African American Ninth-Grade Students' Engagement and Learning in Mathematics: A Case Study of Parent-Teacher Collaboration

African American students continued to underachieve in STEM academics and remained underrepresented among college students majoring in STEM fields and the STEM workforce. This underperformance had negative consequences in that these students likely did not have adequate STEM subject knowledge and skills, especially in mathematics, to compete in the 21st-century workforce. Hence, African American parents and teachers may need to collaborate more frequently to facilitate African America students’ engagement and learning in mathematics. The collaboration between parents and teachers had been documented as a strong predictor of African American student academic achievement, including African American achievement in STEM subject areas. The purpose of this qualitative, case study was to explore and to describe why African American parents and high school teachers did not frequently collaborate to facilitate student engagement to learn mathematics. Two semi-structured interview guides designed for parents and teachers were used to ensure that the interviews were focused and covered the same questions for each participant. The participants for this case study were two math supervisors, six ninth-grade mathematics teachers, and three parents of African American students in a large northern New Jersey school district. It was found that ninth-grade math teacher participants (100%) perceived that they fostered parent-teacher collaboration to facilitate African American students’ engagement to learn mathematics. African American parent participants (100%) perceived that they involved in their children education at home, but the conflict between their work schedule and the district scheduled parent-teacher conferences prevented them from collaborating frequently with teachers. African American parent participants (100%) believed that caring teachers contributed to develop their willingness to collaborate with teachers to motivate their children to be engaged to learn mathematics. Recommendations for future research include investigating how caring teachers contributed to develop the willingness of African American parents to collaborate with teachers