The Mis-Education of the Negro Continues: The Connection Between the Beginning Reading Instruction Delivered to Three High -Performing Black Girls and the Instruction Delivered Within Schools Designed to Colonize

367 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.This study indicates the focal students' schools restricted their reading development by: (a) delivering fragmented reading instruction that typically withheld critical thinking and problem-solving strategies, (b) limiting the roles of parents to passive participants, (c) making teachers more accountable to their schools and school districts than to the families that they served, and (d) making individualized reading instruction difficult to create and sustain. When contextualizing the participants' experiences, within the longstanding history of educational inequality in the focal community and the colonial origins of Black schooling in the United States, it is evident that the educational neglect they experienced was not random, by accident, or the result of an overburdened, benevolent system. Rather, this study suggests that public schools for many Black students remain "colonial spaces" that were never constructed, equipped, or intended to prepare the majority of Blacks to reach their full human potential. Therefore, the focal students' educational neglect was the result of a purposefully created institution that benefits those currently in positions of power by successfully maintaining the present social, political, and economic order. Consequently, future early reading research conducted with Black students should identify resistance techniques that effectively counteract this oppressive infrastructure by delivering liberatory early reading instruction.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD