SECTION B: Ethnicity Flashcards
Key Evidence:
- Chinese and Indian students are the highest attaining ethnic group.
- Pupils who have English as their additional language preform on average less well than student whose first language is English.
- Black students are three times more likely that white students to be permanently excluded form school.
- Bangladeshi (44%) and Pakistani (32%) adults are more likely to have no qualifications.
- White working class boys are the lowest performing group in Britain.
Outside school factors include:
- Material deprivation
- Cultural deprivation
- Cultural capital
- Language
cultural deprivation:
Lack of norms and values essential for educational success.
Material deprivation:
Lack of physical resources required for educational success.
In-school factors:
- Institutional Racism
- Ethnocentric
Expectations - Racialised
Expectations - Labelling
Black Panther Party: Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton (1967) defined institutional racism:
- Less overt, more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing acts. It originates in the operation of established and respected forces in society.
Macpherson definition institutional racism:
- The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.
- It is seen in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
Tony Sewell:
Ethnic minorities underachieve in education due to cultural deprivation and anti-school subcultures.
Gillborn:
Ethnic minorities underactive in education because the system is institutionally racist.
Troyna and Williams (1986):
- We must look at how schools and colleges routinely and unconsciously discriminate against ethnic minorities.
- Distinctions must be made between individual and institutional racism.
Critical Race Theory:
- Views educational system as institutionally racist.
- Emerged in the USA during the 1970s and80s as a framework for understanding the endemic presence of race within the American social and political formation.
Dara Rothmayr (2003)
A critical race theorist, institutional racism is a ‘locked in in-equality’ to education. The scale of historical discrimination is a large that there no longer needs to be conscious intent to discriminate- the inequality becomes self-perpetuation; it feeds of itself.
Gillborn (2008):
Gillborn applies the concept of locked-in inequality to education. He sees ethnic as ‘so deep rooted and so large’ that it is a practically inevitable feature of the education system.
Gillborn (1997):
Argues that because marketisation gives schools more scope to select pupils, it allows negative stereotypes to influence decisions about school admissions.
Gillborn (1997) is view supported by Moore and Davenport’s (1990) American Research:
- Selection procedures led to ethnic segregation.
- Primary school reports were used to screen out pupils with language difficulties.
- Application process was difficult for Non-English speaking parents to understand.
The commission for racial equality (1993) in Britain:
- Report identifies the following reasons:
- Reports from primary schools stereotype minority pupils.
- Racist bias in interviews for school places.
Lack of information and application forms in minority languages. - Ethnic Minority parents were often unaware of how the waiting system works and the importance of deadlines.
Gillborn (2008):
- Argues that the assessment is rigged to validate the dominate cultures superiority.
- He argues that when black children succeed as a group the rules are changed to ‘re-engineer failure’.
- For example when pupils started compulsory schooling schools used baseline assessments.
Tony Swell critques Gillborn:
- Rejects this idea of institutional racism, arguing instead that it is not powerful enough to prevent individuals from succeeding.
- For Sewell, we need to focus on external factors such as boys’ anti-school attitudes, the peer group and the absence of the nurturing role of the father.
Model Minorities: Indian and Chinese achievement:
- Preforms an ideological function, concealing the fact that the education system is institutional racist.
- It makes the system seem fair and meritocratic.
- It justifies the failure of minority groups.
Labelling:
labelling is attaching meaning to behaviour, which is significant in shaping the likely educational outcomes of different ethnic groups.
Key study: Fuller (1984)
Mary Fuller (1984): Rejecting negative labels:
Research on black girls in a London comprehensive school found that the black girls she researched were labelled as low-achievers, but their response to this negative labelling was to knuckle down and study hard to prove their teachers and the school wrong.
