West African boys and early school leaving: persistence as counternarrative (Chicos negroafricanos y abandono escolar: la persistencia como contra-narrativa)

‘Black students’ are considered a group that has been widely studied in the international literature, but their educational situation in Spain has hardly been addressed. Based on an ethnography conducted in the Barcelona metropolitan region, this article examines experiences and educational trajectories of working-class black boys who are the sons of immigrants from West Africa. The research is framed within the European project Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe (RESL.eu), which has used a mixed methodology, longitudinal and comparative, to research the risk and protective factors of early school leaving in nine countries. The study also reveals how their supposed higher school leaving rate is challenged by the specificity of their trajectories, which emerge as a counternarrative of this group of youths as opposed to the hegemonic perspective of deficit from which they are often imagined. The results also warn about the need to review the usefulness of the standardized measures of Early Leaving of Education and Training (ELET) in youths aged 18 to 24.