White children discriminated against (part 3?)
On Wednesday I blogged that it seemed like the media were recycling stories. Today I have come across this story on the BBC about white boys being under achievers. I then thought to myself “I have already read this”. It turned out I had heard it before. Infact I had heard it twice before. I had read about it once in November 2006 on the BBC website. I had also blogged about it in January this year.
For some reason they keep on reporting it. Maybe it’s a good thing especially seeing as I know the reason why whites are such underachievers – it’s because ethnic minorities get more education funding.
2 comments:
In various parts of the country, especially, no doubt, the inner cities, educational standards are now so low that inter-ethnic group comparisons are probably meaningless.
Another factor is that wherever white pupils are in the minority, they will be bullied by blacks. This could affect their achievement levels as well.
One thing for sure, you will never see a headline about blacks outperforming whites academically at the top end of education.
In my sphere of Chemical Engineering at HE level, a 'hard maths, hard scioence' course, where all students were able to get results to the best of their ability and all had equal access to tutorial help etc., I can say for a fact, observable over a period of 26 years in HE, that black students were alomost always in about the bottom 25% of the class.
Many white students and Asian students, including many female students, received 1st Class or Upper 2nd Class Honours degrees in that time. Less that half a dozen black students did. I can remember 2 and there may have been a few others. They were exceptional.
This is the educational reality.
There is a persisting achievement gap between minority and non-minority students, especially here in the U.S. I don't believe this has anything to do with raw ability or innate intelligence, but rather to do with socioeconomic status, access to good schools, and the cultural legacies of these various subgroups.
That said, the way the U.S. govt. has gone about trying to "fix" these inequalities to level the playing field is heavy-handed and unhelpful.
I suspect the same is true in the U.K., from what I'm reading here.
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