CSUF study will look at how Black youths in foster care overcome educational challenges – Orange County Register

Research shows that in many counties of Southern California, Black foster youth have more detrimental educational outcomes than foster youth of other races, said Brianna Harvey, assistant professor of sociology at Cal State Fullerton.

Harvey recently received a grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, via UC Berkeley, of more than $34,000 to dig into this disparity. Collecting data for her project will begin in April, and she’ll have the help of two undergraduate student researchers who are part of a mentoring program on campus called “Bolstering Black Undergraduate Student Creative Activities and Research.”

Professor Harvey is very familiar with this subject. Before becoming a university professor, she worked as a social worker for more than 12 years with a focus on foster youth and families. She went on to achieve a master’s degree in social work from USC and a doctorate in education from UCLA, focusing on the educational experiences of young Black foster youths.

“It was during my time as a practitioner that I saw that there were a lot of challenges that many of my youth were facing in education,” Harvey said. “A lot of them were being suspended, or expelled, or held back a grade.”

She explained that most research on this population compares foster youth to nonfoster youth. “We know that foster youth have very poor outcomes in educational contexts because of trauma and because of moving to multiple homes,” she said. “Research rarely looks at the racialized experiences between foster youth. When I started to dig a little deeper in data, I saw that even among foster youth, Black youth are significantly lagging.”

This is true in Orange County. “Only about 2% of students may experience a suspension, but 15% of Black foster youth are likely to be suspended in Orange County,” Harvey said. “There are significant increases in the numbers as far as the areas that matter the most, which are suspension, expulsion, graduation rates, special education placement.”

Trauma early in life can be one reason Black foster youth sometimes act out in school, becoming “that extra factor that’s causing them to be further marginalized,” Harvey said. “You may have a youth who is having a bad experience within a home, it’s triggering to them. They act out in class, and instead of receiving care or support for it, it’s like, ‘You’re getting kicked out of class. You’re a behavioral problem,’ and the stigma continues.”

Encounters with the probation system or even jail also have a negative impact on school behavior of Black foster youth. “Every interaction that they have with the system seems to make them more vulnerable and more likely to experience detrimental outcomes in school,” Harvey said. Racism and bias can also be a factor. “Unfortunately, a lot of school personnel hold bias against Black youth, and they see them as criminal,” she said.

Harvey’s goal in her new research project, titled “Challenging Anti-Blackness in Education: Amplifying the Voices of Black Foster Youth Students Through Counter-Storytelling,” is to include interviews with Black foster youth who overcame obstacles and succeeded in the education system.

“The youth that I’m going to specifically be talking to are all in college,” she said. “They will all have either graduated from college or be currently in college. They were able to find a way to overcome the challenges that we often see in these quantitative numbers. It’s really them telling a counter-story to the data that is around them.”

In her previous research, Harvey discovered that Black foster youth who did well in school had a strong inner drive to make the most of their education.

“For a lot of them it was this desire to be able to succeed,” she said. “They said that school was a way out. They saw school as an opportunity for them to make a better life for themselves and for their family. It gave them this ability to have almost this self-directed motivation. It’s a different level of importance on education than I think for any other community.”

She plans to interview and organize focus groups with Black teenagers and young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who were in foster care and ask them to reflect on their experiences from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Harvey looks forward to hearing their stories and is excited by the potential of the project to find educational strategies to help Black foster youth succeed.

“It’s uplifting the voices of a marginalized group and allowing them to provide their story, or narrative of their experience,” she said. “What I hope to get from talking with these youths is to better understand what they experienced, but also, how they overcame it.”