Black Students, Urban Schools, and Black Principals: Leadership Practices That Reduce Disenfranchisement

Black students 1 underperform in U.S. urban schools. 2 The data are quite extensive documenting this truism (Barton & Coley, 2010; Delpit, 2012). The underachievement of Black students is a direct result of their persistent, pervasive, and disproportionate disenfranchisement 3 in urban schools. We defi ne disenfranchisement in the U.S. educational context as the historical and systematic deprivation of access to quality education for Black students in urban schools. This disenfranchisement has come about as a result of societal and institutional concerted efforts over decades that have employed all of the structural scaffolding (e.g., housing, property taxes, deferred maintenance) on which to hang each discriminatory educational policy iteration.