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 mother, who stays at home or the main breadwinner of the family.
Driver and Ballard (1981) studied the effect of language, and found that by the age of 16 Asian children whose main language at home wasn’t English were at least as competent as there classmates. This is backed by the Swann Report (1985) who found that linguistic factors might hold back a few, yet for the vast majority they were of no significance. The conclusion that I gain from these reports is that ethnic minorities are not hindered by their family’s language, and that if a child is brought out in England then it will come as naturally as it will for a White English child.
Pilkington (1997) pointed out there were important differences between ethnic minority families. He found that the cohesiveness of Asian families may assist in the high educational achievement of some Asian groups. This view is backed by both the Swann Report (1985) and Driver and Ballard (1981), as they both agreed, “the Asian family structure, more tightly knit than White and West Indian families, maybe responsible foe the higher levels of achievement” (Swann). Driver and Ballard go further to say that “Not only have they encouraged them to work hard at school, but they have in general been prepared to give considerable support to their children...” Therefore I have concluded that the Asian family is a positive resource.
Pilkington has a different view on Afro-Caribbean families, as he points out that the family culture are not suited to educational success. This is backed by Ken Pryce (1979) who described West Indian family life a “turbulent”, but at the same time he found that the “majority of West Indian parents have great aspirations for their children”.
From all of this I conclude that there is no doubt that most parents want the best for their children, however family structures and support methods are an important factors are important as this is where the child will get their primary socialisation from and where they go to for help.
Pilkington believed that cultural explanations should be treated with caution, even if they cannot be dismissed. The problems are that they are critical if ethnic minority cultures simply because they are different, and they can distract attention away from the possible failings of the educational system, deprivation and Racism. I will look into culture factors in may primary research, as I believe that there are some valid points about how important the family is, however, like Pilkington I believe that there are more important factors at work within ethnic minority children that cause them to underachieve in school.
When looking at the classes of ethnic minority groups we find that Indians are mainly middle class due to the fact that in the 1960’s many joined the NHS as doctors, nurses and chemists while others set up small businesses. In contrast to this Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean male immigrants took up skilled and semi-skilled manual jobs while the females took unskilled manual jobs. Therefore these groups are overwhelmingly working class. Mabey (1981) believes that these factors alone largely explain why these groups tend to lag behind White and Indian, who contain more middle class families. This view is backed by the Swann Report (1985), which found that when socio-economic factors where taken into account the degree of underachievement of by West Indian children was reduced by around 50%.
BBC Education correspondent Mike Baker (2002) said that ethnic minority achievement is strongly linked with differences of social class or poverty. He stated that pupils of Bangladeshi origin, who tend to experience higher levels of poverty mostly under-perform.
However there are studies, such as that done by Craft and Craft (1983) that found that Afro-Caribbean children attain significantly less than white working class children. This shows that the underachievement of ethnic minorities may be due to another factor other than social class, or a another factor as well as social class. This view is also backed by the findings of Drew (1995) who used data from ‘Youth Cohort Study’ and found that out of class, gender and Ethnicity, class was easily the most important factor. However it was also clear that differences remain for ethnic minority groups once class was taken into account.
Douglas in his book ‘The home and the school’ traced the achievement of a sample of British children born in the first week of March 1946. He divided his sample into groups, those who has sloe use of hot water, a bathroom and toilet, and those who had to share. The second group symbolised unsatisfactory living conditions, and those who lived in them gained lower reading test scores. Douglas believed that this was because the houses were overcrowded and there was nowhere for the pupils to study quietly with no distractions.
Douglas also argued that middle class children are given a head start in education. This is due to the fact that they are more likely to be taken to museums and libraries, and they were more likely to have more educational toys and books.
As a overview I believe that class has an effect on the achievement of children in education, however this affects all children, and it would be logical to assume that ethnic minority children have to face other problems in the class room that hinder them to explain why Afro-Caribbean children do so much worse than White children of the same socio-economic status.
There is a study by Smith and Tomlinson (1989) ‘the school effect’ that examines the school system itself. They found that that ethnic minority group membership didn’t influence whether or not a pupil as entered for an exam. However what this did depend on was attainment at school and to an extent social class, e.g. middle class children were placed in higher groups than working class children who had the same scores. They stated that different schools achieved very different results in exams with children of similar backgrounds and ability. Therefore they concluded that schools have far more influence than ethnicity. However in my view due to government legislation parents can decide what school their children go to, generally if the parents are middle-class then they are able to put a child in the best school even if it is not it their ‘catchment area ‘, as they are able to afford to take or pay for their child to come any distance to or from school, or pay for boarding school. However working class parents, a position that some ethnic minority groups are in do not have the time or money to send their child far away so they choose a local school, even if it doesn’t have a good track record. Therefore schools do have an influence, however class and ethnicity affect what school a child goes to.
The Swann Report (1985) attached some importance to the role of the education system in explaining the underachievement of ethnic minority children. They accepted that that only a same number of teachers were consciously racist, but there was a great deal of unintentional, intertuslised racism in the teachers, books, system and class content that gave negative images of ethnic minority groups.
Bernard Coard (1971) gave the strongest attack on the education system, by stating
that the education system makes black children become subnormal by making them
feel ‘inferior in every way’; this produces a low self image, which when reinforced by teachers who expected black children to fail, produces a self fulfilling prophecy. Mike Baker (2002) also cited that recent research has shown an unusually high degree of tension and conflict between white teachers and Afro-Caribbean pupils, as well as this he found that teachers are more likely to have a more negative view of Afro-Caribbean pupils. He feels there aren’t enough ethnic minority teachers, who will have a better understanding of how to deal with ethnic minority children. I gather that the issue that the British School system is full of white heroes and historic characters while there is little to no mention of any black or Asian men or women greatly effects the way a child will see themselves and their culture. It could mean that they do not feel part of British society, and they have nothing to give that could help or change they way the country is ran.
Wright (1992) found that Asian children were largely excluded from classroom activities as it was assumed they had a poor command of English. Teachers also talked to them using simplistic and childish language, as well as expressing disapproval of their customs and traditions. This made Asian students feel increasing isolated, which led to them becoming ambivalent towards school and schoolwork. However unlike Asian children Afro-Caribbean students are not expected to have academic success. Black children were more often criticised for bad behaviour when white children were not, they “received a disproportionate amount of teachers negative attentions”.
Wright concluded that children from ethnic minority groups are relatively disadvantaged in the primary school years, which provide the “foundation of emotional, intellectual and social development”. These early disadvantages could very well hold child back in the later stages of education. This seems to make sense that children from ethnic minority groups have to deal with many more problems in everyday life that can effect them in many different way, one of these may be to give up on education as the teachers seem to have no time to deal with them, or treat them in such a manner that they feel they will never be able to achieve academically
The report ‘Black boys betrayed by racist school system, says report’ was a news article in the Guardian in September 2004. It mentioned a study commissioned by the London mayor Ken Livingstone, it found that black boys complained of racism and stereotyping from teachers, and their ‘chances of success were also limited by an archaic curriculum’. Livingstone believed that some of the problem was that there wasn’t enough ethnic minority teachers, nor did the governors and other professionals involved with education reflect the diversity of London’s children. In the same article MP Diane Abbott and the London Development agency agreed “The consensus was that low teacher expectations played a major part in the underachievement of Afro-Caribbean pupils… low levels of positive teacher attention, unfair behaviour management practices…took their toll”. As well as this direct discrimination in the form of Afro-Caribbean overlooked for answering question and verbal aggression and harsher reprimands from teachers was found to have a massive negative effect on the children.
Murza in her study ‘Young, Female and Black’ (1992) descried very few teachers as overt racists, and they girls she was studying tired to avoid them as much as possible. She descried another group of teachers as ‘colour blind’, which means that they felt that was no problem of racism to address therefore if it was happening they wouldn’t do anything about it. They also failed to push their black students hard enough because they wouldn’t point out their weaknesses. Another group of teachers were the ‘anti-racists’, who she found to be over zealous and made misguided attempts to make classes relevant to black pupils, which often resulted in bemusement and embarrassment. The ‘liberal chauvinists’ were those teachers who wanted to help Black students, but this often turned out to be counter-productive. An example o this would be stopping Black students from taking exams feeling that they already had too much on their plate. The final group of teachers were Black, and they treated the girls normally and therefore got the most out of the girls.
Overall Murza found that most teachers were failing to meet the girl’s needs and in the process they were making it difficult for the girls to fulfil their potential. “ The girls had to look for alternative strategies with which to get by. These strategies…were employed by the girls as their only means of challenging their teacher’s expectations of them, and as such were ultimately detrimental to the education of the pupils concerned”. Therefore it was the well-meaning but misguided behaviour of most of the teachers, and in particular by the power that teachers could exercise over pupils were the cause of the girls being held back, it was only the Black teachers that could get the girls to reach the full potential.
In the article ‘Gifted but black’ was a report in the Guardian in October 2003. Maureen Ojo speaks of how black people are often described as aggressive which has a negative effect on the children, “ if teachers attitudes are positive and black children feel listened to, it makes them feel more positive about themselves. If they know that it won’t make a difference then why should they bother…if they feel their contribution isn’t valued, you are on the way to a problem”. These two more recent studies show that not much has changed in the context of racism in the school system since the studies of 1971.
As an overall conclusion I believe that most of my contextual data points towards the fact that the underachievement of some ethnic minority groups is largely to do with Racism and the structure of the school system, and the always important factor of social class, as this is an issue for all ethnic groups and as many black and Asian groups are working class this factor has to be taken into account.
I wanted to use my contextual data to compare what the Norfolk school situation is different to the rest of the country and how the situation has changed over time.
This may be my contextual data, an introduction to what I intent to look into. However I have used much more evidence than needs be, as I intent to use many of these studies as secondary sources, along with my primary evidence I gain from my interviews.
Evidence
This is my summary of the unstructured interview I held on the 14th December 2004 with a member of the Norfolk Racial equality council. Before this interview I had emailed a summary of my context hoping that I would give a good starting point for my interview.
I started off by asking what were his personal feelings about the situation,
“My personal feelings are that the school system has to try to understand more about Black and Indian minority’s issues and how and why they are discriminated against. In my experience the reason why Black and Indian minority children are not doing do well in education is due to institutional racism, therefore it is the white institutions and their policies that have to change, not the children”.
This backs up many of the more recent articles, like ‘Black boys betrayed by racist school system’ from my context that shows that covert racism is of the greatest concern in the education system today. I asked my respondent to expand on his views using the experience he has had from working within schools on cases of racial abuse,
“We have found that there are many teachers who don’t have the training to be able to deal with, or understand what is or what isn’t racism. On top of this Head teachers have been very slow in producing racial equality policies, which by law every school should have. These are just a couple of thing that need to be changed as they are causing a lot of trouble in the education of Black and Indian minority children. In Norfolk there is the problem that the education panel who give advice to schools are mainly white, middle class, they are not representative of disability, lower social classes, the young or of ethnic diversity. The result of this is that ethnic minority children do have in harder because they get less support and the system is seeming against them.”
This information was something that I hadn’t found whilst doing my contextual data, but there is a connection to Coard’s work where he said that the education system was too white. Also from other work I have done in sociology I have found that mainly of the large institutions in England are controlled by mainly middle class white men. I can see how these 3 factors alone can make education inaccessible for ethnic minority children, and they can be causes for racism within schools.
In my rational I had cited that I wanted to compare Norfolk to the rest of the country, so I asked my respondent if he thought the situation is different in Norfolk compared to a major industrial city like Birmingham?
“Racism is the same wherever you go, the difference is in the ways that the institutions are responding to the needs of Black and Indian minorities, and in the Norfolk education system has taken much longer to respond. This is because the institutions in Norfolk are denying that there is a problem, and because of this they are not introducing the policies and programmes needed to help Black and Indian minority children in education. It has taken many years for the education system in Norfolk to have an anti-racist policy. Un top of this teachers often don’t know much about racism, how to recognise it and how to deal with it, and this leaves the child with no one to talk to. This means that ethnic minority children in schools in Norfolk have it harder because there is racism in the system, and there are not many help lines for them to use when they experience discrimination so many do just stop going to school. Also it makes a difference that Norfolk is a rural area, which has an overwhelming majority of white people. In isolated places Black and Indian minorities can suffer more because they don’t have the support of a large community that they would in cities like Birmingham. Another problem in Norfolk is that racism isn’t often thought about because there is so little ethnic diversity, and racism, overt racism just isn’t in peoples faces enough for them to be concerned about it. Still it is very clear to me or anyone who has a quick look at the issue that racism does exist in Norfolk’s schools, just like in all other schools in England. It is this covert racism within the school system and in everyday live that can cause ethnic minority children to underachieve”.
As I could find no secondary data which involved Norfolk this information was again new too me, but it was what I had expected to find from own experience of the Norfolk education system. I have heard many people over time say that because Norfolk lacks in ethnic diversity it makes it harder for any minority ethnic groups in Norfolk because many of peoples views are racist and their isn’t a sense of belonging because there aren’t large communities. This shows that while racism happens within many schools across the country, because my respondent has cited problems with were in my context, it is a different type of problem in Norfolk, and this is rarely a good thing. One piece that does correspond with the study by Murza (1992) where she found that there were teachers who didn’t think that racism was a problem and did nothing to help. It is unclear if this is because they hadn’t had the training (which was the reason my respondent gave for teachers in Norfolk), or they just believed that it wasn’t an issue. Still for whatever reason it is clear that in Norwich and the rest of the country that there are teachers that are turning their backs on children who are being racial abused. So far I have got the feeling that racism in my respondents view is the main factor to ethnic minority underachievement in education.
I then went on to talk about my contextual data, and asked him to respond to Coard theory that racism whether overt or covert caused low self-esteem in ethnic minority children.
“ It really depends on what the child is like, and the action they take against racism. For example they could develop a low self-esteem and never work to their full ability because they don’t believe that they are worth it, or they could become very loud, pushy and cheeky in an attempt to stand up for themselves and show that they will not be pushed around. However this can mean that a teacher will send them out of class more and more often. In both of these situations there is the chance that they won’t go to school for fear of their peers, they don’t see the point in learning therefore don’t put in much effort, or they feel whatever they do they are always getting into trouble. These can all cause underachievement”.
This does to some extend correspond with Coards research in saying that low self-esteem, caused by either the school system or direct teacher actions can cause children to underachieve. However I get the feeling that Coard’s theory is too deterministic, which is what my respondent pointed out, as there are many black boys who become more confident the more teachers ‘pick on’ them, not always drawing into themselves. This does resemble the labelling theory in which once labelled as an underachiever or a trouble maker by a teacher or peer group the child becomes this via a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can see a connection between my respondents idea that the children the more they feel they are a focus of negative teacher attention act up, and research by Murza who found that the girls she was studying used alternative methods to challenge the teachers expectations of them, which was detrimental to their school work. This theory also goes against Coard’s theory that ethnic minority children who faced racism developed low self-esteem. Still whatever the action of the child it is clear that the effects are detrimental. Therefore again I have the feeling that racism in schools is causing in one way or another underachievement in ethnic minority children. I followed this up by asking if he felt that a lot of school material in the British education system is based on a white culture.
“ Yes is feel that there is a dominate white culture in schools, and the problem with this is that for all children it is important to have a role model that they can associate with. As the school system is mainly based on white history and white people, black and Indian minority children can feel that they don’t have a part in British, and as I said early can lead to issues of low self-esteem because they don’t see any from their culture leaving any imprint on history. Therefore it is necessary for the education system to change to accommodate the fact that England is a multi-cultural county and it is this diversity of people that enrich society”.
This issue, I believe is a major factor and it does back up what I have experienced during my time in education. Coard found that in school material given to young children white is often good and black is associated with evil. At such a young age this word association might have an effect of how both the child sees themselves and how other view them. This again is institutional racism, because the education system isn’t making allowances that England is a multi-ethnic country.
I then asked about if he had many cases of teachers being directly racist.
“We do have cases of directly racist teachers, partially head teachers. But we have found that one of the main reasons is that the teachers haven’t got the training needed to understand what they should and shouldn’t do. The problem with the teachers who are directly racist is that their actions have such a massive effect on the children and can cause them to stop going to school, and of course their grades will suffer. For example a bright black child may shout out in class and will dismissed out of the classroom straightway while a white child would have been kept in class. This is because teachers are more negative towards black and Indian minority children, compared to white children. The majority of cases are of ethnic minority children being punished too quickly without issue. This happens because the teachers don’t understand, and often they don’t take the time to understand”.
This corresponds with the article ‘ Black boys betrayed by racist school system, says report’ from my context, as it says that Afro-Caribbean suffer from low levels of positive teachers attention. I think that there is a lot of validly in saying that teachers do treat ethnic minority children differently because there is also the study by Wright saying that Asian children are often ignored by the teachers, and this leads them to become ambivalent towards school. Yet Murza defined very few teachers as directly racist, and I feel that as people have become more aware of overt racism, and campaigned to stop it, very few teachers now can a way with being overtly racist, however this has caused I harder problem to deal with, covert racism which is harder t place, are is no one person to blame, and the people who are making polices are rich and powerful. Still this is a problem of racism; therefore it seems that racism within the education system is the main factor in causing underachievement of ethnic minority children.
I then mentioned the study by Mirza (1992) called ‘Young, Female and Black’, that found the teachers who got the best out of black girls were black teachers, because they treated them as normal people,
“From experience I have found that Black and Indian children do feel more confident with Black and Indian minority teachers, there is a connection there, an understanding that these children don’t have with other teachers and this helps a lot. For example we had a been in touch with a young Black boy who saw his black teacher as an uncle, and it was very important to him that there was a black person here in a position of power to help him. This was the first time that he had seen that Black people can be important and this had a massive positive effect on the child”.
This does link up with what Ken Livingstone said that teachers don’t reflect the diversity of the students, and this is reason why black children underachieve. Mirza believed the same thing that it was only Black teachers that really helped the black girls and it was the well meaning, but misguided behaviour of most of the other teachers and caused the girls to be held back. BBC Education correspondent Mike Baker also felt that Afro-Caribbean teachers would have a better understanding of how to deal with Afro-Caribbean children’s needs. From this I believe that more ethnic minority teachers will greatly help the problem of underachievement, because without them ethnic minority children feel marginalized, don’t know where to go if they suffer from racist abuse, and white teachers can often ignore them or they become a focus of negative attention. Therefore I believe that one major factor to the underachievement of ethnic minority groups is the fact that there aren’t enough teachers that will treat them as any other normal child.
Since so far we had mostly talked about racism I decided to ask about poverty in relevance to my contextual data.
“ Of course there are other problems facing black and Indian minority children, and one of these is clearly poverty, as it effects the conditions in which people live in, it is a huge factor that has to be analysed, as it is clear that children from poorer, working-class backgrounds, whatever the ethnic group do not do so well in education”.
I responded to this by pointing out the study done by Craft and Craft (1983), which cited that working class Afro-Caribbean boys still were doing worst than working class white boys,
“ Well of course poverty cannot be the only factor causing underachievement, it is a combination of factors, and as I have already said racism is another factor for ethnic minority children to deal with on top of issues like poverty”
This does correspond with the study by Drew (1995) that found even through class have a massive effect on everybody, there are clear differences that remain for ethnic minority groups once class has been taken into account. This gives me the opinion that class is more of a secondary factor to racism.
I still wasn’t very clear on my respondent’s view on class and poverty so I asked him to expand on his views.
“ When you start to look into class you will find that it is a massive problem because a lot of issues of inequality come from it because class itself is an inequality. Still in England there are houses without central heating, there are people living in very poor conditions and this does have a huge impact on children. This is because they have to come home to a house that has no room to study, no computer, few books because they all cost too much. I think that a factor is that parents who have manual jobs have to work more hours to support a family, but then they don’t have the time to help their children and might not have the education themselves to help with their children’s school work. Another factor is that many working class parents, especially black and Indian minority parents don’t have the knowledge of the school system to appeal against a decision, because they don’t have the benefits of middle-class white parents who are on the PTA or have connections in the school”.
This supports Douglas’s research from my contextual data, which cites that middle class children are given a head start in education. This is due to the fact that they are more likely to be taken to museums and libraries, and they were more likely to have more educational toys and books. He also argued that children who lived in unsatisfactory living conditions gained lower reading test scores. Due to the fact that many ethnic minority groups are working class it is easy to see how class and poverty are factors that add something to the underachievement of ethnic minority groups, because they are such massive issues. However there is still a gap between white working class children and ethnic minority working class children so there must be more to it.
I then asked if agreed with the ‘school effect’ from my context,
“I still this as a matter of class because it is the poorer areas that tend to have poorer schools, which don’t have such a good quality of teaching, conditions and class sizes are often too large. All these factors alone can cause children to underachieve, yet if this was the only factor than there wouldn’t be a gap between ethnic groups”.
This shows that while the school that the child goes too does have an effect, social class is still an issue because that is what causes people to live in poorer areas, this is unlike Smith and Tomlinson (1989) who concluded that schools have far more influence than ethnicity. I believe therefore that Smith and Tomlinson put to much significance on the effect of school, as I don’t see it as a factor that stands alone, it is wrapped up in social class and ethnicity. Therefore I feel that class and poverty are a massive factor on ethnic minority children, because many are affected by poverty. However I am starting to think that it may be one of a combination of factors.
I then asked if he believed that family support systems make a difference to a child’s achievement at school,
“It does, but it depends, when children reach 15 to 16 the family can often be a problem, practically for young women. The effect of the family can be very complex because Asian families for example do encourage children to work hard but it can also hinder the children by putting too much pressure on them. It really depends on what ethnic group is being discussed; some groups have a greater sense of community support while others have a high percentage of single parent families, who don’t have a lot of financial or emotional support
Still all around the world the family is changing, there are a lot mote people getting divorced, and there are many mixed race families. Therefore it is hard to judge which groups give the best support”.
This does add more to Pilkington, the Swann report and Driver and Ballard research as they all saw the Asian family as a positive resource, none of them talked about how a strong sense of family and cultural traditions could hinder a child. An example of this could be arranged marriages. Also it is true to say that the family is changing, and with more mixed race families it maybe hard to say what culture has the best support system because there is no norm anymore. Still in saying that it is dependent on which ethnic group does correspond with Pilkington findings that Afro-Caribbean family culture isn’t suited to education success, but found that the cohesiveness of Asian families help high educational achievement.
Therefore I feel that while the family as a primary socialising intuition does affect many aspects of a child’s life, including education, it is now due to such massive change in the family too hard to say what type of family is the norm for different ethnic groups, there is no clear cut line anymore. Also I feel that by saying that family systems control how a child will do in education is saying that the white, middle-class family system is the best, because white middle class children often achieve better in school, this is prejudice because instead of just saying that each culture is different it is also saying that one is better than all the others.
I asked if he believed that it made a difference for a female if their culture was more matriarchal,
“ It does give women a much better role model than they could have in a more patriarchal society. They see women in strong, dominant and intellectual roles, who can achieve just as much as men. Therefore more is expected of females, like to do well in education and with this positive self-image they often do”.
This corresponds with Geoffrey Driver’s study in why Afro-Caribbean girls do better than white boys and girls. He found that the girls derived a lot of strength from the matriarchal family tradition in Jamaica. It seems that it is very important to have a role model that you can associate with, as this is also an issue of the low amount of ethnic minority teachers in the education system, as ethnic minority children often don’t feel like they have a place in the education system because they are not represented in the system.
I then asked if he felt that Afro-Caribbean’s have a harder culture fit into the Education system,
“ As I have already said the dominant culture in schools is very white, middle-class. When Afro-Caribbean’s came too England they went into manual jobs, with poor pay, and this effects later generations because even through their children may want to achieve more, social mobility is very hard because the school system, along with others doesn’t know how to care for them, yet this is changing and social mobility is becoming less of a problem, still the change is much too slow”.
This does correspond to an extent to Tizzard’s research in ‘Young children at school in the inner city’ in that Afro-Caribbean families haven’t got a tradition of seeking higher education, as there is majority of working class ethnic minority families. This means that it is hard for Afro-Caribbean children, yet this cannot be a main factor because it is now easier for children from working-class children to become middle-class, I also believe that there is an aspect of racism in this because the dominate culture in education is white in an multi-cultural country. I feel that culture and family while ever so important, are only a small factor when it comes to ethnic minority underachievement. This is because the evidence that I have collected isn’t very concise, e.g. the family can either help or hinder and the whole concept of the family is changing. Also I feel that a family can really encourage a child and support them therefore a child has the chance to become a high achiever. However I don’t feel that the family can hinder a child enough to make them underachievers. So it has to be more that the families influence to such a gap in educational achievement
I went to ask if he believed that the concept that ethnic minority groups are any less intelligent has any validly,
“ The underachievement of Black and Indian minority groups is not because they are any less intelligent, it is because the system is racist, instructional racist.
In my opinion is a prejudice theory because it portrays everyone in an ethnic minority group as the same and worse than the ethnic majority group. It is quite illogical to assume that one group of people are unintelligent while another are, because everyone is different. Also there is no evidence to back this up that c be explained by a racist school”.
Of course this goes completely against Jensen’s (1973) argument that black people are less intelligent, yet I never expected my respondent to agree with such a clearly racist theory. It does in fact back up Pilkington’s idea that “it is questionable that race is a meaningful biologically concept” meaning that you can never judge something like intelligence from somebody’s ‘race’. Therefore intelligence has nothing to do with ethnic minority underachievement.
After this my respondent reinforced his views that the underachievement of ethnic minority groups is due to racism,
“Many don’t understand that children from different cultures can bring something more to education, schools should be encouraging children to speak another language, to express themselves. Instead they are oppressing them, and their culture. You see when you oppress children they become distressed very quickly and this is so detrimental that it can cause children to stop going to school or to stop trying at school. We see a lot of evidence that Black and Indian minority children have been excluded from many aspects of school life, like not taking part in an discussion because a teacher believe that they are not up to it. This causes them to feel alienated and to maybe underachieve”.
This corresponds with the study done by Wright (1992) that found that teachers often expressed disapproval of Asian children’s customs and traditions, and that they were largely excluded from classroom activities because the teacher assumed they had a poor command of English. Both of these led to them to feel more and more isolated from the other children and underachievement in the end. This seems like a very valid point and with my contextual data backing this idea I feel that I can say that the British education system is institutional racist.
As a final thought my respondent added,
“ When you look at the fact that Black and Indian minority children have been racial abused by their peer group, discriminated against by other children and teachers who have prejudices against ethnic minority groups, you see that these children are going to be less ability to perform to their full ability at school. Racism has a massive psychological effect of the well being of the children”.
My conclusion is that Racism is a massive factor that affects so many ethnic minority children. It is mainly institutional racism in the forms of school material being based on white history and culture, the actions of teachers (not directly racist e.g. labeling), they fact that the British education system is biased towards white culture e.g. it doesn’t take into account that Britain is an country full of ethnic diversity, lack of ethnic minority teachers, and the effect racism has on the children all cause ethnic minority underachievement.
While I feel that intelligence has nothing to do with ethnic minority underachievement, poverty, social class, culture and family all do play apart in it. I feel that depending of the child it can be any amount of these factors stated above combined that contributes to the underachievement, however I feel that the overriding factors has to racism with the education system. This view is dependent on all the examples and reason that my respondent gave to me, and also much of the more up to date research on the issue talk of racism instead of culture and family. It also seems that while the arguments for racism are very concise, the ones for other factors are dependent on seeing every family, every person in each ethnic group as the same e.g. the Asian family is very cohesive, while West Indian family life is turbulent. I find it hard to accept such massive generalisations, and therefore I think that their effect is minimal. After racism I believe poverty and social class to be big factors in causing underachievement, however this brings me back to the point that there is still an attainment gap between ethnic minority working class children and white working class children, and I believe that it is the racist school system that causes this difference.
One thing that I found came up again and again was the need for ethnic minority teachers and the importance of children having role models that they can connect with. This I can see will and does have an effect on how children see themselves and what the hope to achieve. Without them it is highly passable that children may see themselves as having a position in a society that doesn’t cater for them and therefore don’t think getting a good education is worthwhile.
In my rationale I talked about wanting to compare the situation in Norfolk with the rest of the country. I have found that while racism is the same all over, the problem is different in rural places like Norfolk, due to lack of understanding and belief that racism is happening in our schools and therefore there is a lack of policies to help ethnic minorities, problems of isolation because there is so little ethnic diversity in Norfolk and finally the fact that many peoples views in Norfolk are still old fashioned, and this includes the people how made decisions about the education system in Norfolk.
Finally I think that the situation has changed over time, I feel that the view on ethnic minority underachievement has become less deterministic and there has been a clear movement away from cultural deprivation. Instead I have found that while poverty is still an issue, as it always will be, it is racist school systems that the newspapers and reports focus on, and in my view that is quite justified.
Evaluation
My aim was to find out if racism is the main cause of the gap between different ethnic groups in education. I set out to find this out by using unstructured interviews because I wanted an in-depth view into the reasons for ethnic minority underachievement. As this was a micro investigation I was more focused on obtaining a lot of valid information. I feel that I achieved these due to the amount of qualitative data that was produced from the interview, also I felt that I gained the high levels of validity that I wanted because as far as I could see my respondent didn’t have any reason to lie, nor to I believe that I lead him in any way by using loaded words or leading questions.
However my reliability was low because there was no way of conducting another interview and expecting to have the same results. Yet I understood this when I decided to use unstructured interviews, and as I said in my methodology validly was much more important to me than reliability because I didn’t want to make any generalisations.
I cannot say that my respondent was representative of the children that my study was based on. However due to the fact that I live in an area that has small amounts of ethnic diversity, I had to interview some one who dealt with racism on a daily basis. When I look back at the interview I feel that I had more than enough very valid information to make a well-informed decision, so I don’t think I lost anything by interviewing a member of the Norfolk racial equality council.
One failing of my research was that I had intended to have more than one interview, using a snowball sampling technique. However even through I had been given a name of a contact who dealt with racism in the education system in my first interview, it turned out that I couldn’t set up an interview in time. Also once I had finished transcribing my interview, and quantifying my data I already felt that I had enough data to give a well-rounded report. However this does mean that I only have one persons point of view, however well informed they were, so my study wasn’t as in-depth as I would of liked.
In my methodology I expressed my ethnic concern that by doing my research I may conform other people’s prejudices about ethnic minorities underachievement, however I feel that if anything my study shows that ethnic minority educational underachievement has nothing to do with their lack of intelligence, but a racist school system. Therefore I feel that my study should help get rid of peoples prejudices. Before I took part in an interview I read the British Sociological Association’s statement of ethical practice, and from this I felt that once I had got my respondents informed consent, about the interview topic and the fact that I wished to use a tape recorder during the interview, that there wasn’t a lot of ethical issues to deal with. This is because I believed, and know now that no ones physical, social and psychological well beings were affected by my research. This is because I wasn’t interviewing any children who would be directly influenced by racism in schools any therefore affected by my study.
There was a time issue, which involved transcribing my interview and the amount of data that I had to deal with. I know before I started my interview that writing up an interview from tape took a long time, however I just didn’t realise how long. I got the feeling that I could have got more data maybe from other interviews or secondary sources with the time I spend on transcribing and qualifying my data. However with the mass of data I did get I felt that I had more than enough information for my research.
With my secondary data I felt that I found some very good studies that could be cross-referenced with other studies to show that they had more validly, than if I couldn’t back them up. However I couldn’t find any secondary data that was focused on the Norfolk education system in reference to racism. This meant that to find out about how the situation is different in Norfolk from the major cities I had to depend solely on my interview, which does take away to an extent the validly of my findings. But I still felt from my own experience that I could agree with what my respondent said, therefore I believe that there was truth in what he said. Another point is must of the more recent studies that I found focused on racism and there was little on culture to compare with the data I had from the 1980’s, yet this happened to help me come to the conclusion that racism is felt to be a bigger reason to ethnic minority underachievement than culture.
I felt that was some aimlessness in my interview, and I put this down to the fact that I hadn’t done a pilot study. A lot of subjects were repeated, I not sure if it was because I wasn’t asking my question in an clear simple way or that my respondent just wanted to make sure that he got his point across. This means that while some subjects like racism were talked about a lot, other subjects were more glossed over, like I felt that I didn’t like enough information about culture. Therefore if I were to do this study again I would do a pilot study and take more control in the interview. I was glad that I had sent a summary of my context via email before my interview because it meant that my respondent knew what I was studying, and it saved time in the interview because we started talking about the subject straight away.
Overall I believe that I got all the data I needed, and I felt that the conclusions I reached were valid. I would like to do some further study into the subject, however I would like to travel to other parts of the country and do some observational studies, to find out how children think and feel about the situation, because I felt that the area I live in does limited me.
