Chapter 10: Counterstories¹ From Mathematically Successful African American Male Students: Implications For Mathematics Teachers And Teacher Educators

Over three decades ago, motivated in part by the publications of An Agenda for Action: Recommendations for School Mathematics of the 1980s (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 1980) and A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), a new, often-repeated phrase emerged within the discourses² of mathematics education research and policy: mathematics for all. Coupled with this mathematics for all rhetoric (Martin, 2003) has been the proliferation of research studies that documents the mathematics “achievement gap” between Black children³ and their White counterparts (e.g., Strutchens, Lubienski, McGraw, & Westbrook, 2004). These studies primarily focus on the aggregated “achievement outcomes” of African American and other historically underserved children but rarely, if ever, explore how schooling experiences and race and racism contribute to these outcomes (Lubienski & Bowen, 2000; Parks & Schmeichel, 2012). Absent from many, if not most, of these studies is a critical examination of the socio-cultural and historical inequities experienced by African American children (and other marginalized groups), inside and outside the mathematics classroom, that inhibit the possibility of mathematics for all (Martin, 2003). Furthermore, many, if not most, of the subsequent policy documents derived from this “gap-gazing” research consistently position African American and other historically underserved children as being somehow mathematically deficient (Gutiérrez, 2008). In many ways, these research studies and policy documents sustain the mathematics education enterprise as a White institutional space (Martin, 2008, 2010). Intentionally or not, collectively, they reify the “White male math myth,” marking the perceived mathematical “abilities” of the White, male child as the point of reference toward which all children should aim (Stinson, 2010).