The Souls of Black Schools: How Black Students and Teachers Experience an Intentionally Designed, Culturally Responsive School System

Abstract

The history of independent Black schools in the United States is wrought with struggle for truly culturally compatible education. Public education for Black Americans has rarely included encouraging Black pride. Except for a few schools born of the ‘60s civil rights era, no other public schools in the US seek to help Black children with their esteem through cultural pride. This paper introduces the unique model of a predominantly Black public school, Quality Education Academy (QEA), that evaluated the effectiveness of its model, designed to create cultural pride. This paper used critical race theory and culturally responsive education as a framework to investigate exactly how to create Black pride in a school community. The methodology included online surveys, one-on-one interviews of faculty, and the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) and Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity-Teen MIBI-T’s Likert-scale points of 1-7/1-5, in the Centrality scale and Personal Regard Subscale. Though most respondents reported increased feelings of Black pride after entering the QEA culture, the length of exposure was not predictive of levels of Black pride. Surprisingly, evidence of internalized racism within Black QEA faculty birthed a new teacher preparation model, the Psychodynamic Bridge Theory, which describes the teacher’s thoughts/feelings about the student as the source of teacher attitudes and behaviors, and, subsequently, the source of student identity-formation. The study concludes with recommendations for implementing the theory in teacher preparation programs for teaching Black students, and culturally responsive school system design.