‘White flight’ in Australian schools

The term ‘white flight’ is one I associate with the USA. I have never heard it used in an Australian context before. However, the Herald has just published a report about this phenomenon, which it says is producing an ever more ‘racially’ and religiously segregated education system. In both city and country contexts, they report, white students are increasingly moving into Catholic and independent schools and away from public schools with large populations of Aborigines, Muslims or Asians. An excerpt:

The NSW Secondary Principals Council conducted a confidential survey which raises serious concerns about “white flight” undermining the public education system and threatening social cohesion. Some teachers and principals have described it as “de facto apartheid”.

The findings are backed by research from the University of Western Sydney, which has identified evidence of racial conflict in schools in the wake of the Cronulla riots. It also suggests students of Anglo-European descent are avoiding some schools with students of mainly Asian background.

Not only have some public schools lost enrolments; they have become racially segregated. In pockets of rural and remote NSW, Aboriginal students fill public schools and white students attend Catholic and other private schools in the same town.

Around Sydney, the parents of some Anglo-European students are avoiding what they perceive as predominantly Lebanese, Muslim and Asian schools.

In New England, in towns such as Armidale, white middle-class students are flocking to Catholic and independent schools.

In their report, principals say this is so the students can “get away from their local school”.

“This is almost certainly white flight from towns in which the public school’s enrolment consists increasingly of indigenous students,” the report says. “The pattern is repeated in the Sydney region. Based on comments from principals, this most likely consists of flight to avoid Islamic students and communities.”

The term ‘white flight’ is not completely appropriate here because it’s not just whites who are making choices that leader to greater levels of segregation. On section of the article suggests, for example, that Asian families may be avoiding schools perceived to be ‘Muslim’. There is also the suggestion that in Southwestern Sydney, Aboriginal and white kids are ‘lining up against’ kids of Lebanese background rather than against each other, as was previously the case.

See also this article on the same theme, which includes details of students crossing from NSW to Queensland to avoid the local public school, perceived as ‘indigenous’ and (therefore) ’scary’ by students.

It would seem that there are several things going on here.  First, there has been a general move to private education among middle class families, which was exacerbated during the Howard years as more public funds were directed to private schools and policies encouraged school choice and student mobility.  Second, ‘racial tensions’ in schools seem to be on the rise — with the Cronulla Riots featuring, as a cause or result?  Again, one could argue that Howard government policies and rhetoric, which promoted a normative white model of Australian identity and encouraged xenophobic nationalism, have exacerbated this trend.  Third,  class is a factor, and much of this segregation could be understood as a product of increasing class segregation in Australian society.

I suppose another point to be taken from this is that this ‘white flight’ phenomenon, according to the reports, differs from the US in that families are not relocating away from neighbourhoods perceived to be undesirable and therefore creating monocultural ghettos.  Children are increasingly travelling long distances to schools, or boarding, but families are staying put.  It therefore doesn’t seem to be the case that ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods are necessarily being produced.

Generally speaking, I see this kind of development as an example of the sort of thing that happens when governments move away from being producers and guardians of public institutions and collective ‘goods’, to becoming the facilitators of privatised choice.  Faith in public institutions, in this case schools, diminishes at the same time as people are encouraged to be more entrepreneurial in their choices.  In short, a sort of market force is at work, and what might appear to be good at the level of the individual — more choice — can produce a systemic racism.

Gerard Noonan, The Herald’s Social Issues Editor, makes similar points when he argues that there are two main factors underpinning the trend towards de-facto segregation:

The first is the ideological obsession with “choice”, which a decade ago in NSW changed the way students in NSW were able to enrol in schools.

Previously students attended their “local” school, based on where they lived. With few exceptions, it was a century-old tradition which ensured a genuine mix in schools - the smart, the scholastic pedestrians, the talented musicians and the sports-obsessed, the immigrants, the local Aboriginal kids, the funny, the socially inept, the goofy - all mixed together.

This widespread and predominantly secular approach allowed Australia to claim, with some justification, that its supposed egalitarianism and lack of class pretension was nurtured and cemented in the nation’s schools.

Now students can effectively enrol anywhere. They do, and one of the results is the abandonment of schools such as the ones identified in the principals’ survey, often for no other reason than distaste by parents in their thousands at having their kids rubbing shoulders with others from a different ethnic, class or religious background.

The second institutional factor is the deliberate effort by federal and state governments to pour billions and billions of dollars into supporting private schools and making them more and more attractive options for the well-off.

These schools, with a few exceptions, generally enjoy far better facilities, lower student-teacher ratios and more “choice” and they make their pitch for a “specialness”: the antithesis of the secular equality of opportunity which underpins Australia’s boastful egalitarianism.

It’s difficult not to see this officially sanctioned abandonment - so starkly revealed by school principals in a report that was kept under wraps for two years - as evidence of plain, old-fashioned racism at work. (See his full article here).

I think the claim of “plain, old-fashioned racism” is a little simplistic.  What this case shows is that a lot of individual choices which are not necessarily racist per se — just wanting the ‘best’ education for one’s kids — can add up to a sort of racism at a much broader level.  This is not to say that racism is not an issue, but just addressing individual attitudes to race will not fully ‘explain’ the situation.

Open access, online journals, peer review

Inside Higher Ed has an article on a debate at Indiana University over the relationship between free, online journals and peer review.  A couple of weeks ago they covered a decision at Harvard University to make an open access repository of faculty publications the default option.  And Savage Minds is talking about similar debates at Berkeley.  It’s clear that this issue is gaining momentum and that a few universities are positioning themselves at the vanguard of the open access movement.

–L.L. Wynn

‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’

Recently I came across the Nobel lecture by Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2007, on the internet; I enjoyed reading it and would like to share it with you.

Doris Lessing was born in Persia in 1919; her parents were English, and she grew up in Zimbabwe, which was a British colony and then called Southern Rhodesia; and later on she moved to England.

In her Nobel lecture ‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’ Lessing talks about the meaning of ‘reading’, people’s craving for books and frustration over not having plenty of books in some poor African villages; and compares it to the ‘reading’ habits in affluent countries. This is a long article, but it’s worth reading and reflecting on:    

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where in ‘56 was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north west Zimbabwe early in the eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa” as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found here in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like all the schools built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas, or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros, in the library are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read: they are tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or with titles like ‘Weekend in Paris’ or ‘Felicity Finds Love’.

International study, mental health, and migration in Australia

I’ve been very quiet of late as I’ve been on holidays after submitting my thesis in December.  I decided to give myself a break from all thinking for that period, which has been blissful.  I’m now back in the department and will start posting to CM again.  First off, an article in the Herald I noticed today which provides a commentary on the experience of many international students who come to Australia to feed its $11.3 billion “export industry”, the country’s fourth largest.  Although the view from the USA and elsewhere in “the West” might be that study in Australia provides a “beaches and beer” holiday, many poor students from Bangladesh, India and China are intent on gaining permanent residency.  The article’s author Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist, writes about one of the less obvious dimensions of this “industry” the consequences the mental health of students who are often betting their family’s wealth on gaining PR:

Some universities have been the target of allegations that their degrees are little more than extended migration schemes, with the qualifications useful for only the points on the residency application but almost worthless in the employment marketplace.

But what is less commented upon is that overseas students are fast becoming one of the most vulnerable groups in our society. Working in mental health, I see more and more each month and their situations are often horrendous. Suicide attempts, self harm or drug overdoses are the most common way they present, usually in relation to financial and study pressures. It is complicated further by language and cultural difficulties and lack of adequate health insurance.

A 2004 study by the University of Queensland found their international students were three times more likely to suffer depression than local students through the course of their study.

Only this month a house fire in suburban Melbourne killed three Indian students. It emerged that they were sharing the one room in bunk beds and would sleep in shifts while the others were working part time jobs. Overcrowding and difficult living conditions may have contributed to the accident.

Overseas students are the new refugees, living on the edges of Australian society under the weight of visa difficulties, imminent deportation and reduced access to social services. They inhabit that ill defined landscape of unbelonging.

A psychiatrist’s perspective is welcome here.  I have also thought that the “international student experience” is something worthy of ethnographic study.  For an enormous “industry” the social dimension of international studentdom in Australia is poorly understood.  It’s perhaps not surprising that universities aren’t all that interested in knowing too much about this subject as it might raise uncomfortable questions about the largely financial, rather than academic, motivations which are driving ever increasing international student numbers.  In my opinion, it is also something of an open secret in the university “industry” that migration, rather than education, is the primary reason for many international students coming to Australia.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/no-spin-needed-on-desperation-for-residency/2008/01/24/1201157558750.html?page=fullpage

“Beer and beaches” hurts the Australian university brand?

The Chronicle of Higher Education posted this little article on the ‘brand image’ of Australian education. When my husband read it, he said, “It’s simply not accurate. I see far more people drinking wine on the beaches here than beer.”

From the issue dated November 30, 2007

‘Beer and Beaches’ Image Said to Hurt Australia’s Higher-Education ‘Brand’

By LUKE SLATTERY

Sydney, Australia

Australia has lost its edge as a leader in higher education as universities in the United States, Canada, and Scandinavia discourage their students from indulging in a “sun, surf, and sex” experience down under, an official representing the nation’s research-intensive universities has warned.

Michael Gallagher, executive director of an eight-university Australian research group, said in a speech that the tourist images “surrounding much of Australia’s international-education marketing send messages other than valuing intellectual achievement” and that a “long tail of mediocrity” threatened the international reputation of Australian higher education. To counter the threat, he said, the country’s universities should concentrate their research money to create a tier of “big league” players in global research.

Mr. Gallagher, who leads the Group of Eight, told the audience at a colloquium at the University of Sydney that an Australian education was associated more with a “beer-and-beaches holiday” than a valuable learning experience.

Is copying “part of Chinese culture”?

I have often encountered culturalist explanations of why Chinese don’t respect intellectual property rights. One version of this is that it “in Chinese culture,” it is okay to copy other people’s writing without acknowledgement. I remember a professor at Heidelberg, Germany’s most famous university, asking me whether this was true. This has always seemed to me a kind of well-intentioned “intercultural communication” orientalism, but also universities and professors looking for cultural excuses for not enforcing their standards on students who bring money and who they think will go back to China anyway. In China’s good universities, plagiarism is as unacceptable as anywhere else — though let’s remember that the institutionalised plagiarism scare is something new in the West, and often seems as a surrogate reaction to failing education standards.

But recently, Sina.com reported that 19 Chinese organizations in Christchurch, New Zealand, protested against a story in a local paper, identified as “Evening News,” that described Chinese students as “the biggest cheats,” showing a photo of Chinese students copying exam papers and asserting that “cheating is part of Chinese culture.” The paper apologized.

NT Intervention on the ABC

On Thursday the ABC program Difference of Opinion addressed the topic of the Northern Territory intervention.  Entitled A New Deal for Indigenous Australians?, the program featured a panel of Indigenous leaders debated the merits of the Intervention in front of an audience.

The panel was made up of Sue Gordon, Chair of the NT Task Force; Tom Calma, Acting Race Discrimination Commissioner; Olga Havnene, CEO of the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the NT (and Women for Wik organiser); and Lowitja O’Donaghue, Inaugural Chairperson of ATSIC.

The context of the debate was both the NT Intervention and the recent surprise announcement by John Howard that he had suddenly become interested in reconciliation after 11 years of doing everything in his power to undermine any form progressive policies in relationship to Indigenous Australia.

While announcing his change of heart on reconciliation and his willingness to hold a referendum on putting a mention of Indigenous Australians into the preamble of the Constitution (but not into the body mind you). Howard claimed that he had recently discovered the value of “symbolic” gestures, as if a decade of refusing to apologise to the Stolen Generation isn’t a symbolic gesture. 

Actually, I think the move was a symbolic gesture, but more towards the Australian electorate than towards Indigenous Australia. A week before he announced the election it was pretty clear he was trying to demonstrate to the electorate that although he was an old dog he still has some new tricks to play.

Back to Difference, the opinions expressed by the panel were varied, which helped to illustrate that there is certainly no consensus even within Indigenous Australia about the merits, or lack thereof of the Intervention.  As would be expected, Sue Gordon was a lot more upbeat about the Intervention and claimed that people in many remote communities were very happy to have part of their income quarantined.  This was hotly disputed by the other panelists, who emphasised the confusion and lack of information in these communities which has bred a lot of uncertainty and fear about what the government would be doing.  I was particularly impressed by Olga Havnene, who made the point that although the Intervention is ostensibly addressed at protecting children from abuse, there is no mention of children in the new legislation and it is very hard to see how many of the policies are supposed to contribute to child protection. 

A couple of the panelists also pointed out that the real tragedy of this process is that there has been virtually no consultation with Indigenous Australians at large, and specifically with the remote communities being targeted.  Thus even if some of the policies might have some objective benefits for some members of the communities, they don’t contribute to any sense of empowerment or control within the communities themselves.

In any case, there is a strong contrast between Howard’s proposal for “reconciliation” as an essentially abstract notion and the concrete reality of the policies that are impacting on actual Aboriginal communities.  Good ethnographic studies done in these communities would, I think, help to illuminate discrepancies of this kind.

The show’s website is worth a visit.  It includes video from the program, the transcript, online forum and a poll about the Intervention. 

Some practical notes on ethics applications

Alright, so the first two blog entries on ethics weren’t very fun (here and here). I’ll admit that. And it’s a danger when dealing with a topic like university human research ethics review that we may contribute to the sense students (and others) have that it’s a dry or dreadful subject. I worry that we tell our horror stories to our students and prepare them for the worst from the ethics process, forgetting that this can set up self-fulfilling expectations. I didn’t help that with the last couple of posts.

So, in the interest of punching up the entertainment value (after all, I have to compete with some brilliant posts on the new Creationist museum in Missouri, my home state, by Lisa Wynn and ongoing cultural observations from Nursel and Jovan), I’m going to take a little different strategy and write in a more conversational tone.

Although the institutional dynamics of something like the Ethics Review Committee (Human Research) at Macquarie might be fascinating to a few (mostly to me), the majority of our readers at Culture Matters are likely to be more interested in practical questions. So I’ll try to highlight the most important, recurring issues for ethnographic projects from my perspective as researcher, ethics advisor, and application reviewer on the committee. Although all of the examples I discuss below are fictional, some resemblance to individuals living or deceased is inevitable. But please know, if it sounds like I’m talking about you, and you’re a Macquarie student or faculty member, you’re probably part of fictional synthesis because none of these issues is rare or unusual.

Playing with Children and other cultural oddities…

The article’s a month old now, but I find myself still thinking about it, so I thought I’d share. The Boston Globe ran a piece entitled, ‘Leave Those Kids Alone,’ about the adult practice of playing with children. You can find the original article here.

The article commits its own grievous errors of cross-cultural universalizing, but it makes some worthwhile points about the peculiarity of certain Western conventions of childrearing. For example:

“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

There is now a concerted effort to spread adult-child play beyond its stronghold in the upper- and middle-classes of wealthy countries. To this end, many cities and states support programs of some sort. Massachusetts will give the Parent-Child Home Program, which has 33 sites in the state, $3 million this year (up from $2 million last year). Through the program, staff members visit the homes of low-income residents and offer tips not just on good books for toddlers but also on “play activities” for parents and kids. Likewise, the eminent Yale psychologist Jerome Singer has partnered with a media company to devise imaginative parent-child games (examples: “My Magic Story Car” and “Puppets: Counting”) that librarians and social workers can teach to low-income parents.

Macquarie University’s Initiatives for the Indigenous People

Macquarie University has some initiatives for indigenous people, which I believe are the kind of things the Australian government and society should be talking about in relation to the indigenous people rather than sensationalising ‘sexual child abuse’ and sending troops to Northern Territory.  

Macquarie University has an Indigenous Traineeship Program. According to the http://www.pers.mq.edu.au/ies/traineeshipprogram.html,          

 The Indigenous Traineeship Program recruits six Indigenous people with low-level or no qualifications annually and provides them with twelve months work experience and training to obtain a AQTF Certificate III in a field of interest to the University. Key features include:

• Trainees spend four days per week gaining practical experience in the Office or Division, and
• Trainees undertake a further one-day per week in study with a registered training organisation (eg. TAFE) either on-site or off-site
• Trainees have the option to take one week planned annual leave every 12-13 weeks
• Traineeships will operate for one year from January 2007 to January 2008
• On successful completion of their qualification, the trainee will have preference for interviews for continuing or fixed-term position with the University.
• Offices and Divisions gain an employee with current knowledge, skills and experience of the work in their Office/Division

Also Macquarie recently organised a two-day science experience with Indigenous student demonstrators in order to encourage young indigenous students to study and have careers in science. Below are the details: http://www.pr.mq.edu.au/events/index.asp?ItemID=2999  

Young Indigenous scientists lead by example

July 17, 2007

A lack of education within Indigenous communities can lead to other social problems such as unemployment, poverty and low self esteem. But this week a group of young Indigenous students will attempt to inspire hundreds of their peers to finish high school and build careers in science.

Only 29 per cent of Indigenous students currently complete Year 12, compared to 65 per cent of the broader Australian community. Even more disconcerting, of the 9004 university science graduates in 2005, only 25 were Indigenous.

To help counter these trends, Macquarie University and the Western Sydney Office of the NSW Department of Education and Training will be conducting a two-day science experience with Indigenous student demonstrators at the Dunheved Campus of Chifley College on Wednesday July 18 and Thursday July 19.

Around 450 high school students are expected to attend the event, which will involve activities ranging from hands-on chemistry, microbiology activities and entomological exhibits, to careers, scholarships and further education information. Local Aboriginal elders will also demonstrate wood carving and painting, and tell stories.

“The event is intended to stimulate interest in the sciences and promote further education opportunities amongst Indigenous students,” says one of the organisers, Associate Professor Joanne Jamie of Macquarie University. “It’s part of a much larger program initiated in response to Aboriginal community concerns about poor school retention rates in their young people.”

Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor Professor Steven Schwartz says that the science shows are just one way that the University is demonstrating its commitment to social equity.

 “A student who attends a well-resourced private school and who receives after-school coaching currently has a major head-start when it comes to accessing a university education in Australia,” Professor Schwartz says. “However by providing opportunities to disadvantaged communities through events like these, by offering educational scholarships and by instituting an admissions system which considers a student’s background, Macquarie University is hoping to address this situation.”