Minority Education in Comparative Perspective

Minority groups in contemporary pluralistic industrial societies face the problem of achieving educational parity with the dominant groups of their societies. They often lag in years of school completion. They also do less well on tests given at school and on standardized tests of academic achievement and cognitive skills. Variability in the school adjustment and academic performance of minority groups has been documented in the United States (Ogbu, 1974; Woolard, 1981), Britain (Tomlinson, 1982; Ogbu, 1978), New Zealand (Penfold, 1981), Malaysia (Wan Zahid, 1978), and Australia (Bullivant, 1987). The educational problems of minorities have been explained in many ways. Some have asserted that the problems are genetic, e.g., that minorities do not have the genetic endowment for the type of IQ or intelligence required to do good schoolwork Jensen, 1969). Others have attributed the absence of appropriate IQ for school success to inadequate home environment and early socialization (Ramey & Suarez, 1985). Sociological correlational studies generally have concluded that the minority lag in education is due to their lower socioeconomic status (Bond, 1981). Still others have claimed that minority educational problems are a function of cultural and language differences and conflicts. Proponents of this latter view have argued that minority children are more or less forced to receive their education in a learning environment that is culturally or linguistically different from the one familiar to them at home (Philips, 1976). In such situations, it has been reported that minority children have difficulty acquiring the content and style of learning that is required to master the curriculum materials and teaching methods used in school. There is no question that all of the above factors contribute to the difficulties experienced by minority children in school, but none of these factors can explain the variability that one finds in cross-cultural research on minority education. How, then, do we explain the differences in the school adjustment and academic performance of the different minority groups? Those who have posited the IQ factor cannot explain why Black children often do not perform similar to White children of comparable ability. For example, consider the academic success of Black children