Is the Underachievement of Ethnic Minority Children due to a Racist School System?

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Is the Underachievement of Ethnic Minority Children due to a Racist School System?

By Abigail Page

Rational

    Every child goes through the same education system, every child works through the same ‘curriculum 2000’ set by New Labour and every child sits the same exams up to the age of 16.  So why are there marked differences in educational attainment for ethnic minority students?

 

    My main aim is to find out if racism is the main cause of the gap between different ethnic groups in education, which can lead to some ethnic minority groups being over represented in low-status, low paid jobs.

   

   My investigation will look at the different explanations that sociologists have used over the years to explain why African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students are less likely to achieve 5 A*-C than white and Indian students.  To do this I will use secondary evidence, statistics and studies to show the traditional and more modern explanations for the ever-widening dissonance between ethnic groups.

 

     My primary research will be done by using informal interviews with members of the Norfolk and Norwich national equality council.  This will help me find out what the situation is like in Norfolk, and if people believe that the underachievement of some ethnic groups is due to reasons such as cultural deprivation or institutional racism.  Also I would like to see if the situation has changed much over time, therefore I will be using more dated research on top of more recent research.   I also hope that there may be a snowball effect once I interview one group as they may suggest other people who are involved in racial equality of education within Norfolk.

   

   Of course it is a much wider issue than what is just happening in my home city, yet for practical reasons I feel that I will only have time to focus on one area.  Yet I can do a comparison with the rest of Britain by using other sociologist research on the topic, and see how much mine and theirs vary.

 

    I have picked this topic because I feel that education underachievement is a major problem and so is institutional racism.  This issue has gained more attention after the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Mancpherson report that followed.  I also believe that everyone should be given an equal chance to do his or her best, so it is important to me to find out if racism is the real reason for ethnic minority students underachievement.        

   

METHODOLOGY

     An important issue in my research is how am I going to go about it?   The main issue is to find out the best method that suits the nature of my research.  Along side this it is important to know how practical and ethical my research is.

   I have decided to use unstructured interviews for my research.  This is due to several reasons, one being the constraints of the area I live in.  Norwich generally has small amounts of ethnic diversity, and my school shows this, as the majority of students are White.  If this wasn’t so then I would of used questionnaires and observation methods.  Therefore I have decided that my best opinion is to talk to people who deal with such matters on a day-to-day basis.

   Another reason why I am taking an interprestivist approach is because I want to look at social interaction and I feel that by using unstructured interviews I can have a much more in-depth view into the reasons for ethnic minority underachievement in education.   This is because my questions are open-ended and produce qualitative data, giving me the chance to hear what the respondent really feels and thinks.

   Advantages of this method is that I will have a higher levels of validity which is very important to me, however I understand that my study will not be representative of the population and much more difficult to analyse.   Yet I feel that I need much more than yes and no answers as I am looking for explanations to why and for this I will need to know what the respondent believes to be the reasons for underachievement and why they feel that way.  The respondent’s opinions are of the highest importance to me.

   These are also the reasons why I wanted a free flowing type of interview, so I start with topics I wish to cover during the interview but other than that I will let the questions flow from each other, without having the restrictions of pre-set questions and missing out of more information as I might have had to rush to get all the questions in.  In this way I hope to gain the most from my interviews.

   I have decided that I will not take notes during the interview, as this my stop such a good rapport being developed and may draw my attention away from the respondent.   Therefore I will tape the interview and transcribe it later.   I understand that this can be very time consuming, but this is better than taking notes as I don’t believe that I could keep up will everything being said, and forget things later and it may stop the flow of the interview, slow it down, which cannot happen as time is a issue and I will only have an hour to an hour and a half at most. I will gain informed consent for the use of the tape recorder before I go into the interview.  This I feel is an important ethical issue, which is in the British Sociological Association’s statement of ethical practice.

   Time is one of the most important practical issues as my respondents are very busy and I don’t want to over run and take up too much of their time.   Therefore I will do everything I can to keep the interview going and make sure that nothing slows it down.  

   Due to the subject matter there are some clear ethical issues.  The first one is that I don’t want to, by doing my research, confirm some peoples prejudices about ethnic minority underachievement in education.  To over come this I will make it clear that there are many ethnic minority children who are high achievers.

    As I am not directly interviewing any children I am not worried about the effect of my study.  I will get informed consent from anyone I will interview and I will be complete open about what it is I am studying.

         

   Another one of my concerns is of leading questions.  I don’t want my values coming across in the interview, therefore I am going to try to use as much unbiased language as possible.  This should mean that the respondent will say what they think not what they think I want to hear.  This is for validly sake as it doing everything I can to get the most in-depth information that I can.  Also practical there is no way that I can check if what I have been told is correct, and I will not have enough time to do a new set of interviews.      

   

    My sampling technique is opportunistic as I have few contacts within the Norfolk Education council, which are involved in racial equality in schools.  Also I hope there will be a snowball effect after talking to person.  So I can interview as many people as time allows.  This is my main way of finding respondents, I understand that it isn’t a random representative of the population but that is not what I am concerned with, as I am only looking to talk to a selective group of people within Norfolk that are involved with ethnic groups in schools.

 

    I have decided to email a shorter sample of my contextual data before the interview.  This is because I am aware that I will only have a limited amount of time during the interview and it also gives my respondent time to think about what I am looking into and what kind of basis I am working from.  Also this should give my respondent a well-informed idea about what I’m studying.  Therefore if there are any objections they can be made at the start of the interview so I can make the changes were appropriate.

  This I hope will lead to a more productive interview as both the respondent and me will be more prepared to discuss what other sociologists that found whilst researching the matter, and what are the factors we feel to be the most important, valid or most intriguing.  

     

   I have decided against doing a pilot study as in my opinion with an unstructured interview the length and context of each interview will be very different.  Therefore a pilot study will not really help me as in the real interviews I hope that the conversion will just flow.  Also I feel that it will be very hard to find someone to try a pilot study on as it has been rather hard trying to set up the real interviews.

   

   As I explained in my rational I will use a lot of secondary data within my study so I can compare what I find in Norfolk with the rest of the country.  This will be to find out how ethnic minority underachievement is effected by different areas. Also I wanted to find out if the situation has changed over time.  Generally I have found the sociological literature in a number of different A-level textbooks, yet I have also used sociological update to gain more statistical data.  From this I can find out what conclusions have been reached in the past, as well as avoiding the mistakes of the past.  One point about secondary data is that you can never know the validly of the source, therefore the sources I will use will be backed up by others to show that at least they were on the right track.

     

   I have decided to use instructed interviews, which will be tape recorded so I can get as much as I can out of one interview.  I have decided that to me for this study validly is more important than reliability due the nature of the study.      

               

CONTEXT

   

    When ethnic minority underachievement in education is assessed in sociology the main focus is what the cause of such a gap is when the educational system and schools give out such mottos as ‘success for all’.  Therefore it is my wish to find out the most valid reason for this underachievement.  To start with I am using a number of sources as my contextual data to show the five different explanations for the underachievement of ethnic minority children in education.

   

   The first argument is led by Arthur Jensen (1973) and Hans Eysenck (1971) who used the evidence that black people on average score 12 to 15 points less on general IQ tests than white people to come to the conclusion that this is a clear indication that black people are substantially less intelligent and it was inherited.  Yet to many sociologists this is hardly a valid argument.  Pilkington (1997) says, “It is questionable whether race is a biologically meaningful concept”.  He questions if IQ tests really measure intelligence as they are often weighted towards the white middle class and he believed that most differences can be explained by socio-economic status and racism, both of which I will explore later.  This argument in my view is very limited, as it is impossible to say that one group of people are much less intelligent than others.

   

    Cultural factors are easiest to explain when spilt into, traditions and culture, language and family structure, all of which differ between different ethnic groups.  It is important to point out that within different ethnic minority groups there is a great deal of difference in educational underachievement.  This is show by the research of Kysel (1985) who found that Indian Students O level scores exceeded that of white students and that Bangladeshi and Afro-Caribbean students were doing considerably worse.  Therefore much of my contextual data is focused on Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups.

   

   Tizzard (1988) in ‘Young children at school in the inner city’ points out that relatively few Afro-Caribbean families have the experience and tradition of seeking higher education, and also for Afro-Caribbean students there isn’t a relatively easy cultural fit’ as there is with such groups as Indians in the education system.  This suggests that Tizzard believes that one factor for Afro-Caribbean underachievement is the fact that their families and culture are not suited to aiming high in the system; there is a lack of motivation.  A problem that I have with this view is that it can imply that some cultures are not only different, but they are deprived and worse than others.

   

   However Tizzard in a later study of 343 children (171 white and 106 black) found that both sets of parents were interested in and supported their children’s education.  Yet he found that it was the teachers views of black culture that held the children back, “a widely held belief among teachers that black parents are particularly likely to fail to provide adequate support…(has) proved to be a myth”.  Therefore Tizzard recognised the fact that racism might play an increasing role in Afro-Caribbean underachievement.      

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    Geoffrey Driver, in another study found that Afro-Caribbean girls achieved better results than White girls and boys as well as Afro-Caribbean boys.  He concluded that this was due to the strength derived from the matriarchal family tradition in Jamaica.  This study makes the point that it is important to look at the differences between genders, as some ethnic groups are historical more matrifocal than patriarchal.   It also points out that traditions and cultures do play a role in how a child will see themselves and what they should aim to achieve, a loving wife and ...

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