Ethnic Differences In Achievement

Question 1

Define the term ‘ethnic group’.

Answer 1

Lawson + Garrod: ‘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.’

Question 2

Define an external factor.

Answer 2

Factors outside the education system, such as the influence of home and family background and wider society.

Question 3

Define an internal factor.

Answer 3

Factors within schools and the education system, such as interactions between pupils and teachers, and inequalities between schools.

Question 4

How do intellectual and linguistic skills affect educational achievement?

Answer 4

Cultural deprivation theorists:

• Argue many children from low-income black families lack intellectual stimulation and enriching experiences.
• Result: poorly equipped for schools because they’ve not been able to develop reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Bereiter + Engelmann:

• Consider the language spoken by low-income black American families as inadequate for educational success.
• Ungrammatical, disjointed and incapable of expressing abstract ideas.

Question 5

How do attitudes and values affect educational achievement?

Answer 5

Cultural deprivation theorists:

• Lack of motivation is a major cause of the failure for many black children.
• Some black children are socialised into a subculture that instils a fatalistic ‘live for today’ attitudes that doesn’t value education and leaves them unequipped for success.

Question 6

How does family structure and parental support affect educational achievement?

Answer 6

Moynihan (cultural deprivation):

• As many black families are headed by a lone mother, their children are deprived of adequate care as she has to struggle financially in the absence of a male breadwinner.
• Sees cultural deprivation as a cycle.

Murray (new right):
- High rate of lone parenthood and a lack of male role models leads to underachievement of some minorities.

Question 7

Note one example of compensatory education.

Answer 7

Operation Head Start in the USA was to compensate children for the cultural deficit they’re said to suffer because of deprived backgrounds.

Question 8

Give three criticisms of cultural deprivation.

Answer 8

Driver:

• Ignores positive effect of ethnicity on achievement
• The black Caribbean family, far from being dysfunctional, provides girls with positive role models of strong independent women.
• Argues this is why black girls tend to be more successful in education than black boys.

Lawrence:

• Challenges Pryce’s view that black pupils fail because their culture is weak and they lack self-esteem.
• Argues that black pupils under-achieve not because of low self-esteem, but because of racism.

Keddie:

• Cultural deprivation is a victim blaming explanation.
• Argues ethnic minority children are culturally different, not culturally deprived.
• They underachieve because schools are ethnocentric: biased in favour of white culture and against minorities.

Question 9

Define multicultural education.

Answer 9

A policy that recognises and values minority cultures and includes them in the curriculum.

Question 10

Define anti-racist education.

Answer 10

A policy that challenges the prejudice and discrimination that exists in schools and wider society.

Question 11

Define material deprivation.

Answer 11

A lack of those physical necessities that are seen as essential or normal for life in today’s society.

Question 12

Give four reasons why ethnic minority pupils are more likely to suffer material deprivation linked to housing and low income.

Answer 12

• Almost half of all ethnic minority children live in low-income households, as against a quarter of white children.
• Ethnic minorities are almost 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 white British workers.

Question 13

What evidence is there that ethnicity may sometimes be more important than class in pupils’ achievement?

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

According to Rex, how does racism lead to social exclusion in housing?

Answer 14

Discrimination means that minorities are more likely to be forced into substandard accommodation than white people of the same social class.

Question 15

According to Wood et al, how does racism lead to social exclusion in employment?

Answer 15

• Sent 3 closely matched job applications to almost 1,000 job vacancies.
• Fictitious applicants using names associated with different ethnic groups.
• Found only 1 in 16 ‘ethnic minority’ applications were offered an interview, as against 1 in 9 ‘white’ applications.

Question 16

How does Gillborn and Mirza’s study challenge cultural deprivation theory?

Answer 16

Found, in one local education authority, black children were the highest achievers on entry to primary school (20 percentage points above local average), yet by the time it came to GCSE, they had the worse results of any ethnic group - 21 points below average.

Question 17

How does labelling and teacher racism affect educational achievement?

Answer 17

Bourne: schools tend to see black boys as a threat + label them negatively, leading eventually to exclusion. Exclusions affect achievement: only 1 in 5 excluded students achieves 5 GCSEs.

Foster: found teachers’ stereotypes of black pupils as badly behaved could result in them being placed in lower sets than other pupils of similar ability. Resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy of underachievement.

Wright: 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.

Question 18

How do pupil identities affect educational achievement?

Answer 18

Archer describes how the dominant discourse constructs three different pupil identities:

• The ideal pupil identity: A white, m/c, masculinised identity, with a ‘normal’ sexuality. Seen as achieving in the ‘right’ way, through natural ability + initiative.
• The pathologised pupil identity: An Asian, ‘deserving poor’, feminised identity, either asexual or an oppressed sexuality. Seen as a plodding, conformist and culture-bound ‘over-achiever’, achieves through hard worth rather than natural ability.
• The demonised pupil identity: A black or white, w/c hyper-sexualised identity. Seen as unintelligent, peer-led, culturally deprived under-achiever.

Question 19

How do pupils responses and subcultures affect educational achievement?

Answer 19

Fuller: Study of a group of black girls in yr 11.

• They were high achievers in a school where most black girls were placed in low streams.
• Instead of internalising negative stereotypes, they channelled their anger into educational success.
• Didn’t seek approval from teachers (racist).
• Maintained relationship with lower streamed girls.
• Only conformed to school work, not rules.
• Relied on their own efforts/abilities to pass exams.
• Fuller: ways of coping with the contradictory demands of the white British m/c education system, whilst avoiding the ridicule of black boys and maintaining relationships with black girls from lower streams.

Question 20

Give two criticisms of labelling theory.

Answer 20

• Dangers of seeing stereotypes as simply the product of individual teachers’ prejudices, rather than of racism in the way that the education system as a whole operates. E.g publishing league tables, ‘A-to-C economy.’
• Danger of assuming that once labelled, pupils automatically fall victim to the self-fulfilling prophecy and fail. Nevertheless, as Mirza shows, although pupils may devise strategies to try to avoid teachers’ racism, these too can limit opportunities.

Question 21

Define individual racism.

Answer 21

Results from the prejudiced views of individual teachers and others.

Question 22

Define institutional racism.

Answer 22

Discrimination that is built into the way institutions such as schools and colleges operate.

Question 23

According to critical race theory, racism is a ‘locked-in inequality’. Explain what this means.

Answer 23

The scale of historical discrimination is so large that there no longer needs to be any conscious intent to discriminate - the inequality because self-perpetuating.

Gillborn: sees ethnic inequality as ‘so deep rooted and so large that it’s a practically inevitable feature of the education system’.

Question 24

Summarise how marketisation and segregation affect ethnic differences in achievement.

Answer 24

Gillborn: argues because marketisation gives schools more scope to select pupils, it allows negative stereotypes to influence decisions about school admissions.

Moore + Davenport:

• Selection leads to ethnic segregation, with minority pupils failing to get into better secondary schools due to discrimination.
• Example: they found primary school reports were used to screen out pupils with language difficulties, while the application process was hard for non-English speaking parents to understand.

Question 25

Summarise how the ethnocentric curriculum affects ethnic differences in achievement.

Answer 25

Ethnocentric curriculum is a curriculum that reflects the culture of one ethnic group - usually the dominant culture.

Examples:

• Language, literature + music: David describes the National Curriculum as a ‘specifically British’ curriculum that largely ignores non-European languages, literature and music.
• History: Ball criticises the National Curriculum for ignoring ethnic diversity and for promoting an attitude of ‘little Englandism’. E.g the history curriculum tries to recreate a ‘mythical age of empire and past glories’, while ignoring the history of black and Asian people.

Question 26

Summarise how assessments affect ethnic differences in achievement.

Answer 26

Gillborn:

• Argues ‘the assessment game’ is rigged to validate the dominant cultures superiority.
• If black children succeed as a group, ‘the rules will be changed the re-engineer failure’.
• Example: previously, primary schools used ‘baseline assessments’ which tested pupils when they started compulsory schooling.
• Result: overnight black pupils now appeared to be doing worse than white pupils.

Question 27

Summarise how access to opportunities affects ethnic differences in achievement.

Answer 27

The ‘Gifted and Talented’ programme:

• Created to meet the needs of more able pupils in inner-city schools.
• Gillborn: official stats show whites are over twice as likely as Black Caribbeans to be identified as gifted and talented, and 5 times more likely than Black Africans.

Exam tiers (Tikly et al):

• In 30 schools in the ‘Aiming High’ initiative to raise Black Caribbean pupils achievements, blacks were nevertheless more likely than whites to be entered for lower tier GCSE exams.
• Often because black pupils had been placed in lower sets.
• Effect: can only gain grade C at best.

Question 28

Summarise how the ‘new IQism’ affects ethnic differences in achievement.

Answer 28

Gillborn:

• Argues teachers and policymakers make false assumptions about the nature of pupils ‘ability’ or ‘potential’.
• They see potential as a fixed quality that can be easily measures and once a pupil is measured, they can be put into the ‘right’ set or stream.
• No genuine measure of ‘potential’.

Gillborn and Youdell:
- Secondary schools are increasingly using old-style intelligence (IQ) tests to allocate pupils to different streams on entry.

Question 29

How does Sewell criticise Gillborn’s view?

Answer 29

• Although he doesn’t believe that racism has disappeared from schools, he argues that it’s not powerful enough to prevent individuals from succeeding.
• Sewell: we need to focus on external factors such as boys anti-school attitudes, the peer group and the nurturing role of the father.

Question 30

How has the achievement of model minorities been used to criticise Gillborn?

Answer 30

Critics: As well as the underachievement of groups such as black boys, there’s also an ‘overachievement’ by other ‘model minorities’. E.g Indian and Chinese students perform better than the white majority.

‘If these two groups do so well, how then can there be institutional racism in education?’

Question 31

In Gillborn’s view, how do model minorities conceal institutional racism?

Answer 31

• It makes the system appear fair and meritocratic: that Indians and Chinese succeed because they make the effort and take advantage of the opportunities offered to them.
• It justifies the failure of other minorities, such as blacks: that they fail because they’re unable or unwilling to make the effort, due to their ‘unaspirational’ home culture.
• It ignores the fact that ‘model minorities’ still suffer racism in schools. For example, Chinese students report similar levels of harassment to Black Caribbeans.

Question 32

What does Connolly mean by an ‘interactions effect’?

Answer 32

Class and gender interact differently with ethnicity depending on which ethnic group we’re looking at.

Question 33

Give one or more examples of how the interactions effect affects ethnic differences in achievement.

Answer 33

There’s a bigger gap between the achievements of white m/c and white w/c pupils than there is between black m/c and black w/c.

Question 34

Who identified 4 responses to teacher racism? What were they?

Answer 34

• The rebels: small minority, reject goals and rules, anti authority ‘black macho lads’, identify with hegemonic masculinity.
• The conformists: largest group, accept goals and rules, keen to succeed, wish to avoid stereotypes.
• The retreatists: tiny minority, isolated individuals, disconnected from school and subcultures, despised by the rebels.
• The innovators: 2nd largest group, pro-education but anti-school, only conformed to school work not rules, friendly with rebels.