Ethnic differences in achievement

Ethnic differences in achievment

External

1) Cultural deprivation- Underacheivement of some ethnic groups result of inadequate socialisation in the home.

Intellectual and linguistic skills:

- Major cause of underachievement, Low income black families lack intellectual stimulation and enriching experiences. Language also used is ungrammatical and disjointed. Asians seen has higher achievers as their culture is more resistent against racism and gives greater sense of self worth. Black Carribbean is less cohesive, pupils have low self esteem.

Attitudes and values:

- Lack of motivation leads to failure of many black children, most are socialised into a mainstream culture of ambition to achieve long-term goals. Some black children are socialised into a subculture that instils fatalistic attitude that doesnt give value to education.

Family structure and parental support:

- Failure to result children adequatly is the result of a dysfunctional family structure. e.g black families headed by lone parent women, struggle for care role as fulfilling bread winner role to support family. Lack of father figure means boys deprived of role model of male achievment. Seen as a cycle come from dysfunctional families, fail at school, become dysfunctional parents.

Sewell: fathers, gangs and culture:

- sees problem of as lack of fatherly nurturing or tough love making it hard for black boys to overcome emotional and behavioural difficulties of adolescence. Many become subject to powerful anti educational peer pressure e.g gangs. Criticisms is that its institutional racism that systematically produces failure in black boys.

Asian families:

Indian and chinese benefit from supportive families that place high value on education, adult authority is similar to what operates in school, parents more supportive of schools behavior families.

White working class families:

- White working are also subject to underachievement, may be lack of parental support, street culture can be brutal so young people learn to withstand intimadation and intimidate others, power games are played bringing disruption making it hard to succeed.

Compensatory education:

- to tackle cultural deprivation, e.g opertation head start.

Critisisms of cultural deprivation:

- Ignores postive effect of ethnicity, black carribean girls having postive independent women as role models, black people underachieve because of racism not low self esteem. ethnic minority are culturally different not deprived, under achive becayse schools are ethnocentric.

- reject compensatory education prefer, multicultural education- values minority and includes them in curriculm, anti-racist education- challengs prejudice and dicrimination.

2) Material deprivation and class- ethnic minorities mofd likely to face these problems.

• Almost half of ethnic minority children live in low income househoulds.
• Twice as likely to be unemployed
• three times more likely to be homeless
• earn less money

More likely to be subject to material deprivation because...

• Live in economically depressed areas, high unemployment low wages
• traditon prevent women working outside their homes

• Lack of language skills and foreign qualifications not recognised by uk employers
• Ayslum seekers may not take work
• Racial discrimination in labour and housing market.

Class over ethnicity:

- indian and chinese students who are materially deprived still do better, suggesting material deprivation and…