[Dua]

Black pupils 'are treated worse'

Black pupils are routinely punished more harshly, praised less and told off more often in English schools than other pupils, an official report says.
It says the staff in many schools are "unwittingly" racist, with black youngsters three times more likely than white to be expelled permanently.
It describes this as an "iconic issue" for black Caribbean communities.
The Department for Education and Skills said using "the R-word" was unhelpful, but it is to issue new guidance.

'Iconic'

The report - Getting it. Getting it right - had advocated a focus on the 100 schools with "disproportionately high" exclusions of black pupils.
A DfES spokesperson said the numbers involved in any one institution were small so it was hard to draw general conclusions about which interventions would work or not. "We are not making any suggestion at all that this would equate to a list of 'the schools where black Caribbean pupils are most likely to be excluded'," she said. But it is going to target support to schools and local authorities felt to need it most.

The report stemmed from a "priority review" involving officials, head teachers and others, headed by the department's director of school performance and reform, Peter Wanless. It was completed last September and leaked to a newspaper but has only now been published, as questions were being asked about its continued non-appearance.

BLACK PUPILS

significantly more likely to be permanently excluded
routinely punished more harshly, praised less and told off more often
1.5 times as likely as white British pupils to be identified with behaviour-related special needs
outperformed white pupils in school entry tests - when these were changed to teacher observations the pattern was reversed
disproportionately put in bottom sets - due to behaviour rather than ability
much less likely than the average to be identified as gifted and talented Source: Wanless report

It says every year 1,000 black pupils are permanently excluded and nearly 30,000 suspended. It describes this as an "iconic issue" for those of black Caribbean heritage. "Exclusions are to education what stop-and-search is to criminal justice", it says. A key factor is "the marginal status of race equality" as "important but somebody else's problem and politically correct nonsense".
The response to race equality legislation by many schools, local authorities and even part of the department itself "has ranged from grudging minimum compliance to open hostility".

'Using the R-word'

The review considered two strands of thought.
One argument holds that "largely unwitting, but systematic, racial discrimination" means staff expect black pupils to behave worse.
The other argument is that black pupils, especially boys, are subject to outside influences and cultural stereotypes that cause them to behave more aggressively in school.

The report favours making schools the focus. It says they can be categorised broadly as those that "get it" and those that "don't get it".
"The main barrier to an effective closing of the exclusions gap is the need to engage the co-operation of those schools who have not 'got it' yet."
The report highlights - in bold, in a red box - what it calls a "key decision: using the R-word".

"Properly understood, Institutional Racism is not such a 'scary' thing for an institution to admit to," it says.
But it is "highly charged" and the department must decide whether to use it in its guidance or something "that has less inflammatory potential" but might be less "challenging". The DfES spokesperson said: "It is hard to see how using this label would help schools and local authorities to take intelligent action to tackle the issue."

'Nuclear' option

The report says the schools inspectorate, Ofsted, has not been "robust" enough with schools but has expressed a willingness to do more.
There needs to be a "nuclear deterrent" for those that have consistently failed to tackle their exclusions gaps, it says.

But it accepts that the sort of special measures used for educational failure would never be invoked just on this issue. Instead the Commission for Racial Equality might issue a compliance notice under the Race Relations Act, it suggests. Schools Minister Jim Knight said: "We want to ensure that we are able to equip our schools to identify the in-school factors and have a better understanding of 'culturally different' behaviours."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...on/6413265.stm

Published: 2007/03/02 17:12:41 GMT

[MtuKwao]

Black pupils 'are treated worse'


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...on/6413265.stm

Published: 2007/03/02 17:12:41 GMT

you said it, .... Dua la kuku halimpati mwewe .....

[Dua]

Diversity is not black and white

August 11, 2007
The latest round of research done by sociologist Robert Putnam has been spreading around the world in dribs and drabs for most of this decade. Mr Putnam, who teaches at both Harvard and the University of Manchester, is known for his work on social capital, which he defines as "social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness".

Since social capital is linked to better health, wealth and education, longevity and a stronger democratic life, it is something worth guarding. Mr Putnam lamented its decline in a bestseller called Bowling Alone. At the start of this decade, Mr Putnam undertook a vast study that led him to a troubling conclusion: one of the big causes of the decline of social capital is racial diversity.

This summer, Mr Putnam's work on diversity came a step closer to penetrating the consciousness of the public when one of his lectures was published in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. His social science colleagues have been mulling over his research for years and none has seriously challenged his conclusions. So an ideological crisis is looming. One of the cherished shibboleths of public policy, corporate identity and interpersonal relations - the idea that "diversity is strength" - is losing its legitimacy.

Mr Putnam studied 30,000 people, urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, across the US. He found a steady correlation between ethnically mixed environments and withdrawal from public life. People living amidst diversity tend to "hunker down", in his words. They trust their neighbours less (whether of other races or their own), vote less and give less to charity. About the only things they excel at, in Mr Putnam's account, are television-watching and protest marching. They lead sadder lives.

This conclusion, viewed a certain way, is just laboriously documented common sense. People trust people like themselves more than they trust people unlike themselves. Life is short and diverse groups waste precious time arguing over ground rules. Once a certain level of diversity is surpassed, a community ceases to be a community. What makes "the gay community" and "the African-American community" communities, at least in politically correct jargon, is that they are not diverse. Mr Putnam himself acknowledges a long list of "evidence that diversity and solidarity are negatively correlated". One could cite Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's demonstration that ethnic diversity helps account for much of the weakness of the US welfare state relative to those in Europe.

But Mr Putnam's study does not simply point to a few difficulties in administering diversity - it undermines the official doctrine of western governments that diversity is always, and in every way, a positive force in society. It makes one wonder if diversity would still be considered a positive force at all if it were not an official doctrine, and one with a mighty apparatus of enforcement. Admirably,Mr Putnam wants to keep people from overreacting to diversity (the social fact). But the way he chooses to do this is by taking refuge in diversity (the state ideology). He insists that "ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset". What exactly does he mean by this? Diversity is indeed an asset, in the sense that companies that pay careful attention to it will spend a lot less time defending lawsuits against government prosecutors. But what is its inherent value?

Here, Mr Putnam's gift for specificity and syllogism fails him. While he describes and empirically verifies the problems of diversity, he does little more than speculate about its advantages. Mr Putnam credits one social scientist with having "powerfully summarised evidence that diversity (especially intellectual diversity) produces much better, faster problem-solving". But intellectual diversity is not the kind of diversity that Mr Putnam is studying, and it is not the kind that official programmes promote, particularly in human resources departments and on college campuses. What is promoted is racial diversity. While it is assumed in theory that this will bring intellectual diversity in its wake, that has not happened in practice. Indeed, a powerful conformism has become the mark of American universities in precisely the decades when they have been growing more diverse. Mr Putnam also cites the desegregation of the US Army as evidence that people get used to diversity over time. But even the best army is organised along hierarchical and authoritarian lines that make it a poor place to look for lessons about life in a democratic republic.

"The central challenge for modern, diversifying societies," writes Mr Putnam, "is to create a new, broader sense of 'we'." But surely to "broaden" anything is to attenuate it. If you doubt this, imagine how your spouse or business partner would take such a suggestion. To ask for a "broader sense of 'we' " is to ask that we simply make our peace with waning social capital.

It is our duty to live with the diversity around us. But it is not our duty to sing the praises of diversity ideology. Racism and certain other forms of exclusion corrode a society morally. But diversity, as an ideology, is not a matter of avoiding those occasions of sin. It is an active, ruthless and crusading belief system. Its effects resemble those of "meritocracy" on the community life of London's Bethnal Green, as described in Dench, Gavron and Young's The New East End. It involves identifying, discrediting and breaking up close-knit communities in the interest of mixing them more easily into some new ideal of the nation. (Emphasis added. Ed.)

There have been great gains from this ideology, and great losses. Mr Putnam's research shows that the latter are more obvious than the former.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.