Black Girl Brilliance: Using Data to Catalyze Change for California's Black Girls. Research in Brief

Abstract

When it comes to Black youth, narratives about educational outcome gaps are often deficit-focused and incomplete, reifying notions of immovable racial inequities rather than uplifting evidence of students excelling when afforded the opportunities they deserve. There is a need to access data that tells a fuller and more nuanced story of students' experiences across intersections of identity, like race and gender, to tailor school improvement efforts effectively. In this research brief, school-level data from the 2017-2018 Civil Rights Data Collection was utilized to examine the relative representation of Black girls across various opportunities that have been proven to promote academic success and college-going, known as "promotive opportunities," in 8,234 K-12 public schools serving Black students in California. By doing so, the authors hope to shift deficit narratives that often stem from extrapolations of state-level aggregate data, and identify precisely where targeted, school-level interventions may have significant potential to improve access to promotive opportunities for Black girls. The findings show that Black girls are proportionately represented or better on several promotive opportunities like advanced placement course enrollment and advanced math classes in just a quarter of California's public schools, demonstrating that there are schools successfully breaking from historical trends and creating conditions that nurture rather than stifle Black girls' brilliance. Recommendations are provided to shift deficit narratives about Black girls (and Black youth more broadly) and to address state-level educational inequities by race and gender. [Additional funding provided by the AIR Equity Initiative.]