So this article about the ‘only brown kid in the room‘ has been shared by a couple of staff at my school and, combined with this article about how a NZ student still experiences racism got me thinking about that whole thorny issue of ethnicity in education. I don’t claim to be an expert and be able to offer the silver bullet, but I do know that my understanding on these types of issues gets deeper when I hear other peoples views. And often views that are contradictory to my own deepen my understanding the most.
If I look at data from my school, we can produce evidence that support the view argued in the NZ Herald article that there is an achievement gap if we disaggregate by ethnicity.
Graph shows Ethnicity vs Total credits gained with the red line being that magic figure of 80 credits.
We can see that the median for Maori is less than for other ethnic groups (and yes, I’m quite happy to be challenged on the use of total credits as a measure of academic achievement – there are holes in the data used but I think it shows a trend). But what about if we combine this data with socio-economic factors?:
So, when we look at the data this way we see that there is quite a spread of achievement across both ethnicity and decile (socio-economic rating). It is not only ‘rich’ kids that achieve, and it’s not only ‘brown’ kids that fail. So what am I trying to say? Ethnicity and socio economic status don’t really tell us that much about a student. I’ll try and explain this point in a different way. Below is an excerpt from an email a tutor sent about a new student joining one of my classes:
“XXXXXXX will be starting in the Inquiry class at the beginning of Term 4. His family have just moved up from Christchurch. He has sat our Entrance Test and tested as well as any student that has sat the test, admittedly a year later than most of them. He was also very methodical in his approach doing the test.
He knows absolutely no-one at the college, so might take a while to settle. Please help him to do so. He says he did not enjoy the ‘open-plan’ environment of his last school in Christchurch. This may have been due to new schools, teachers, systems as an aftermath of the earthquake. He was initially concerned that the Inquiry class would be the same. However, he is prepared to give it go.”
All very useful information in getting to know this student before I taught him. I think most of you would agree that this is very appropriate information sharing, and the tutor was communicating the important information that will be useful to a teacher. But notice what’s missing. No mention of ethnicity or socio economic status. Imagine if all this tutor had passed on to me was like ‘he’s a poor European’, or ‘he’s a rich Maori student’. This information is really of no use to me to getting to know the student as a learner. Yet we hold these categories (ethnicity and socio-economic status) so dearly when we are trying to measure student achievement.
I reckon we should stop categorising students by ethnicity. It is not a great predictor for success at school and can lead us to making assumptions about a student that are not accurate. Let’s focus more on indicators that are more meaningful (achievement data from previous school, diagnostic testing, learning preferences, topics the student is curious about etc.) and getting to know our students as individuals.
