Education: Ethnic Differences in Educational Achievement Flashcards
1
Q
Archer and Franics
A
- Chinese parents see education as a family project, have high expectations of their children, and invest lots of time and money in their education.
2
Q
Ethnocentric Curriculum
A
- What is taught in schools focuses on white, European culture. Black music, culture and art are largely ignored. Lip service is paid to black history.
3
Q
Gilborn and Youdell
A
- White female teachers have low expectations of black boys. They are more likely to be given detentions. Teachers interpret their dress and speech as challenging authority.
4
Q
Criticism
A
- Despite teacher stereotyping, most black boys are not a problem at school. They generally obey rules and leave school with good qualifications.
5
Q
Tony Sewell
A
- African-Caribbean boys brought up by single mums lack the discipline provided by fathers and may be attracted to gang culture and reject academic values.
6
Q
Guy Palmer
A
- Nearly half of ethnic minority children live in low-income families and suffer material deprivation, compared with a quarter of white children.
- For example, ethnic minorities in the UK are more likely to be in poverty because they are more likely to be unemployed or in low-paid jobs due to racism.
7
Q
Wright (1992)
A
- Some teachers openly labelled Asian culture as inferior to British culture. They often assumed that Asian children had a poor grasp of English. As a result, Asian students felt that they were not allowed to participate fully in discussion.
8
Q
What are the overall attitudes and values of cultural deprivation theorists regarding black children and their educational achievement?
A
- Some black children are socialised into a subculture that instils fatalistic attitudes that does not value education and leaves them unequipped for success.
9
Q
How does Driver criticise the cultural deprivation theory?
A
- Ignores positive effects of Black family structures on achievement.
- The Black Caribbean family is far from dysfunctional as it provides girls with positive role models of strong independent models who can lead the lone parent family.
- This is why black girls tend to be more successful in education than Black boys.and why they achieve better grades than their White peers.
10
Q
What happens in Asian families, that leads to their greater educational achievement?
A
- While many black families have absent fathers in Sewell’s view, Indian and Chinese pupils benefit from supportive families that have an ‘Asian work ethic’ and place a high value open education.
11
Q
What did Ruth Lupton argue?
A
- Ruth Lupton found that Asian parents expect their children to be respectful to adults. Therefore, they are generally more supportive of school behaviour, policies and sanctions.
- This had a knock-on effect in school, since parents were more likely to be supportive of school behaviour polices.
12
Q
What is Archer’s ‘Pupil Identities’ theory?
A
- Teachers often define pupils as having stereotypical ethnic identities.
13
Q
Briefly explain the three pupil identities.
A
There are three different pupil identities:
- The ideal pupil identity - A white middle class masculinised identity. Teachers stereotypically see this pupil as achieving through the right way with natural ability and initiative.
- The pathologised pupil identity - stereotypically seen as the conformist over-achievers
- The demonised pupil identity - A white/black working class student. Teachers see this pupil as stereotypically unintelligent, peer-led an =d culturally deprived under-achiever.
14
Q
Who are teachers may likely to pathologise?
Provide an example of an ethnicity group that is ‘pathologised’.
A
- Teachers are more likely to pathologise (seen as abnormal) minority ethnic groups.
- For example, while Chinese students were successful, they were seen as achieving success in the wrong way - through and working passive conformism rather than natural individual ability.
- This meant that Chinese students could never legitimately occupy the identity of the ideal pupil
- Therefore, proper achievement is only seen as legitimate from privilege white middle class ideal pupils rather than ethnic minorities such as the Chinese.
15
Q
How can Archer’s theory of pupil identities be criticsed?
A
- Does not explain why Chinese still perform consistently better than white peers in all social class. This would then suggest that teachers see Chinese as inferior than white students, but this has not affected educational achievement.
- This could be explained in terms of the self-refuting prophecy as pupils may refuse to accept this ‘negative positive’ stereotype and decide to prove it wrong by working extra hard . Negative labels do not automatically lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, whereby achievement is hindered.
