Reformulating Educational Reform: Toward the Proactive Schooling of African American Children.

Educational reform efforts to date in the United States have not been germane or responsive to the social problems of African American children. The reform efforts advanced to date have only been exercises in tinkering around the educational edges. Our educational focus, the origin of which is outlined, must shift in at least two major ways. First, we must turn from preoccupation with talent assessment and its trappings to a commitment to talent development. Second, we must as a nation move away from an obsession with social homogenization and social control to a system based on racial and cultural diversity. This paper discusses the traditional assumptions for psychological and pedagogical processes that underlie the present focus on talent assessment and compares them with alternative assumptions that underlie a focus on talent development. A second section makes a case for deep cultural structure and the incorporation of Afrocultural ethos into the pedagogical process at the deepest levels of schooling. Overdetermination is proposed as an explanatory framework for the educational process and a structural guide for reform. A table lists implications of cultural deep structure analyses. (Contains 46 references.) (SLD)