Assess the view that ethnic minority pupil’s underachievement in education is the result of teacher labelling and racism (20 marks)
A students ethnicity can be a large influencing factor on their education, many teachers are racist, labelling students on their ‘race’ or ethnicity. A person’s race is the biological differences from person to person, for example skin colour. Whereas ethnicity entirely depends on the individual. Ethnicity is influenced by numerous factors such as ancestry, experience of racism, language, geographical location, and so on. According to the question being of an ethnic minority causes underachievement, meaning that white British students should be achieving highest in the UK. This is not the case, many ethnic minorities achieve better results than white British students. According to government statistics, Chinese and Indian students received the highest percentage of grades of grades A* to C at GCSE in 2010/11. White British pupils are the mid achieving students, with Pakistani and Black Caribbean students achieving the lowest GCSE results.
Many teachers label their students, due to stereotypical or racist viewpoints they hold and this can often to lead to underachievement. According to Gillborn and Youdell (2000), teachers are quicker to punish black students than others of different ethnicities for similar behaviour. This leads to many black students being anti-school, rejecting education and then underachieving. Mirza (1992) found after studying black female students who faced teacher labelling and racism, but also wished to achieve highly. They did not achieve highly, as their racist teachers discouraged them through careers advice. The girls avoided certain teachers as they knew the labels they had been given and wanted to prove them wrong.
On the other hand, underachievement in ethnic minority students is not always based on