4.6 Evidence Flashcards
Ethnicity and Educational Attainment
Minority Ethnic Attainment and Participation in Education and Training
Blair et al
Early School Life:
* Indian and Chinese pupils more likely to achieve the expected level as compared to all other ethnic minority groups
* Many ethnic minority groups are from lower socio economic backgrounds; with 30% of black and pakistani students eligible for free school meals. and over 50% of gypsy/roma and bangladeshi pupils are eligible for free meals.
* Proportionately Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshis require special educational needs compared to white, chinese and indian students
* Black Carribean students are 3x more likely to face permanent exclusion than their white counterparts.
Post 16 Education and Training:
* Greater proportion of minority ethnic pupils in post-16 education mirrors the smaller proportion following work based routes. Only 4% of minority ethnic 16/17 y/os follow work based routes.
* found a lack of ethnic role models for ethnic minority students.
Higher Studies;
* There are very small number of minority ethnic staff at higher grades in Higher Education Institutions despite more minority ethnic groups going on to study in HE with GNVQ and BTEC qualifications compared to other students.
Half of UK’s young black males are unemployed
Ball etal
- The new figures, which do not include students, also reveal that the youth unemployment rate for black people has increased at almost twice the rate for white 16- to 24-year-olds since the start of the recession in 2008. Young black men are the worst affected of all, according to a gender breakdown contained within the data supplied by the Office for National Statistics.
- According to the ONS, in the last three months of 2008 the unemployment rate for black people aged 16 to 24 was 28.8%. In the most recent quarter in 2011, this had risen to 47.4% – an increase of 70% in three years. This is more than double the unemployment rate for young white people, which increased from 15% in 2008 to 20.8% in 2011.
Report that with black unemployment currently running at 50% in the UK there is little chance of boys getting paid work as adults so they see little point to educational qualifications.
William Labov on African-American English Vernacular
The fact is that the child’s teacher has no systematic knowledge of the non-forms which oppose and contradict standard English. Some teachers are reluctant to believe that there are systematic principles in non-standard English which differ from those of standard English. They look upon every deviation from schoolroom English as inherently evil, and they attribute these mistakes to laziness, sloppiness or the child’s natural disposition to be wrong … From this point of view, teaching English is a question of imposing rules upon chaotic and shapeless speech, filling a vacuum by supplying rules where no rules existed before …
The viewpoint that has been widely accepted and used as the basis for large-scale intervention programs is that the children show a cultural deficit as a result of an impoverished environment in their early years. Considerable attention has been given to language. In this area the deficit theory appears as the concept of verbal deprivation. Black children from the ghetto area are said to receive little verbal stimulation, to hear very little well-formed language, and as a result are impoverished in their means of verbal expression. They cannot speak complete sentences, do not know the names of common objects, cannot form concepts or convey logical thoughts.
Unfortunately, these notions are based upon the work of educational psychologists who know very little about language and even less about black children. The concept of verbal deprivation has no basis in social reality. In fact, black children in the urban ghettos receive a great deal of verbal stimulation, hear more well-formed sentences than middle-class children, and participate fully in a highly verbal culture. They have the same basic vocabulary, possess the same capacity for conceptual learning, and use the same logic as anyone else who learns to speak and understand English.
The notion of verbal deprivation is part of the modern mythology of educational psychology, typical of the unfounded notions which tend to expand rapidly in our educational system … The myth of verbal deprivation is particularly dangerous because it diverts attention from real defects of our educational system to imaginary defects of the child … It leads its sponsors inevitably to hypothesis of the genetic inferiority of black children that it was originally designed to avoid.
Black Masculinities and Schooling: How Black Boys Survive Modern Schooling
Sewell
In this 1997 study Sewell argues that a culture of hyper-masculinity ascribed to by some (but not all) black boys is one of the main factors explaining the educational underachievement of black boys. This study is an interested counter point to previous studies such as those by Cecile Wright and David Gilborn which emphasised negative teacher labelling as the main explanation for differential achievement by ethnicity.
Street culture and black masculinity
A relatively high proportion of Black Caribbean boys are raised in lone-mother household, with the father being absent. In the late 1990s when Sewell conducted his study, 57% of Black Caribbean families with dependent children were headed by a single parent, compared to only 25% of white families.
This means that many black boys lack a father figure to act as a role model and provide discipline while they are growing up, which makes this group more vulnerable to peer pressure.
Young black men are disproportionately drawn into gang culture which emphasizes an aggressive, macho form of masculinity which emphasizes the use of violence as a means to gain respect, values materialist displays of wealth such as the latest street fashions and crime, rather than ‘hard work’ as a quick and easy (‘smart’) route to financial gain.
Do gang culture and hyper masculinity explain the underachievement of Black Caribbean boys?
According to Sewell, this subculture of black masculinity provides peer support which makes up for their sense of rejection by their absent fathers, and for the sense of racism and injustice they feel from wider society.
Black Masculunities in School
Sewell suggests that this type of black masculinity (what he calls ‘hyper-masculinity) comes into conflict with schools. It leads black boys to rejecting the authority of both the teachers and senior leaders and to them not taking school work seriously as this is seen as effeminate and a bit of a ‘mugs game’ compared to the ease with which you can earn money by committing gang related crime.
Conformists (Active acceptors)– 41% who rejected hyper-masculinity and saw conforming to school rules and hard work as their route to success. These students ‘acted white’, Sewell found this to be the most common pro-school strategic response.
Innovators (Passive resistors) – 35% who saw education as important but rejected the process of formal schooling as it compromised their identity too much. However, they attempted to stay out of trouble.
Retreatists – 6% of students who kept to themselves, mainly SEN students
Rebels (active resistors) – 18% who rejected the norms and values of school and the importance of education. They saw educational qualifications as having no value because Racism in society would disqualify them from many decent jobs anyway. This is the group which adopted hyper-masculinity and were confrontational and challenging.
The schooling and identity of Asian girls
Shain
examined th subcultural responses of Asian girls in UK schools:
* The Gang were generally anti school. They adopted an ‘Us and Them’ approach that involved a positive claim of Asian identity. They generally opposed the dominant culture of school, which they saw as white and racist.
* The Survivors were pro-education and pro school. They were generally seen as ideal pupils, who worked hard to achieve success. teachers labelled them as ‘nice girls’ and ‘good workers’. This group played up the stereotype pf Asian girls as shy and timid, while being actively engaged in a strategy of self advancement through education.
* The Rebels were generally pro school and their rebellion was against their own cultural background. They adopted western modes of dress and distanced themselves from other Asian girl groups. Their survival strategy was one of academic success, and they connected school to positive experiences that they did not find in their home life.
* Faith girls developed their identities around religion rather than ethnicity. They were pro-education in the sense of promoting positive relations with staff and students pursuing academic success. They were, however aware of racism in the school as a major source of oppression. and this made some of them anti school.
Masterclass in Victimhood
I began my lesson by dividing the class into five groups. Their task was to draw “a wonderful African mask.” But there were a number of restrictions. I gave the first table, which consisted of well-behaved girls, lots of sugar paper, felt-tip pens, paint and glitter. Table two got a little less equipment, and I reduced the amount for each remaining table. Table five—let’s call it the “bad boy table”—was given one pencil, a pair of scissors and one piece of paper. They were, however, allowed to go to the other tables and trade resources.
One of the boys from table five put his hand up and said, “Sir, it isn’t fair. Why have you given everyone else all those papers and pens but we’re suffering in the ghetto?” Another boy said he was going to tell his mum I was racist (though table one was all black girls). Meanwhile, one boy went over to table one to beg for some pens, but the nice girls turned nasty and refused to trade. The boys on table five all began to moan that their white teacher was always picking on them and that the school was “prejujuice”—a word they had trouble pronouncing but not applying to me. “Everyone thinks we are gangsters and we are going to beat them up,” one said. Teachers were “rude” for telling them off.
At the end of the lesson I called on the headteacher to come in and judge which was the best mask. Table one, with all its resources, looked grotesque. The winner was table five. They had worked together with their meagre resources and come up with something magnificent.
At the end of the lesson I asked the bad boys what they had learned. They started predictably enough by saying “we are the best.” They then explained how bad they felt having to beg for resources, but were then determined to beat everyone else against the odds. I told them I had disliked their whingeing but was proud when they became focused and used their talent.
In 1971, education expert Bernard Coard wrote a pamphlet, “How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal in the British school system.” He described the notorious units for struggling students, where a large percentage of children from the Caribbean were placed on the basis of linguistic difference, cultural attitudes and a belief that black children were intellectually inferior.
African-Caribbean boys are still at the bottom of the league table for GCSEs. They start school at roughly the same level as other pupils, but during the course of their education fall further and further behind their peers, including white working-class and Bangladeshi boys. In 2008, the department for education reported that only 27 per cent of black boys achieve five or more A*-C GCSE grades. African-Caribbean boys are also the group most likely to be excluded from school; in some areas they are three times more likely to be excluded than other groups.
As someone who has experienced the education system throughout this period—as a child in the 1960s, as a teacher in the 1980s, and as a researcher today—I can say that, while the level of underachievement for black boys has remained the same, the reasons behind it have changed.
The MP Diane Abbott has claimed that “teachers are failing black boys,” arguing that “black boys do not have to be too long out of disposable nappies for some teachers to see them as a miniature gangster rapper.” Researchers such as David Gillborn and Heidi Mirza claim that teachers and schools indirectly discriminate against black boys. Gillborn cites the reason that schools try to protect their position in league tables: teachers enter black children into GCSE exams in which they can only get a maximum grade of C because if they were entered for harder exams they might fail, lowering the school’s results.
My challenge to these claims is that times have changed. What we now see in schools is children undermined by poor parenting, peer-group pressure and an inability to be responsible for their own behaviour. They are not subjects of institutional racism. They have failed their GCSEs because they did not do the homework, did not pay attention and were disrespectful to their teachers. Instead of challenging our children, we have given them the discourse of the victim—a sense that the world is against them and they cannot succeed.
Gillborn and Abbott imply that white teachers have low expectations of black boys and this is partly why they underachieve. I have never been convinced by this. I believe black underachievement is due to the low expectations of school leaders, who do not want to be seen as racist and who position black boys as victims.
And consider this initiative, introduced by the previous Labour government. “Reach” takes 20 “great black role models” around the country to inspire black boys to success. This is desperate and patronising. Why can’t black boys be inspired by anyone around them who is positive, including white teachers?
The bad boys in that class had a default reaction—all their experience was seen through the lens of racism. They had no measure to understand their lives other than that of the victim. It was only when they felt they could control their world that they realised they could succeed. I was not teaching them to accept their lot but to move on from being a victim.
Young black boys are constantly on edge, feeling that the world is against them but unable to find the real source of their trouble. We have a generation who have all the language and discourse of the race relations industry but no devil to fight.
Much of the supposed evidence of institutional racism is flimsy. An Observer article in April (“Black pupils ‘are routinely marked down by teachers’”) referred to a study by Simon Burgess at Bristol University. He had compared teacher assessments of thousands of pupils with independent Sats results and found that teachers tended to underscore for black and white working-class children, but overscore for Indian and Chinese children.
But the truth is that the study proves little. The black pupils were still underachieving in the real Sats scores compared to their peers, and the research showed that teachers in predominantly black schools did not underscore. Moreover, teachers were also underscoring white working-class pupils. At the age of 14, 63 per cent of white working-class boys and 55 per cent of black boys have a reading age of seven or less.
I had a hunch that if I worked with African-Caribbean boys over the period when they were most vulnerable to a victim mentality, then I could help them succeed. I set up a charity, Generating Genius, to work with black teenagers. Through a programme of summer schools, internships, and other interventions, we encourage them to realise their potential and aspire to professions in the sciences. (I chose science because it is perceived to be harder.)
I picked the students carefully, from schools with children from poor backgrounds and little history of sending students to university. Over a period of four years we worked with 60 boys. Our group met every summer for a residential science camp at a number of top universities. The result was fantastic: by 16 the boys had scored mainly A and A* in sciences and maths. All are now going to university.
Basit
In her West Midlands study, she found that Hindu, Muslim and other Asian families (cross generationally) placed a great emphasis on education as it yielded more opportunities then in their country of origin (a “blessing”). Grandparents were working class but the parents got middle class jobs through education - expect children to do the same.
Even poorer families put considerable effort and resources into helping their children - provided space to work etc.
Children were expected to work hard.
To conclude, having stable and supportive families are key to educational success. Could explain why different ethnic groups perform relatively better than others.
