Am I My Brother’s Keeper?
Educational Opportunities and Outcomes for Black and Brown Boys
By Dr. Adriana Villavicencio
Foreword by David E. Kirkland
Harvard Education Press
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Am I My Brother’s Keeper? offers powerful insights into the challenges of implementing large-scale educational change. The book, chronicling the Expanded Success Initiative (ESI), a four-year study focused on improving the educational outcomes of fifteen thousand Black and Latinx males in New York City public high schools, covers what worked, what didn’t, and what we can learn from the experience.
The ESI model, a precursor to President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, highlights the ways that school districts can embed educational equity into the principles and policies that guide their work with students, in contrast to implementing stand-alone initiatives that may come and go. Through the voices of students, teachers, and administrators, the book informs the implementation of other large-scale district-community partnerships designed to improve opportunities and outcomes for young people who have systematically been denied both. Most critically, the book provides policy, practice, and research recommendations to inform the next generation of work with this student population.
As sustained protests across the United States call attention to the ravages of systemic racism, Am I My Brother’s Keeper? highlights concrete steps that school districts can take to confront racist structures and support young people of color.
Praise for Am I My Brother’s Keeper?
“This book will be an eye-opener and potentially a guide on how to improve academic and developmental outcomes for young men of color elsewhere.”
— Pedro A. Noguera, Dean, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California
“When I was conducting my own research on Black men and boys more than a decade ago, this was the book that I was searching for but could not find. Books that love us are rare, perhaps because it’s easier, or more acceptable, to write about what afflicts us young Black and Brown men and boys than about what heals us. Nevertheless, writing this book could not have been easy, because doing so must have meant contending with this tragic mix of deeply engrained biases—that is, confronting the scars. Researching and writing about Black and Brown men and boys is about balance. One must hold onto the pain while uplifting the heavy wounds, stare at the naked corpse of our bodies thoroughly bruised while listening to the shrill but silent cries of agony rehearsed over and again while no one ever hears.
Black and Brown men and boys have grown accustomed to not being heard. But with Am I My Brother’s Keeper? Adriana Villavicencio listens. She cares. In a world too often bent on devaluing Black and Brown life, this book declares that we matter .”