Education & black power. posted by Richard Seymour

Try this for emotional blackmail: critics of the government's education White Paper don't care about black children. Thus Trevor Phillips in today's Guardian:

I wonder if some who condemn the proposals wholesale, saying they work against the poor and disadvantaged, aren't once again ignoring the real experience of black Britons.

What do the critics say? The Audit Commission says that the policy works "against the interests of the most disadvantaged, least mobile and worst informed parents and children". The proposals include allowing a new breed of "trust schools", independent from democratic control, to have much more say in determining what pupils they include - and exclude. A recent Joseph Rowntree report notes that it is precisely on the matter of exclusions that education fails black students most. They are hampered by the low expectations of teachers and fellow pupils, treated as aggressive, and disproportionately expelled and penalised for behaviour that other pupils would be more likely to get away with. Not to put too fine a point upon it, this compounds the disadvantages to non-white pupils rather than reducing them.

Phillips' argument?

Look at one of the most popular examples of ethnic-minority involvement in recent years: the supplementary school. There, volunteers - some parents, some from the community - come together to supplement what has been happening in maintained schools. I sponsored a small study in north London three years ago which suggested that this extra effort can make a decisive difference both to young people's aspirations and their performance at GCSE. But these schools get by on a shoestring and often face the disapproval of mainstream schools, being seen as competition. That's why I think there could be a real opportunity in the idea of trusts, or something similar, to address black underachievement.

The rest of the article drifts off into a New Labour Fantasia in which the white power trio Ruth Kelly, Andrew Adonis and Tony Blair become advocates of black power. I have no idea what study Phillips refers to, but one thing I am fairly certain about is that he either hasn't read this White Paper or followed its history, or he is lying when he claims to be making an argument on behalf of black children. One of the first things that black activists and education experts noticed about it was that no assessment had been made of the impact of the proposals on race, despite such an assessment being a legal necessity. Of course, one reason might be that the described impact on poor and working class kids would be intensified among black students who are, of course, more likely to be poor. By removing control of admissions from LEAs (whose record is not without fault here, but who are at least subject to pressure from democratically elected institutions) and placing them in the hands of unaccountable trusts, the government is disempowering black students and their families. It then emerged that the Commission for Racial Equality, which Trevor Phillips heads, is now doing the government's job for it, ensuring it fulfils its obligations under the law. To put it another way, the organisation that is responsible for monitoring and judging the implementation of these policies is participating in their implementation. It is hard to see how the CRE will find itself at fault. In fact, it looks as if the organisation has been drafted in to clear up New Labour's mess: which is exactly what Trevor Phillips is doing.

If you really want to know what can be done to tackle the systematic exclusion and racism against non-white students in schools, try this, this and this.