funds of knowledge (or meaning making resources) do high-achieving African American male adolescents use to navigate and negotiate their cultural worlds of home and school?” (p. 456). This framing grounded the potential of Black boys’ achievement within their aspirational, familial, and communal forms of capital.

Similarly, Adeyemo (2022) utilized Yosso's (2005) framework of community cultural wealth to analyze qualitative data to reframe the way Black interscholastic student-athletes have been portrayed as socially inept underachievers. Interscholastic Black male student-athlete experience have been invisible in UE until this point despite the salience of sports within this context (Beamon, 2010) and the significant participation of Black children in organized athletics (Black et al., 2022). Aside from isolated findings within specific classrooms, Kumah-Abiwu (2022) noted how Black boys’ potential was realized through institutional cultures of excellence. The study was driven by a research question that asked, “to what extent have the elements of Capital Preparatory Magnet School′s institutional culture and student motivation shaped the sustained academic achievements of students, especially Black males?” (Kuma-Abiwu, 2022, p. 1568).

Postsecondary

This period reflected the evolving discourse on racial equity, particularly in response to the national reckoning following George Floyd's murder and the subsequent backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The research questions guiding these studies reflect a shift toward understanding the structural and systemic factors that shape Black men's collegiate experiences while also grappling with their agency in navigating these spaces. Jones et al. (2019) asked, “What are the predictive factors that influence the STEM-related success of Black males in urban educational settings?” (p. 345), situating Black men within a framework that sought to address institutional barriers while simultaneously tasking them with overcoming these constraints through engagement and self-efficacy.

Similarly, Johnson et al. (2019) examined, “How do Black male students experience academic advising at an urban university?” (p. 776), revealing how advising structures, rather than serving as a support mechanism, often reinforced racialized tracking and deficit narratives. These studies, though critical of systemic failures, still positioned Black males as individuals who must adapt and persist despite structural inequalities. Smith et al. (2022), through the first-person perspective of hip-hop superstar Nas, provided a powerful counter-narrative, shifting the focus from strictly barriers to brilliance. The team investigated: “How does [Nas's] perspective provide insight into the lives of Black boys and men?” and “How does Nas’ experiences illuminate the sociocultural relationship between schools and Black male students?” (p. 2251). Their study argued that due to epistemic colonization (Gordon, 2006), “positing ‘Black,’ ‘male,’ and ‘intellectual’ together remains incompatible for some” (p. 2262). As they asserted, Black male brilliance remains obscured, not because it does not exist but because institutional narratives refuse to acknowledge it.

Shifting the focus of institutions, Boykin (2017) interrogated the exploitative promises of for-profit institutions, Brooms (2016) explored how belonging and identity shaped urban Black males’ college persistence, and Gasman et al. (2015) investigated how urban HBCUs foster success through institutional commitment and cultural responsiveness. Together, these studies asked how systems—whether for-profit, predominantly White, or historically Black—either constrained or cultivated Black male potential, offering a layered understanding of postsecondary education as both a site of opportunity and structural reproduction for urban Black men.

Dache and McGuire (2021) and Fuller et al. (2016) introduced intersectional considerations, broadening the discourse beyond traditional academic concerns. Dache and McGuire (2021) examined how geography, class, and sexuality shaped one Black male student's postsecondary trajectory, asking, “How despite the odds, [Marcus] engaged in locally centered community advocacy and policy research while successfully earning higher education credentials?” (p. 874) This study highlighted how structural and cultural barriers, including racism, classism, and homophobia, compounded to shape postsecondary experiences in ways that are often ignored in mainstream discourse.

Fuller et al. (2016) interrogated the pervasive tension between athletics and academic identity formation, asking, “How do academically successful African American male athletes define themselves with relation to education, sport, and society within the context of [historically white institutions] of higher education and Division I college athletics in urban settings?” and “In what ways do others, specifically athletic and non-athletic peers, influence African American male athletes’ perception of selves (i.e., identity)?” (p. 816). Their findings echoed long-standing criticisms that institutions value Black male athletes for their athletic labor rather than their intellectual contributions. One participant noted, “Just because I had two interceptions on Saturday doesn’t mean that's all that I can do” (p. 821).

Collectively, these studies illustrate how Black males in postsecondary education continued to be framed within narratives of perseverance and exceptionalism rather than systemic transformation. While some studies challenged this positioning by emphasizing brilliance and intersectional identities, the prevailing research questions still maintained a framework critiquing the practices of educational institutions but understood “the resolution of issues under debate … is embodied in the lives of those trapped between the threads of tattered policies” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 170).

Black Male Teachers

Within this policy era, Black male teachers received a renewed prioritization in the public discourse due in large part to one 2018 economic study published by the Institute of Labor Economics called The long-run impacts of same-race teachers. Within the study's findings, Gershenson et al. (2022) reported that Black students are 13% more likely to enroll in college if they have one Black teacher by third grade, and subsequent research has shown that this sole data point has fueled Black male teacher recruitment discourse (A. L. Brown & Thomas, 2020). Although this report was published 53 years after the Moynihan Report (1965), they both have one commonality—redressing the employment of Black men. Building off Murphy's (2017) notion of the economization of life in which capitalism imagines and organizes populations within the economy, A. L. Brown and Thomas (2020) noted that the Institute of Labor Economics's study “created an entire economy that centered around not only the recruitment and hiring of Black male teachers, but also the employment of Black males in general” (p. 465).

Theoretically, Goldberg (1993) noted how the urban Other has remained framed as an underclass that “has come to signify not just the unemployed but the permanently unemployed and unemployable” (p. 169). Despite the emphasis on Black male teachers in popular discourse, there were limited studies on Black male teachers during this era (Milton-Williams & Bryan, 2021; Thomas, 2025a, 2025b), but they both advanced nuanced approaches to understanding this demographic. Previous policy eras of UE framed the Black family as pathological (Besag, 1970) and unsupportive (Orrock & Clark, 2018) of Black boy's intellectual development. However, Milton-Williams and Bryan (2021) and Thomas (2025a, 2025b) reframed the potential and promise of Black male teachers by grounding inquiries into their acquisition and application of youth knowledge acquired from their families and communities.

In reframing the potential of a Black male middle school teacher, Milton-Williams and Bryan (2021) utilized life history methodology to examine the cultural continuum of a Black male teacher's pedagogy by critically examining “the ways in which his historical, societal, institutional, communal, and personal experiences have shaped him to become a culturally relevant teacher” (p. 34). Their study was guided by the following consequential research questions: “Research Question 1: How do community, family, and teachers influence the cultural pedagogical practices of a Black male teacher? Research Question 2: How does the life history of a Black male teacher shape their understanding of Black students?” (Milton-Williams & Bryan, 2021, p. 34). Thomas (2025b) also tended to the salience of a population of Black male educators that had been invisible in UE—teacher-coaches.

This is striking considering that Black male teachers were the highest concentration of social studies teacher-coaches by race (Knowles et al., 2020) in addition to the salience on sport amongst Black youth (Beamon, 2010; Johnson & Thomas, 2025) with 42.1% of Black children between the ages of 6–17 participating in sports (Black et al., 2022). For Thomas (2025b), an underlying assumption of their work was that “the ontological being of these men gives rise to a particular sociogenic experience, and it is through these lived experiences that Black male teachers develop the inner eye to deconstruct and reconstruct meaning around curriculum” (p. 26). This intentional reframing was evident in the purpose statement undergirding the project on Black male teacher-coaches (BMTCs):

the purpose of this case study was to explicate how the Black family and community served as initial Black counterpublics where these BMTCs reconceptualized the ontological limitation of Black existence projected via the White gaze. It was within these counterpublic spaces that these BMTCs developed a fervent, unequivocal understanding of their Blackness as excellence while immersed within an antiBlack milieu. (Thomas, 2025b, p. 5)

This study reframed anti-Blackness and oppression as experiences seized and repurposed within Black counterpublics to engage in civic projects of fortification and revisionist ontology.

Additionally, this study focused on a demographic of Black male teachers that was invisible in UE—Black men working in urban private schools. The latter detaches Black male teachers from limiting their potential to surrogacy (Thomas et al., 2024) as their cultural relevance has utility for students of all backgrounds. Moreover, this study introduced Black critical theories beyond Critical Race Theory to introduce philosophers such as Sylvia Wynter, George Yancy, and Lewis Gordon to reframe Black men in the education profession.