Dr Trisha J Baker

The Effects of an Afrocentric Curriculum on Reading Scores of African American Third, Fourth, and Fifth Graders Dr Trisha J Baker

"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The academic achievement gap between Black and White students has been the measure by which students are ranked based on their performance in reading and math. Based on these rankings, curriculum, instructional strategies, and a number of early intervention techniques have come out to address this academic discrepancy, yet the gap remains. A comparative analysis of DRA scores (Developmental Reading Assessment) and MAP scores (Measures of Academic Progress) presented in this book emanated after watching the academic progress of Black student consistently remain well below the academic progress of White students. The implementation of an Afrocentric curriculum came as a mechanism to affect this discrepancy. After a number of years of implementing an Afrocentric curriculum (ACC) in a midwestern North Suburban school district, there was no statistical evidence of the effects of ACC, until now.