Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males

Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males, by Freeman Hrabowski, III, Kenneth I. Maton, and Geoffrey L. Greif. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 205pp. $25.00, cloth. Reviewed by Zada N. Johnson, Olive-Harvey College. Beating the Odds is a collaborative examination of academically successful young African American men who have participated in the Meyerhoff Scholars Program in Baltimore, Maryland. The Meyerhoff Scholars Program was established in 1988 at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) as a response to studies indicating the disproportionately low numbers of African American males in college overall and the national shortage of African Americans earning doctoral degrees in science and engineering. In 1990, the program was expanded to include women among its participants. Its goal is to identify and lend support to promising African American college-going males interested in pursuing research careers in those fields. It recruits outstanding African American students and offers them accelerated course work, summer bridge activities, academic advising, and scholarship support at UMBC. The program consists of 13 primary components, including personal advising and counseling, a family involvement component, internship opportunities, a mentoring component, and involvement from university faculty, all of which exposes Meyerhoff scholars to an academically rigorous yet supportive postsecondary environment. Beating the Odds is divided into three major sections. Given that the study draws its substance from interviews conducted with these students and members of their families, the first section describes the information exchanges held with the African American male Meyerhoff participants and their families. From these candid discussions, the authors formulate a checklist of strategies and activities that they believe motivate African American males to achieve academic excellence and pursue mathematics and science careers from early childhood to college age. The second section discusses these effective parenting strategies in depth. The concluding section features an assessment of institutional and community-based programs such as the Meyerhoff initiative that provide a framework for the continued academic success of African American males in the 21st century. The authors early highlight the Meyerhoff participants' relationships with their families by discussing the responses of the students' fathers and mothers to questions about their approaches to ensuring their sons' success. At the outset, Hrabowski et al. identify several key parenting strategies as contributing to the academic achievement of African American male students. Among these are "child-focused love," strong discipline and communication, positive race and gender identification, and parental involvement in students' academic lives. The critical importance of parental involvement is emphasized in this initial discussion. One chapter specifically focuses on fathers' involvement. In it, the authors contend that fathers are instrumental not only in preparing their sons for the challenges that will face them as African American males but also for setting rigid disciplinary boundaries with a high value placed on education. The authors note, however, that the mothers of these students appeared to "do"-that is, to implement the tasks and strategies that ensured their sons' successes-while the fathers appeared more involved and interested in instilling the philosophy of academic excellence in their sons. In essence, they contend, the mothers of these youth played a more centralized role in their sons' educational preparation while the fathers were more involved in discipline-related matters. Corroborating this conclusion, a chapter that addresses the young men's assessments of their academic success and focuses on family structure and parental education reveals that those who grew up in single-parent homes reported a centralized maternal influence with an emphasis on discipline and punishment. …