Black Youth Educational Under-Achievement Problem: How Peer Influence, Social Attitudes, Education Policy, & Family Circumstance Unite to Maintain this Problem in the Ontario Public School System

This research paper is concerned with the problem of black youths educational underachievement in Ontario public schools. The general aim of the thesis is to demonstrate that this problem is not one that education policy makers are interested in finding a fix for, even though it has been a mainstay on their debate agenda for three to four decades now. To be sure, black youths academic under-achievement in Ontarios public school system is an issue usually taken up very seriously by education stakeholders.. The general position taken in the paper is that the long history of anti-black sentiment, contemporary economic and social marginalization of black people, and discriminatory policies and practices in the Ontario public school system, are all factors that combine to produce the deviant black-youth-identity we talk so much about today.