//Ethnic Differences in Achievement Flashcards
Define the term ‘ethnic group’.
People who share common history, customs and identity, as well as, in most cases, language and religion, and who see themselves as a distinct unit.. These people can be a majority group or a minority group.
How do intellectual and linguistic skills affect educational achievement?
Bereiter and Engelmann consider the language spoken by low-income black American families as inadequate for educational success.
How do attitudes and values affect educational achievement?
Cultural deprivation theorists see lack of motivation as a major cause of the failure of many black children.
How do family structure and parental support affect educational achievement?
Moynihan argues that because many black families are headed by a lone mother, their children are deprived of adequate care because she has to struggle financially in the absence of a male breadwinner.
Note one example of compensatory education.
Operation Head Start. It was set up to compensate children for the cultural deficit they are said to suffer because of their deprived backgrounds.
Define multicultural education.
A policy that recognises and values minority cultures and includes them in he curriculum.
Define anti-racist education.
A policy that challenges the prejudice and discrimination that exists in schools and a wider society.
What are three criticisms of the cultural deprivation theory?
Keddie sees cultural deprivation as a myth and sees it as a victim-blaming explanation. she dismissed the idea that failure at school can be blamed on a culturally deprived background.
Troyna and Williams argue that the problem is not the child’s language but the school’s attitude towards it.
Blackstone and Mortimore argue that working class parents do not have the education or the knowledge to help their children.
Define material deprivation.
Refers to poverty and a lack of material necessities such as adequate housing an income.
Give four reasons why ethnic minority pupils are more likely to suffer material deprivation linked to housing and low income.
Almost half of all ethnic minority children live in low-income households, as against a quarter of white children.
Ethnic minorities are twice as likely to be unemployed compared with whites.
Ethnic minority households are around three times as likely to be homeless.
Almost half of Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers earned under £7 per hour, compared with only a quarter of British workers.
What evidence is there that ethnicity may sometimes be more important than class in pupils’ achievement?
In 2011, 86% of Chinese girls who received free school meals achieved 5 or more higher grade GCSEs, compared with only 65% of white girls.
According to Rex, how does racism lead to social exclusion in housing?
Discrimination means that minorities are more likely to be forced into substandard accommodation than white people of the same class.
According to Wood et al, how does racism lead to social exclusion in employment?
He sent job applications to nearly 1,000 job vacancies. These came from fictitious applicants using names from different ethnic groups. For each job, one application appeared to come from a white person and two from members of minority groups. He found that only one in 16 ethnic minority applications got an interview, in comparison to one in nine whites.
How does Gillborn and Mirza’s study challenge the cultural deprivation theory?
They found that in one local education authority, black children were the highest achievers on entry to primary school (20 percentage points above the local average), yet by the time it came to GCSE, they had the worst results of any ethnic group - 21 points below the average.
How does labelling and teacher racism affect educational achievement?
Wright’s study of a multi-ethnic primary school found that Asian pupils are also victims of labelling. They found that teachers assumed that Asian pupils would have a poor grasp of English and therefore left them out of class discussions and spoke to them using simplistic language.
