Why Britain’s schools are failing to tackle racism

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/racism-schools-government-reforms-targets

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A 14-year-old boy was sentenced to 11 years in prison for stabbing his teacher in an apparently racially motivated attack in which be called his victim the N-word. Laura Pidcock, of the charity Show Racism the Red Card, condemned members of the government for creating a climate of hatred by their use of language during the migrant “crisis”. This tragic incident demonstrates the work that needs to be done for schools to challenge a climate that allows racist language and behaviour. However, given the government’s attitude and policy agenda for schools, the prospects for change are slim.

Related: Anti-racism group links teacher's stabbing to language over migrants

For good reason much of the activism around racism and schooling has focused on levelling the attainment gap for certain ethnic minority groups. There have been some successes in this approach, for example Bangladeshi students now achieve above- average rates at GCSE level (5 A*-C, including English and maths), but there remains systemic disadvantage for certain groups.

However, this focus on the attainment figures has meant that there have been lots of interventions targeted at overcoming the perceived deficits of ethnic minority children. Programmes like Aimhigher and the array of mentoring projects that have been rolled out embraced the idea that it was the children who were “underachieving”. The logic went that if their aspirations and work ethic could be fixed so would the attainment gap. Policymakers have ignored the structural problems of institutional racism in the delivery of schooling to the extent that minority communities accept it as a given, a challenge that needs to be negotiated.

Britain has a 50-year history of providing extra school activity, typically on a Saturday, for black students to counter the deficits of mainstream schooling. During research for my book on the movement, Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and the Black Supplementary School Movement, a theme that came up time and again was how the supplementary schools were a place to teach the children how to “survive” racism in the mainstream schools. One of the sessions I witnessed in a supplementary school was the staff explaining to an eight-year-old how to deal with racist bullying from his classmates that his mainstream school was simply ignoring. This climate of hatred is one that ethnic minority children and staff have become accustomed to navigating.

Racist language and behaviour in schools is a mirror of the power relations of the wider society

Education should provide an inclusive curriculum that teaches the students respect for other cultures. If schools provided such an education, the climate that allows racist language and behaviour would cease to exist. Promoting such an education should be a priority for government, however in Britain we have a school system that has little interest in education.

In 1973, Ivan Illich wrote the book Deschooling Society, which was a critique of the emergence of universal school systems in postwar welfare states. Illich saw schooling not as a way to reduce inequality but to cement it in society by producing a system of credentials that justify a person’s status. Lack of access to the credentials works to lock out working-class and ethnic minority communities because they do not make the grade. It is these credentials that the policymakers have focused on when understanding racism as a problem of the attainment gap. A school system makes no attempts at broader education and focuses solely on the grades, and students collecting the necessary credentials. More importantly, rather than challenge the status quo, as Professor Mwalimu J Shujaa argues, “schooling is the institutional process to perpetuate and maintain the society’s existing power relations”.

Racist language and behaviour in schools is a mirror of the power relations of the wider society. Laura Pidcock was right to challenge the government over their dehumanising language used to describe African people endangering their lives to try to find better lives for their families. This is the same government that ended up stoking anti-Muslim sentiment during the Trojan Horse fiasco ; extended the insidious Prevent agenda; and in a distinctly Orwellian turn have mandated that schools “promote fundamental British values”, whatever they may be.

Worse still, the government’s reforms to the school system are the exact opposite of what is needed to address the climate of racism. The school curriculum has been narrowed, there has been a renewed focus on “standards” (shorthand for testing); and control of the system has been centralised. School should be about far more than testing children to hand out credentials for the world of work.

Britain is desperate for an education that provides a broad basis of knowledge and learning, which equips students for contemporary society. A central part of that education should be about understanding others and living in a diverse society. Unfortunately under this government there is little prospect of transforming schooling into education. In fact, David Cameron seems quite happy to cement racial disadvantage through policy and preside over a school system in which the climate works to reproduce racism in the next generation.