Assess the claim that ethnic differences in educational achievement are primarily the result of school factors.

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Assess the claim that ethnic difference in educational achievement are primarily the result of school factors.

There are clear differences between certain ethnicities within educational achievement as ethnic minorities perform worse than the white population, but this covers wide variations between groups. In particular, Indian and Chinese students outperform white students, while Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afro Caribbean students do worse than the white population. A key reason for these differences is that factors within school effect certain ethnicities outcomes.

A significant factor within school is the idea of teacher racism. Teachers hold labels of students that mean that they often believe Asian students are incredibly naturally intellectual. This meant that certain ethnic minorities got more help from the teacher so straight away they have a clear advantage. Gillborn and Youdell argue that teacher’s racist assumptions led them to believe that Afro Caribbean students would cause trouble and that teachers would see the behaviour of these students challenging. Teachers would then confront their behaviour which would cause problems. Therefore they were labelled by teachers as students who didn’t want to do well. This leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy and helps to explain why Afro-Caribbean’s are seen to underachieve.

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The idea of an ethnocentric curriculum within schools describes an attitude that gives priority to the culture and view point of one particular ethnic group while disregarding others. This is seen within schools in Britain as Miriam David(1993) see’s the National Curriculum as ‘specifically british’ that teaches the culture of the ‘host community’ whilst ignoring other ethnicities cultures and languages. Bernard Coard(2005) helps to explain how the ethnocentric curriculum may produce underachievement as the image of black people as inferior undermines black children’s self-esteem, leading to their failure.

However some such as Troyna and Williams argue that teacher racism ...

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