Ethnicity + Achievement

Question 1

Bereiter and Engelmann

Answer 1

language spoken by low-income black American families is inadequate - it is ungrammatical, disjointed, and incapable of expressing abstract ideas

Question 2

Gillborn and Mirza

Answer 2

Indian pupils do very well despite many not being EFL

Question 3

Pryce

Answer 3

Asians are high achievers because their culture is more resistant to racism as it was not destroyed by colonialism so they have higher self-worth

Question 4

Murray

Answer 4

high rate of lone parenthood (WC black family) and a lack of positive male role models → underachievement

Question 5

Sewell

Answer 5

it is not the absence of fathers that leads to underachievement, but the absence of fatherly nurturing or ‘tough love’ → black boys find it hard to overcome the emotional and behavioural difficulties of adolescence
Street gangs offer black boys ‘perverse loyalty and love’ and anti-educational peer group pressure → most of the academically successful black boys felt that the greatest barrier to success was pressure from other boys - doing well was seen as ‘selling out’ to the white establishment.
Asian pupils benefit from supportive families that have an ‘Asian work ethic’ + place a high value on education

Question 6

Lupton

Answer 6

adult authority in Asian families is similar to the model that operates in schools
In a study of 4 schools she found that teachers reported poorer levels of behaviour and discipline in white WC schools, despite the fact they had fewer children on FSM → low levels of parental support VS ethnic minority parents saw education as a ‘way up in society’

Question 7

AO3 of cultural deprivation theory

Answer 7

ignores the positive effects of ethnicity on achievement - eg black Carribean family is not dysfunctional but provides girls with role models of strong, independent women

Question 8

Palmer

Answer 8

ethnic minorities are more likely to experience material deprivation

• living in economically deprived areas
• culture: Muslim concept of Purdah (stops women leaving home for work)
• foreign qualifications aren’t recognised

Question 9

racism in wider society

Answer 9

Some argue that poverty itself is a product of racism - ethnic minorities are more likely to be placed in substandard housing

Question 10

Bourne

Answer 10

schools tend to see black boys as a threat and to label them negatively, leading eventually to exclusion → only 1 in 5 excluded pupils achieve 5 GCSEs

Question 11

Foster

Answer 11

teachers stereotypes of black pupils being badly behaved results in them being placed in lower sets than other pupils of similar ability → SFP of underachievement

Question 12

Wright

Answer 12

despite school’s apparent commitment to equal opportunities, teachers held ethnocentric views - that British culture and Standard English were superior → Asian pupils were marginalised and not engaged in class discussions

Question 13

Archer

Answer 13

teacher’s construct 3 pupil identities

1. ideal pupil - natural ability, white, MC, masculine
2. pathologised - Asian, feminine, asexual, hardworker
3. demonised - WC, hyper-sexualised, culturally deprived, underachiever

Question 14

Fuller

Answer 14

• study = a group of black girls who were untypical because they were high achievers when most black girls were placed into low streams
• Instead of accepting negative stereotypes, they channelled their anger about being labelled into the pursuit of educational success

Question 15

Mirza

Answer 15

3 types of teacher racism

1. colour-blind = sees pupils as equal but doesn’t challenge racism
2. liberal chauvinist = sees black pupils as culturally deprived and have low expectations of them
3. overt racists = active discrimination

Question 16

AO3 of labelling theories

Answer 16

Danger of seeing these stereotypes as simply the product of individual teacher’s prejudices rather than of racism in the way the education system as a whole operates

Danger of being too deterministic, but although pupils may devise strategies to try to avoid teacher’s racism, these too can limit their opportunities

Question 17

individual racism

Answer 17

results from the prejudiced views of individual teachers and others

Question 18

institutional racism

Answer 18

discrimination that is built into the way the education system operates

Question 19

CRT

Answer 19

racism as an ingrained feature of society - it involves not just the intentional actions of individuals, but institutional racism

Question 20

5 elements of institutional racism

Answer 20

1. marketisation
2. ethnocentric curriculum
3. assessment
4. access to opportunities
5. new IQism

Question 21

Moore and Davenport

Answer 21

Marketisation - selection procedures leads to ethnic segregation, with minority pupils failing to get into better secondary schools due to discrimination → ethnically stratified education system

Question 22

Ethnocentric curriculum

Answer 22

only reflects the culture of the dominant ethnic group → builds a racial bias into the everyday workings of school

Question 23

Assessment

Answer 23

the ‘assessment game’ is rigged to validate the dominant culture’s superiority - if black children succeed as a group, the rules will be changed to ‘re-engineer failure’

EXAMPLE: the ‘baseline assessments’ were replaced with the ‘Foundation Stage Profile’ - overnight black pupils seemed to be doing much worse

Question 24

gifted and talented programme

Answer 24

whites 5x more likely to be accepted than Black Africans

Question 25

new IQism

Answer 25

Teacher assessment of pupils work against black pupils because when teachers are asked to judge ‘potential’ they look at perceptions of ‘attitude’ as well as attainment, and teachers have ‘racialised expectations’ of black pupils

Question 26

AO3 of CRT

Answer 26

‘Model minorities’ such as Indian/Chinese overachieve so there cannot be institutional racism