Inglaterra: Discriminación Estructural en Escuelas

Social class affects white pupils' exam results more than those of ethnic minorities study

Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school

Jessica Shepherd, education correspondent

The Guardian, Friday 3 September 2010

Study finds that white children's social class affects their school-leaving grades. Photograph: John Alex Maguire/Rex Features

A child's social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered.

The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.

They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers' grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31% of white pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found.

This gap between social classes – of 32 percentage points – is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.

For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.

The study – Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University tomorrow.

It argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.

The researchers, from the Institute of Education and Queen Mary, both part of the University of London, also found that Chinese pupils from families in routine and manual jobs perform better than white pupils from managerial and professional backgrounds. They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.

Professor Ramesh Kapadia, who led the study, said this may be linked to "cultural aspirations and expectations, as well as parental support for education. This appears to have been the case for Indian and Chinese pupils for many years," he said.

A separate study has found that a similar pattern can be identified for children in primary schools: social class is more likely to determine how well a pupil will perform if that child is white than if they are from other ethnic groups.

Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.

Professor Steve Strand, who will present the findings to the British Educational Research Association's conference today, said the effects of poverty are "much less pronounced for most minority ethnic groups".

"Those from low socio-economic backgrounds seem to be much more resilient to the impact of disadvantage than their white British peers," he said.

However, he added that well-off white children may do particularly well because their parents might be "a bit more savvy about ensuring that they go to schools with similar pupils".

"More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you've been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don't necessarily believe that education is going to change that.

"All of these factors may combine to make the effect of socio-economic status remarkably strong for white British kids."

Meanwhile, headteachers' leaders have warned secondary schools to consider axing subjects that few pupils take to cope with imminent budget cuts.

The Association of School and College Leaders told the Times Educational Supplement that A-levels in foreign languages, for example, could be scrapped. Last week, French dropped out of the top 10 most popular GCSEs for the first time. "Languages in some schools will be vulnerable," he said. "We are already worried about them and this could speed up the decline."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Escuelas y Raza en New York

The New York Times

August 15, 2010

Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools

By SHARON OTTERMAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF

Two years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, testified before Congress about the city’s impressive progress in closing the gulf in performance between minority and white children. The gains were historic, all but unheard of in recent decades.

“Over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have,” Mr. Bloomberg testified. “In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

“We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever,” the mayor said again in 2009, as city reading scores — now acknowledged as the height of a test score bubble — showed nearly 70 percent of children had met state standards.

When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians.

“The claims were based on some bad information,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research group that studies education policy. “On achievement, the story in New York City is of some modest progress, but not the miracle that the mayor and the chancellor would like to claim.”

Reducing racial gaps in educational performance has been a national preoccupation for decades. But after substantial progress in the 1970s and ’80s, the effort has largely stalled, except for a brief period from 1999 to 2004, where there were some gains, particularly in reading, according to a report released this month by the Educational Testing Service, which develops standardized tests used across the country.

The achievement gap was also the main thrust of the No Child Left Behind law, which mandated annual testing for all students in grades three through eight and required school systems to track the performance of each racial and ethnic group, with the goal of bringing all children to proficiency by 2014.

New York City’s progress in closing its achievement gap on those tests drew national attention as a possible model for other urban school districts. It won praise from President George W. Bush as evidence that No Child Left Behind was working. In 2007, the city won a prestigious urban education prize from the Broad Foundation, which cited the city’s progress in narrowing the racial achievement gap.

But the latest state math and English tests show that the proficiency gap between minority and white students has returned to about the same level as when the mayor arrived. In 2002, 31 percent of black students were considered proficient in math, for example, while 65 percent of white students met that standard.

Experts have many theories, but no clear answers, about why national progress on closing the gap has slowed. They included worsening economic conditions for poor families and an increase in fatherless black households, social factors that interfere with students’ educational progress.

Mr. Klein said in an interview that he was not discouraged by New York City’s performance on the 2010 state tests, and that he still felt “awfully good” about improvements for black and Hispanic students, noting their rising graduation rates and college enrollments.

“I don’t think we claimed it was a miracle; certainly I don’t believe it was a miracle,” he said. “I think there are sustained steady gains here, and I think that’s important.”

Unbowed, Mr. Klein said the new test results reinforced some of his beliefs and policies: he said he would continue to close low-performing schools, for example, and would keep pushing to pay more to teachers who work in hard-to-staff neighborhoods or subjects, which the teachers’ union has resisted.

The bulk of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein’s effort to overhaul the education system has been focused on the lowest-performing students. The city has closed 91 poorly performing schools, established about 100 charter schools and sent waves of new young teachers and principals into schools in poor neighborhoods.

Mr. Klein began to use test scores to measure schools’ performance, and joined with the Rev. Al Sharpton in forming the Education Equality Project in 2008 to promote good instruction and education reform for minority and poor children. “It is certainly what makes Joel Klein tick,” said Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, which advocates for progress on the issue. “And you can’t say that for everyone.”

The city has even tried to attack the deeper issue of how children are reared at home, by offering some families monetary incentives to go to the dentist for checkups, for example, or to maintain good school attendance. The three-year-old pilot project was ended in March after it showed only modest results.

For several years, data suggested that the city had seen improvements among all ethnic groups, including in graduation rates, which have risen about 14 percentage points for black and Hispanic students since 2005, and a national standardized test given every other year to a sampling of fourth and eighth graders.

Even so, the scores on the national test, considered tougher than the state tests, did not exactly show a mastery of material. Forty-nine percent of white students and 17 percent of black students showed proficiency on the fourth-grade English test in 2009, for example, up from 45 percent of white students and 13 percent of black students in 2003.

The city made no statistically significant progress in closing the racial achievement gap in that time, said Arnold Goldstein, a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the national test. With few exceptions, including Charlotte, N.C., and Washington, D.C., the achievement gap on the national tests has remained constant in all major cities.

But the test scores that the mayor and the chancellor chose to highlight were the state standardized tests, and they built their entire system around it, with schools’ A-through-F grades, teachers’ bonuses and now tenure decisions dependent on how well their students performed on the tests.

By 2009, the passing rates of black students on English exams had narrowed to within 22 percentage points of white students’, and within 17 points on the math exams. And charter schools, which predominantly serve black students, were doing so well that one Stanford University researcher proclaimed that they had practically eliminated the “Harlem-Scarsdale” gap in math.

But skeptics argued that comparing passing rates was flawed because they did not account for whether a student passed by a little or a lot. In New York City, black and Hispanic students were far more likely to pass with scores barely above the minimum requirement, thereby masking the real difference in performance among groups.

The State Education Department recalibrated the scoring of the tests this year, raising the number of correct answers needed to pass and saying that the previous standards were not accurate measures of what students needed to know at each grade level. When that happened, the passing rates of white and Asian students dropped a little, but those of black and Hispanic students plummeted.

Asian students have generally performed better than white students on state math tests in the city, and about the same on English tests. Those gaps have remained fairly consistent over the years.

While the slow improvement of all groups is “still a success story,” Mr. Petrilli said, the achievement gap, which shows how different groups perform relative to one another, still means that most black and Hispanic students will be at a sharp disadvantage when they have to compete against white and Asian peers as they move through schools and into the workplace.

While the gap is not closing, Mr. Klein said he was encouraged that the scores for black and Hispanic students were rising nonetheless.

“Do I wish that we had eliminated the entire achievement gap?” he said. “Sure.”

Jennifer Medina contributed reporting.

Trato igual y escuelas

Aulas que separan a ellas de ellos

LA NACION

Domingo 15 de agosto de 2010 | Publicado en edición impresa

Divididos para aprender / Beneficios y problemas de estudiar rodeado de chicos del mismo sexo

En el país, unos 200 colegios son diferenciados para mujeres y varones; el debate con la educación mixta

Por Julieta Molina

Se educan sin las distracciones que genera el otro sexo; puede enfatizarse la enseñanza sobre ciertas áreas de interés o dificultad para mujeres o varones; hay mayor comodidad para hablar de ciertos temas. Esos son algunos de los beneficios que tienen las escuelas diferenciadas -exclusivas para mujeres o varones-, según sostienen sus directivos y algunos especialistas.

Sin embargo, quienes defienden las escuelas mixtas argumentan que integrar mujeres y varones en una misma aula mejora el aprendizaje y la conducta, y permite equilibrar miradas diferentes.

La educación diferenciada, que es debate aún hoy en día, se imparte aún en unas 200 escuelas de Argentina, según estimó Elisabeth Vierheller, presidenta de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Centros de Educación Diferenciada (Alced), quien explicó que estas escuelas permiten atender "a las peculiaridades de mujeres y hombres, además de orientar la actitud docente en función de quienes tienen enfrente".

En este siglo, el debate se ha actualizado porque muchas escuelas en Estados Unidos y en Europa han optado por la enseñanza diferenciada. En la Argentina, sin embargo, hace unos años se produjo la oleada inversa y hoy, algunos colegios diferenciados han incorporado al otro sexo, pero mantienen a varones y mujeres en aulas separadas.

El Colegio del Salvador es exclusivo para varones desde 1868 y sus autoridades no tienen planes de cambiar la modalidad, aunque realizan esa consulta a la comunidad escolar en forma periódica. Ricardo Moscato, vicerrector del colegio, explicó a LA NACION que "es una tradición con lógica" ya que se especializan en la enseñanza de varones.

"Me parece irrelevante la discusión porque estudian entre varones en un período corto de la vida y en todos los demás ámbitos interactúan con mujeres", explicó.

Advirtió, sin embargo, que están "muy atentos a los peligros de una formación como ésta, como el machismo, los prejuicios a lo diferente o la tentación a ser cerrados" y por ese motivo tienen programas especiales donde los alumnos se relacionan con todas las personas. "Hacemos nuestro aporte, desde el lugar donde estamos, para construir una sociedad más equilibrada y solidaria, pero de una forma dinámica, sin convertirnos en un museo" afirmó.

Interacción fuera del aula

La directora de primaria del Colegio Santa Inés, Elena Alvarez Indart, que es exclusivo para mujeres, explicó que esa circunstancia no afecta a las niñas en su sociabilidad, ya que "interactúan con varones en los clubes, con primos y hermanos en distintos ámbitos". Detalló los beneficios de un sistema diferenciado: "Al estar centrados en un solo género se optimiza la incorporación de ciertos contenidos que se dan mejor en las mujeres como la plástica, lo artístico o lo humanístico".

Mariana Espagnolo contó a LA NACION que a pesar de haber estudiado en una escuela exclusiva para mujeres, a ella le gustaría que su hija asistiera a un colegio mixto porque "la vida es de varones y mujeres". Sin embargo, su hija Bárbara asiste al Colegio Mitre, que es diferenciado, porque en la ciudad de Concordia, en Entre Ríos, donde viven, no consiguieron vacante en el colegio mixto.

Ignacio José Montero, de 16 años y alumno del Colegio del Salvador, explicó que no siente una diferencia en la interacción con las mujeres al compararse con amigos de escuelas mixtas. "Por ahí cuando era chico, a los 12, me daba vergüenza hablarles a las chicas, pero después se convirtieron en mis amigas", aunque reconoció que le gustaría "probar una escuela mixta, siempre dan ganas de probar lo que no conocés".

Si bien muchas escuelas diferenciadas son católicas, no son las únicas instituciones que separan a hombres de mujeres. En el judaísmo, las ramas más ortodoxas separan a los estudiantes a partir de la escuela secundaria, donde se supone, comienza la adultez.

Marcela Platero, ex presidenta de la Federación de Psicopedagogía, se mostró a favor de la escuela mixta: "Hay una estructura de personalidad distinta en la mujer y en el hombre que no podemos negar. El hombre es en general más expeditivo, más práctico y la mujer es más emocional, sintética y analítica. Esto puede ser un complemento ideal a la hora de estudiar en grupo porque se generan miradas diferentes". Además, explicó que "en general las escuelas diferenciadas no tienen beneficios en relación con las mixtas. Por ahí sí, si un niño se siente incómodo rodeado de mujeres, pero ésa es una dificultad que merece la intervención de algún profesional".

Quien ha experimentado las diferencias de todos los sistemas es Alberto Berro, director general del Colegio Pilgrims´, institución que en sus dos sedes -en Pacheco y en San Isidro- cuenta con las tres modalidades: aulas mixtas, aulas de varones solos y cursos con varones y mujeres separados en distintas aulas.

"Desde el aprendizaje y el trabajo dentro del aula es mejor el sistema mixto, porque se nota una complementación en las formas de ser y de pensar", dijo. Cuando los espacios son diferenciados, "se potencian las características propias específicas del género y no se balancean o moderan las actitudes", detalló.

"La mujer es moderadora, contendedora y más participativa, tiende a cumplir con la maestra, mientras que los chicos pueden ser más vagonetas", agregó Berro. Sin embargo, prosiguió, "las escuelas separadas tienen valores que no se deben desconocer y también limitaciones muy claras. Un beneficio es que se forma una barra de amigos muy sólida; en las aulas mixtas, por otro lado, es evidente que, al ser distintos, se complementan y equilibran. Hemos notado un mejor rendimiento académico y menores sanciones disciplinarias en estos cursos".

CLAVES

Por continente . En el mundo hay unas 241.974 escuelas diferenciadas. La mayoría (155.102) están en Medio Oriente y en Africa (53.322). En América se cuentan unas 5330.

Todas privadas . En el país, las escuelas diferenciadas son unas 200, todas privadas y muchas religiosas. Sus defensores piden escuelas públicas de este tipo para que más familias puedan optar por estos colegios.

Ejemplos . Algunas escuelas diferenciadas son el Colegio El Buen Ayre (Beccar), Madre Teresa (San Fernando), Santa Inés (San Isidro), Pilgrims´ (San Isidro), Colegio del Salvador, Los Robles, San Martín de Tours, Etcheverry Boneo, Mater Ter Admirabilis (ciudad de Buenos Aires).