Black girls overtake white boys. The article notes the increasing proportion of black African students, and implicitly suggests that in terms of educational metrics they should be viewed separately from West Indians. The relative educational success of black girls in the UK should be an interesting test of the importance of racism in shaping economic prospects in the coming years as this cohort is tracked. On a somewhat bizarre note, Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality is suggesting that black boys need to be segregated to improve their performance. To me, this is the sort of peculiar outcome of excessive focus on group level identity that is so easy to lambast and predict. I know I am somewhat idealistic, but a society with a “Commission for Individual Opportunity” would seem to better reflect Enlightenment values, no matter the pragmatic need to organize and mobilize based on ethnic identities. In any case, if peer socialization tends to enforce a certain set of values, it seems that a different form of separation might be warranted for academically challenged young black males, rather than segregation as a group from the general student population, it seems that their dispersion might disrupt an anti-academic environment.1
Related: You can find many statistics here, control-f “GCSE” for the data sets that the story above is based on.
Addendum: GCSE in Wikipedia.
1 – Seeing as how black outmarriage in England hovers around 50% (more for males, less for females), the difficulties of black males will be a temporary phenomena sans further immigration because blacks in Britain will be a temporary phenomena.
Posted by razib at 11:35 PM