Racial Opportunity Cost

Racial Opportunity Cost turns critical attention to the specific challenges faced by high-achieving students of color and gives educators a framework for recognizing and addressing these issues. Terah Venzant Chambers roots her discussion in the concept of racial opportunity cost, using a term borrowed from economics to refer to the obstacles faced and trade-offs made by Black and Latinx students on the path to academic success. Gathering firsthand accounts from students, practitioners, and researchers, Venzant Chambers underscores a set of experiences common to successful students from racially minoritized backgrounds. Together, these individual testimonies show how high-achieving students of color often encounter educational racism, and not only while attending predominantly white institutions. These personal accounts illustrate the many ways in which the negative effects of racial opportunity cost extend from K-12 education into postsecondary academics and beyond. In this clarifying work, Venzant Chambers identifies factors that can impact racial opportunity cost across educational environments. She considers how the individual challenges that high-ability students of color confront reflect larger systemic problems. Venzant Chambers's framework will help educators proactively cultivate change in their classrooms and schools to lower racial opportunity cost and improve student experiences. "Racial Opportunity Cost advances the study of academic achievement for students of color into new terrain. Venzant Chambers demonstrates convincingly that we should not close our eyes to the passageways of high-achieving minoritized students in white-normed school settings, as their experiences tell us so much about entrenched racialized norms that inflict pain and trauma on even the most successful students of color." -James D. Anderson, dean of the College of Education and Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Education, University of Illinois Terah Venzant Chambers is a professor of K-12 educational administration and the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the College of Education at Michigan State University. H. Richard Milner IV is Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of Education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He is President as well as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, an elected member of the National Academy of Education, and the editor for the Race and Education Series.