Ethnic differences in achievement

Bereiter and Engelmann

Language spoken by low income black American families is inadequate for educational success. They see it as ungrammatical, disjointed and incapable of expressing abstract ideas.

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. Father's absences also means boys lack an adequate role model of male achievement. Cultural deprivation is a cycle where inadequately socialised children from unstable families go on to fail at school and become inadequate parents themselves.

Murray

High rate of lone parenthood and lack of positive role models lead to the underachievement of some minorities.

Scruton

Sees the low achievement levels of some ethnic minorities as resulting from a failure to embrace mainstream British culture.

Pryce

Family structure contributes to underachievement of black Caribbean pupils in Britain. Claims Asians are higher achievers because their culture is more resistant to racism and gives them a greater sense of self-worth. Black Caribbean culture is less less resistant to racism. So many black pupils have a low self-esteem and underachieve.

Sewell

Problem is a lack of fatherly nurturing or 'tough-love', resulting in black boys finding it hard to overcome and emotional and behavioural difficulties of adolescence. Four responses to schooling, including racist stereotyping by teachers: Rebels, conformists, retreatists, innovators.

Lupton

Adult authority in Asian families is similar to the model that operates in schools.

McCulloch

Survey of 16,000 pupils found ethnic minority pupils more likely to aspire to go to university than white British pupils.

Evans

Street culture in white working-class areas can be brutal and so young people have to learn how to withstand intimidation and intimidate others.

Driver

Cultural deprivation theory ignores positive effects of ethnicity on achievement. Black Carribean family provides girls with positive role models of strong, independent women.

Lawrence

Challenges Pryce's view that black pupils fail because of weak culture and lack of self-esteem. He says they underachieve instead because of racism.

Palmer

Almost half of 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 white. 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.

Modood

While children from low-income families generally did less well, the effects of low income were much less for other ethnic groups than for white pupils.

Mason

Discrimination is a continuing and persistent feature of the experience of Britain's citizens of minority ethnic origin.

Rex

Racial discrimination leads to social exclusion and how this worsens the poverty faces by ethnic minorities.

Gillborn and Mirza

In one local education authority, black children were highest achievers on entry to primary school, yet by the time it came to GCSE, they had the worst results of any ethnic group.

Strand

Analysis of entire national cohort of over 530,000 7-11 year olds shows how quickly many black pupils fall behind after starting school. He found black Caribbean boys not entitled to FSM made significantly less progress than their white peers.

Bourne

Schools tend to see black boys as a threat and to label them negatively, leading eventually to exclusion.

Osler

In addition to higher rates of official exclusions, black pupils appear more likely to suffer from unrecorded unofficial exclusions, and from 'internal exclusions' where they are sent out of class.

Foster

Teachers' stereotypes of black pupils behaving badly could result in them being placed in lower sets than other pupils of similar ability.

Wright

Study of a multi-ethnic primary school shows Asian pupils can also be the victims of teachers' labelling. She found despite of school's apparent commitment to equal opportunities, teachers held ethnocentric views, that is, they took for granted that British culture and standard English were superior.

Archer

Ideal, pathologised, and demonised pupil identities.

Archer and Francis

Chinese students - Teachers' view of them is a 'negative positive stereotype'

Fuller

Study of group of black girls in year 11 of a London comprehensive school. Girls untypical because they were high achievers in a school where more black girls were placed in low streams. Girls channelled their anger about being labelled into the pursuit of educational success.

Mac an Ghaill

Study of black and Asian A-Level students. Students who believed teachers had labelled them did not necessarily accept their label. How they responded depended on factors like their ethnic group and gender and the nature of their former schools.

Mirza

Studied ambitious black girls who faced teacher racism. Racist teachers discouraged black pupils from being ambitious through the kind of advice they gave them about careers and option choices. Mirza identifies three types of teacher racism: colour-blind, liberal chauvinists, overt racists.

Troyna and Williams

Distinction between individual racism (prejudiced views of individuals) and institutional racism (built into the way institutions operate) Meagre provision for teaching Asian languages as compared with European languages.

Carmichael and Hamilton

Institutional racism is less overt, more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. it originates in the operation of established and respected forces in society.

Roithmayr

Institutional racism is a 'locked-in inequality': The scale of historical discrimination is so large that there no longer needs to be any conscious intent to discriminate- the inequality becomes self-perpetuating: it feeds on itself.

Gillborn

Argues that because marketisation gives schools more of a chance to select pupils it allows negative stereotypes to influence decisions about school admissions.

Moore and Davenport

Selection procedures lead to ethnic segregation, with minority pupils failing to get into better secondary schools due to discrimination

Commission for Racial Equality

It noted that racism in school admissions procedures means ethnic minority children are more likely to end up in unpopular schools. The report identifies the following reasons: Reports from primary schools that stereotype minority pupils, racist bias in interviews for schools places, lack of information and application forms in minority languages and ethnic minority parents are often unaware of how the waiting system works and the importance of deadlines.

David

Describes National Curriculum as a 'specifically British' curriculum that largely ignores non-European languages, literature and music.

Ball

Criticises National Curriculum for ignoring ethnic diversity and promoting attitudes of 'Little Englandism'. For example, the history curriculum tries to recreate a 'mythical age of empire and past glories', while ignoring the history of black and Asian people

Coard

Explains how the ethnocentric curriculum may produce underachievement eg in history, the British may be presented as bringing civilisation to the 'primitive' peoples they colonised. He argues that this image of black people as inferior undermines black children's self-esteem and leads to their failure.

Stone

Argues black children do not suffer from low self-esteem

Sanders and Horn

Study of GCSE. Found where more weighting was given to tasks assessed by teachers rather than by written exams, the gap between the scores of ethnic groups widened.

Tinkly et al

In 30 schools in the 'Aiming High' initiative to raise Black pupils' achievement, blacks were nevertheless more likely than whites to be entered for lower tier GCSE exams. This was often because black pupils had been placed in lower sets. The effect is that they can only gain a grade C at best.

Strand 2

Analysis of large-scale data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England shows a white-black achievement gap in maths and science tests at age 14. He found this to be the result of black pupils being systematically underrepresented in entry to higher-tier tests. Strad suggests ethnic differences in entry to test tiers reflect teachers' expectations, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Gillborn and Youdell

Secondary schools are increasingly using old-style intelligence tests to allocate pupils to different streams on entry.

Evans 2

To fully understand the relationship between ethnicity and achievement, we need to look at how ethnicity interacts with gender and class.

Connolly

One example of how ethnicity intersects with gender to affect achievement is in Connolly's study of five and six year olds in a multi-ethnic inner-city primary school. He shows how pupils and teachers construct masculinity differently depending on a child's ethnicity.

Connolly 2

There is an 'interactions effect': class and gender interact differently with ethnicity depending on which ethnic group we are looking at.