When a child ‗underachieves‘ in school it means that he/she is not achieving at the level that is expected of children at a particular age. This means that the child has not met test standards in Cognitive Abilities Tests (CATs), Standard Assessment Techniques (SATs), GCSEs or A-level assessments as measured by these test scores (QCA 2010 and DfE 2010). Children are classified as failing because they have not achieved the desired scores, and in this respect African-Caribbean boys are being categorised as underachieving in secondary education. Travis (2010) quotes DCSF statistics that show black Caribbean boys performing well below average in terms of 5 A*-C grades at GCSE.
Qualifications are all inter-related. For example, without good GCSEs students cannot go on to do A-levels and without A-levels they cannot easily go to university and without a degree they are less likely to have a good career. Also, if students are repeatedly suspended or excluded from school they are less likely to achieve these qualifications. This issue of exclusion from school is discussed further in section iii) of this chapter.
In this study of African-Caribbean boys' ‗underachievement‘, it is essential to provide a definition of the term. The Oxford Dictionary (1999) defines underachievement in terms of: someone whose actual performance consistently fails to reach the level predicted by intelligence tests or other measures of ability. Plewis and Coram (1991) are of the view that underachievement is a word frequently encountered in educational writing but that it is not a well-defined concept. The authors cite Crane (1959) as saying that the concept goes back at least to 1920, and has been known variously as the achievement quotient, the accomplishment quotient, and the achievement ratio.
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Plewis and Coram (1991) are of the view that underachievement lacks a universally agreed and applied definition. They assert that many psychologists define educational underachievement for individuals in terms of a discrepancy between their Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and their score on an educational test, initially measuring the concept as a ratio but that more recently as a difference between actual attainment and that predicted by IQ. Plewis and Coram (1991) argue that an implication of this definition is that IQ is seen as the major causative factor in educational achievement. They also assert that there has been a trend in recent years for low achievement to be used synonymously as characteristic of groups rather than of individuals. They further assert that social and demographic groups with mean achievement of attainment test scores below the mean for a selected reference group are said to underachieve, regardless of their mean IQ. Thus, they argue that this usage has tended to be favoured more by educational sociologists rather than by educational psychologists which generates some operational confusion, especially as there is no necessary connection between the two definitions.
The conclusion that Plewis and Coram (1991) arrive at is that it is clearly unsatisfactory that a concept which is used so widely in educational discourse does not have an unambiguous definition. The confusion engendered by having two definitions; which, for convenience, can be referred to as psychologists‘ and sociologists‘ definitions—can be seen when we compare the attainment of black British pupils of African-Caribbean origin with their white British peers. It is generally agreed that African-Caribbean pupils, as a group, have lower academic attainments than white British pupils and, in that sense, they underachieve. However, results presented in the Swann Report (1985), obtained using the regression method already described, show that there is no consistent evidence of African-Caribbean underachievement, when their academic attainments and examination results were compared with those predicted from their IQ scores.
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According to Tayyari (2004) there remains a lack of scientific precision for the definition of intelligence, although many scientists use the psychometric definition (where intelligence is measured in terms of general cognitive ability). Whether nature or nurture influences intelligence remains a matter of debate between geneticists and environmentalists, who are divided equally over the issue. The view held by Tomlinson (2005) is that there is a determined right-wing who has not given up on efforts to persuade the world that black people have lower average IQs than whites. She asserts that the magazine ‗Right Now‘, which has several lords and professors as patrons, recorded an interview with 77 year old Arthur Jensen in 1999, where he asserted that black people had an IQ on average of 15 points lower than whites, and that some ‗high level‘ politicians in both USA and Britain agreed with him that compensatory education programmes did not work. Tomlinson (2008) goes on to argue that black boys are still the group most likely to be demonised as potential problems for schools and society. The argument here is that politicians are using IQ to explain why black boys underachieve and to not make provision for their education. This was the problem encountered by the early West Indian children in British schools. Coard (1971) argued that the IQ tests which were given to the black child, with all their cultural bias, gave them a low score only too often. He goes on to say that teachers have, in the form of the IQ test results, what they considered to be ‗objective‘ confirmation of what everybody in society was thinking and sometimes said: that the black children on average had lower IQs than the white children and consequently are expected to do less well in class.
2.4 Effects of globalisation, national policy initiatives and government