1. Produce & Achieve: A Case Study of Inner-City Education A Born Digital Dissertation * Proposal Daryl Tate, Pepperdine University Introduction There is a crisis in American education – minority youth in urban schools fare poorly in comparison with their non-ethnic-minority counterparts. This disparity, known as the achievement gap, has persisted for well over half a century with African American males being consistently and by far in the direst of straits. Evidence of the problem is well-documented in the literature (Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Magnuson & Waldfogel, 2008) and defined and substantiated by national test score data (e.g., National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2013), disproportionately high dropout rates (Ebner, 2013), and low college enrollment and completion that exceeds what can be accounted for by socioeconomic status alone (Viadero & Johnson, 2000). Purpose of Research The purpose of this case study is to explore factors that may have contributed to the development of high academic achievement at Holy Angels, an African American inner city school, from 1969-1979. The focus will be on understanding and interpreting teachers’, clergy members’, and administrators’ intentions and decisions in the design and management of Holy Angels as well as students’ experiences at Holy Angels and their perceptions of the impact these experiences have had on their lives. My research goal is to identify, describe, and document the features, characteristics, and qualities that made Holy Angels a high achieving school as well as explore the plausible relationships among and between these elements that shaped Holy Angels. Research Question The overarching research question guiding this study is: What was the experience of students that attended Holy Angels School between 1969-1979? Conceptual/Theoretical Focus The ecological systems theory (EST) framework will be used to ground the research question and inform the research design for this study. EST is born out of ecology which examines the multipart arrangement of interconnected and interrelated relationships amongst biological entities and the physical and communal location in which an organism exists. The foundation of ecological theory focuses on the activity and dynamics between the living organism and its physical world. In the same manner that, over time, biological alteration is made evident, social relationships too are created and recreated within a broader environmental structure. Every specific social interaction establishes a series of interactive relationships which are not merely reciprocal. Ecological systems theory is self-evident in that it relays the notion that “development never takes place in a vacuum; it is always embedded and expressed through behavior in a particular environment” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 27). Study Propositions Although my examination of the unique dynamics at Holy Angels is novel, there does exist information on high achieving African American students in general that provide direction to avenues that may prove useful to begin exploring answers to my research question. Taking an ecological systems theory approach, I explored the background literature relevant to my research question at each level of the ecological model. In searching the literature in this way three major propositions consistently reoccurred in the literature: teacher expectations (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995; Woolley, et. al, 2010), academic emphasis (e.g., Hrabowski, 2001; Prager, 2011), culturally responsive pedagogy (e.g., Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 1995; Tate, 1994) Methods Research Design : Qualitative single case study Sources of Data : Interviews, archival records, and artifacts Population: Holy Angels administration, leadership and/or clergy, social scientists Sampling method : Snowball Data Collection Strategies & Procedures: video recording Means to Ensure Study Validity: Triangulation of the data, member checks and alternative explanations will be explored Reflexivity/Positionality Related to the validity of the study is my acknowledgement of my position as a participant-researcher as well as the perspective I bring to the data. My perspective as an indigenous insider is necessarily different compared to someone with no or a less intimate relationship with the subject *This study will be a born digital dissertation. A born digital scholarly study relies on complex interaction between media-rich elements to construct the argument(s).