Ethnic Differences in Achievement

Intellectual and language skills:

• Children from low income black families lack intellectual stimulation so fail to develop reasoning & problem-solving skills.
• Bereiter & Engelmann - language of poorer black American families is ungrammatical & disjointed so underarchieve.

Attitudes, values and family structure:

• Fatalism & immediate gratification socialisation of black children.
• Lack of male role model for many Afro-Caribbean boys leads to underachievement (Murray).
• Culture of poverty - inadequately socialised childern from black matrifocal families (Moynihan).
• Impact of slavery - low self esteem as less resistant to racism (Pryce).
• Asian families - more supportive families (Sewell).
• Fathers, gangs & culture - street gangs offer a perverse loyalty & love (Sewell).

White working class pupils:

• Lupton - poorer levels of behaviour & discipline due to less parental support & negative attitudes to education.
• Evans - street culture produces peer pressure to reject education.

Compensatory education:

• Aims to counter the effects of cultural deprivation.
• Operation Head Start - established in teh USA to compensate children for the cultural deficit thety suffer.
• Sure Start - aims to support the devlopment of pre-school children in deprived areas in the UK.

Criticisms:

• Keddie - victim blaming, minority ethnic groups underachieve as school is ethnocentric.
• Ball - less aware of how to 'negotiate' the British education system so are culturally excluded.
• Cultural denomination - imposes dominant white middle class culture on minority ethnic groups.

• Lack of the physical & economic resources essential for normal life in society.
• Half of ethnic minority children live in low-income households.
• Ethnic minorities are almost twice as likely to be unemployed.
• Minorities face discrimination in the housing & labour markets.

Racism in wider society:

• Members of minority ethnic groups face direct & indirect discrimination at work & in the housing market.
• Therefore are more likely to have low pay or be unemployed, thus affecting their children's educational opportunities.

Black pupils:

• Gillborn & Mirza - black children were highest achievers on entering primary school but had fallen below average by GCSE, suggesting schooling is to blame.
• Gillborn and Youdell - teachers had 'racialised' expectations about black pupils by expecting more discipline problems & threatening behaviours so are more likely to be punished - this conflict stems from racist stereotypes of teachers - higher exclusions of black boys & placed in lower streams.

Asian pupils:

• Wright - Asian primary school pupils were stereotyped by teachers & treated differently - assumed they would have a poor grasp of English so used simplistic language; mispronounced names - so pupils were marginalised, erducing self-esteem.
• Connolly - saw Asian pupils as passive & conformist, and boys as more feminine, vulnerable & less able to protect themselves.

Sewell:

• Conformists - keen to succeed, accepted school's goals & had friends from other ethnic groups.
• Innovators - pro-education but anti-school, valued success but not teachers' approval.
• Retreatists - disconnected from both the school and black subcultures outside it.
• Rebels - rejected the school's goals & rules & conformed instead to the stereotype of 'black mach lad'.
• This lead to the underacheivement of all black pupils as teachers saw them all as rebels so discriminated.

Rejecting negative labels:

• Fuller - girls maintained a positive self-image by rejecting teachers' stereotypes of them; recognised value of education but only conformed by doing schoolwork & working hard; didn't seek teachers' approval & maintained friendships with black girls in lower streams - innovators.
• Mac an Ghaill - black & Asian 'A' level students did not necessarily accept teachers' negative labels.
• Mirza - strategies for dealing with teacher racism restricted their opportunities.

• Selection & segregation - Gillborn argues that marketisation allows schools to select pupils, these decisions can be affected by negative stereotypes.
• Assessment - Gillborn argues that assessment is rigged to validate the dominant white cultures superiority, e.g. baseline assessments showing black pupils ahead of whites were replaced in 2013 to foundation stage profile based on teachers' judgement.
• Access to opportunities - Strand found that blacks were more liekly to be entered for lower tier exams. Whites are twice as likely to be identified as gifted & talented.  
• The new IQism - secondary schools are increasingly using IQ tests to allocate pupils into streams, based on the assumption that 'potential' is a fixed quality that can be measured; black pupils are more liekly to be placed in lower streams

The ethnocentric curriculum:

• Troyna  & Williams - gives priority to white culture & the english lagnuage.
• Ball - history curriculum recreates 'mythical age of empire and past glories', & ignores history of black & Asian people.
• Identity not valued in education do diminishes their self-esteem, thus negatively affecting their educational achievement.