Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: A Brief Overview 47comparing median family incomes across groups may give a misleadingpicture of their relative SES. Their mid-1990s investigations in the UnitedStates revealed that, although white family incomes were on average halfagain as large as those of black families, the overall wealth of the former(their ‘capital assets’, most notably home ownership) was about ten timesgreater.Nonetheless, while the two overlap to a considerable extent, disadvantageis not simply a synonym for poverty. Within areas of highunemployment, poor housing and low income, one certainly expects tofind a concentration of social or educational disadvantage. It is also truethat ethnic and racial minorities are very often poor (although externaland visible markers of class or ethnicity may mask a great deal ofheterogeneity). On the other hand, it would be logically incorrect toequate comfortable physical surroundings with absence of socio-educationaldisadvantage. It is clear that there are many ‘good’ homes inworking-class neighborhoods and many ‘poor’ ones in middle-classsuburbia; see Wiseman (1968) for an early expression of this, andGarbarino et al. (1997).Recent statistics from Toronto a heavily multicultural city, with morethan a quarter of a million schoolchildren from virtually every countryon earth reveal something of the interaction between ethnicity andmaterial poverty (Wente, 2006). While children from the poorestneighborhoods are three times more likely to drop out of school thanare those from the richest ones (33 versus 11%), achievement differencesamong ethnic groups are more striking. Romanian and Chinese children(with drop-out rates of about 11.5%) and Gujarati, Bengali and Tamilpupils (about 16%) are the most likely to finish school, while the leastlikely to stay the course are Somali, Caribbean, Portuguese and SouthAmerican children (whose drop-out rates are on the order of 40%). Thesefigures are, broadly speaking, typical of other countries in which theseimmigrant groups are represented. Writing about the American experience,Steinberg et al. (1996) consider that ethnicity is the most predictiveof children’s school success, more important than parental wealth, twoparentfamilies and stay-at-home mothers. The Asian students who do sowell in anglophone contexts benefit from homes in which educationalachievement is highly valued, and in which family habits and valuesreflect and support this. Their disproportionate presence in universityleveleducation is as marked as that of black and Hispanic children inopposite directions, of course.If so much importance rests upon family ‘culture’, obvious questionsarise about many contemporary educational innovations and practices