It's the poor, stupid!

In Britain, there has been suggestion recently that black boys should be taught in separate classes from their white peers to help them do better at school.

Surprisingly, this comes from Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality, himself a black man of course, who sees himself as one of the few lucky ones who “escaped the fate of most black men of his generation”. He is also suggests that schools should hire black teachers to teach black children. The problem is undeniable : just 35.7% of black Caribbean pupils in England scored at least five C-grades at GCSE, [General Certificate of Secondary Education] compared with a national average of 51.9%.

But the answer is certainly not to be found in ethnic separatism. This suggestion is partly based on the “cultural deficit theory” which says that Afro-Caribbean pupils are not culturally prepared to learn in (white) schools and that (white) teachers treat them more harshly.

A recent article in The Economist shows that if indeed blacks perform worse among children as a whole, the result is quite different among poor children. It is then the whites who perform worse. In fact, the white poor have the worst performance of all the ethnic groups in the bottom social class. This shows a universal truth - that the school system simply fails the poor. So let’s not add racism to a problem that is already very hard to solve as it is.