As a music teacher, Dr. Ramon Goings began noticing a disturbing trend among the students that he was teaching.
“More and more Black boys who looked like me were being pushed into special education,” says Goings, who eventually went back to school and then became certified to teach special education. Increasingly frustrated and concerned by this dilemma, Goings encountered barriers from administrators who, he says, oft en placed Black boys into special education and kept them there because of funding purposes.
Initially, Goings, who held teaching positions in several urban school districts including Baltimore city, had plans of becoming a school principal. But his interest in research forced him to change his career trajectory and led him to pursue a doctoral degree in educational leadership at Morgan State University.
“I liked the thought of becoming a professor,” says Goings, who graduated in 2008 from Lynchburg College with a bachelor’s in music education.
This fall, Goings began a tenure-track teaching position though, he was catching the attention of well-known scholars, such as Dr. Donna Ford of Vanderbilt University, for his groundbreaking research on Black males.
“Dr. Ramon Goings is not only an upcoming scholar and leader, he also is a mentor in the early stage of his career,” says Ford. “Th is is rare and he should be replicated.”
Goings credits Ford for mentoring and grooming him on how to become a professor and excel within the academy. And by the summer of 2014, while he was deeply engaged in writing his dissertation, he says that he started to think of himself as a scholar.
