Private schools used for cultural quarantine

[Phteven]

Thoughts?

Private schools used for cultural quarantine

Bianca Hall March 07, 2012
The research shows Australian-born parents in areas with high migrant populations were more likely to send their children to private schools.

PARENTS are using private schools to segregate their children from unfamiliar cultures, new research shows.

An academic paper published in The Australian Economic Review shows Australian-born parents in areas with high migrant populations are more likely to send their children to private schools than Australian-born parents in areas with lower immigrant rates.

First-generation migrants in areas where there are more migrant children of the same ethnic background are less likely to send their children to private schools.

The paper, by Australian National University fellow Astghik Mavisakalyan, shows the trend is highest among secondary students.

Dr Mavisakalyan found that at primary school, a 10 per cent increase in the proportion of immigrants increased the probability of Australian-born children attending private schools by 3.5 percentage points. This compared with 6.45 percentage points at the secondary-school level.

She said the findings were statistically significant, adding: ''Overall, the results suggest the possibility of a flight from unfamiliar cultures in the Australian school system.

''I considered cultural differences between natives and immigrants based on shared language and ethnic background [and] in both cases, it appears that the private-school attendance of native-born Australians increases in response to immigrants from distant cultures.''

Dr Mavisakalyan used 2001 census data for her work, which warned that the trend could lead to school segregation.

The recent government-commissioned Gonski review of school funding found a lack of English proficiency was one of five factors that significantly affected students' performances.

A spokeswoman for Multicultural Affairs Minister Kate Lundy said: ''Parents select a school for a variety of different reasons and they are increasingly making informed choices using the My School website.''


http://m.theage.com.au/victoria/priv...306-1uieg.html

I guess it's effective in quarantining immigrant children from racists too....

In relation to the last line about people making informed choices based on the MySchool website, I don't think people are making informed choices based on the MySchool website. They are making choices that are informed by the very limited information on the MySchool website. The MySchool website and NAPLAN don't measure a whole host of things that I consider important in a school.

[Maruschke]

why must people be so racially intolerant?

[Traveller]

This doesn't surprise me at all

[AnyDream]

That summary doesn't indicate what other factors were investigated - I'm thinking things like socio-economic differences, disposible incomes, level of education, age of parents, choice of available schools vs zoning and what impact high population growth has on availabilty, and whether parents themselves attended private schools. It also overlooks the vary glaringly obvious point that the majority of private schools are Christian which may not appeal culturally to new migrant families who are arriving in larger numbers from different countries than those they were coming from a couple of decades ago. Which is a long and twisty way of saying I don't think they can really get to that conclusion without looking at why new migrant families might be underrepresented in private schools in the first place.

Not sure this constitutes a robust statistical correlation at all.

[sushee]

It's interesting because I doubt that any parent would express that as being the explicit reason why they were putting their child in a private school. And I don't think it just happens with private schools. I suspect that many parents will move school zones altogether to keep their children from going to a school that may have a high population of immigrant or indigenous students.

[glenny_c]

I think the other thing to note is that, yes parents may be moving or putting their kids in private schools to avoid schools with a high migrant or indigenous population. However, that may only be the reason in a round about way. The sad truth is that schools with a high migrant or indigenous population are often the under performing schools academically. Not going to go into all the reasons for this but it has been true for a long time. I would consider moving or putting DD in private school if our local school was one of the lowest performing schools in the country. It wouldn't enter my head that I was moving her away from children from a different cultural background, (in fact, exposure to different cultures would be a plus point to stay) and the cultural makeup of the school certainly wouldn't be my reason but yes, I would move her to give her a better opportunity academically wise.

Does that make sense?

[sushee]

MD,

the study showed that the higher the population density of immigrants in an area, then higher the LIKELIHOOD that a native born Australian child would be sent to private school if living in that area. Which is not about the uptake of immigrants to the private school. And even without taking in other factors, if it consistently shows that increased immigrant density = increase uptake of native australians to private school, I think it's a fair call to say that it may be significant.

Anecdotally I don't think this is in the realms of fantasy. I think parents do choose schools based on many things, and cultural influence in one significant one. Or the desire NOT to have a particular cultural influence, in this case.

[AnyDream]

Yes it's definitely a leap to jump from noting the trend to concluding its about racial quarantining. There are too many other factors that might be involved that have not been considered in arriving at this conclusion.

[FabFiona]

glenny_c - I get it.

I would probably fit into this category. Last time I checked, I'm not racist.

The public schools in Melbourne's West, where a lot of migrant communities have made their homes are not the better performing schools. This is reflective of the areas socio-economic status and the number of parents that completed high school. I'm also a catholic and want my kids to go to catholic schools. There simply isn't the option of secondary boys catholic schools in this area. So it's likely (although very early to definitely say) that my boys will catch the train across town to the inner southern suburbs to go to school.

I'm exactly the type of person that this study reflects, but I would argue that race is not the significant factor here but the academic performance of the schools. The fact that schools that are largely comprised of migrant communities generally perform poorly is a whole new thread!

[Maruschke]

It doesn't take much to look at the actual peer reviewed article.

Here it is...

Immigration and School Choice in Australia - Mavisakalyan - 2012 - Australian Economic Review - Wiley Online Library

And here is a summary of their model, explaining what other factors they took into account:

The list of controls includes a wide range of individual characteristics of native and immigrant students, captured by Xil in equation (1). These include their age, sex, religion, natural or adopted child status, the number of children in their family, having a single parent as well as parents’ education, government employee status, occupation and age. Measures of family income, home ownership and mobility history are also included as controls. In addition, dummies for natives of Asian and other origin are specifically included in the native models. Immigrant-specific individual controls include dummies for European, Asian and other immigrants, for immigrants from developed countries and for those who speak English at home.

The variable of central interest is the immigrants’ share of student population in a locality in the native models and the like-type immigrants’ share of student population in a locality in the immigrant models.10Cl in equation (1) further captures a set of additional locality-level measures. These include the logarithm of mean income per capita, the Gini coefficient, the share of unemployed in the local labour force, the logarithm of the number of students and the private school student/teacher ratios.11 In the native models, the minority share (the share of native-born of non-European ancestry) of student population in a locality is included to control for the possibility of a flight from native-born minorities. Finally, state-fixed effects, denoted as Sl in equation (1), are included as controls. Table 1 provides the full list of variables and describes how they were defined.

Seems to me like the study DID take most reasonable things into account, and the "flight" was a legitimate observation after controlling for those factors. The observation was only significant at the secondary school level, and the R^2 of the model was about 0.2... so not a very strong association at all, but it is there, nonetheless.

[AnyDream]

Sushee yes I did understand the distinction, but the conclusion of "cultural quarantining" rests upon the notion that private schools are culturally homogenous. So while the researcher might be pointing out a trend in uptake of private schooling by australuan born parents based on density of culturally distant migrants, and rightly so, the conclusion that this is somehow based on cultural or racial quarantining can NOT be validly asserted without examining the determinants of schooling choice right across the population.

ETA I should clarify, I'm not arguing with the figures, but the conclusion. "cultural quarantining" implies a deliberate intent to segregate based on race or culture. It's one thing to observe that there is an effect and another thing altogether to imply that this is based on a very particular set of attitudes.

[glenny_c]

Aggghhhhhrrrr!!! Flashback to my psych degree! I HATED stats!!!!

[sushee]

I see what you mean MD, but that brings another point to the table - the issue that most private schools are christian and you often have stringent requirements to get in that makes it difficult for immigrants. This means that a lot of private schools naturally filter out immigrants, even if they might want to attend. I am Catholic and had that issue when looking to place my children in a private Catholic school - I'm Catholic but my children were not baptised and therefore they did not get placed high up the waiting list. They eventually did not attend a private school in the end - they could not get in.

It also means that, as a result, private schools tend to be more culturally homogenous than other schools. I lived in an area in Perth that had a high density of immigrants (asians) and while the public schools were 50% or more asian students (and ranked in the top performing public schools in WA), the private school that was in the area had a very low percentage of asian students. I don't think immigrant parents are less inclined to care about the education of their children, but private schools are often not geared towards permitting easy entry of immigrant students into their ranks, with waiting lists and other such barriers to entry.

And I don't necessarily agree that the choosing of a private school when in a high density immigrant population is explicitly racial quarantining, and I said so earlier. But I think it's a by-product of it.

[AnyDream]

I'm on my phone so I haven't followed links, and I find myself wondering whether the "cultural quarantining" wordage was really the conclusion of the researcher or whether it arose from some sloppy journalism at the age.

[LizLemon]

I think it's a bit harsh to say that people in these situations are racist.

We live in what is considered a lower socio-economic area. It also has a high percentage of immigrants. We will be sending our kids to the local private school rather than the local public school purely because we feel that, being in a lower socio-economic area, the private school may provide better opportunities than the public school. In other words, the local public school is a bit sub-par. The high school is terrible.

I am in no way racist and I don't care if my child goes to school with kids who are from the moon, so long as the school has the ability to discipline, and hopefully exclude the ratbags.

When we move to a better area in a few years time our kids will be going to the public schools.

I will say though, if people were avoiding public schools purely because of the immigrant factor, it's still not necessarily racist. I remember when I was in (public) primary school, christian view were still quite heavily promoted - we celebrated Christmas, Easter etc and looked at the Christian beliefs behind them. From what I hear political correctness has had a big impact on schools' ability to celebrate these Christian holidays/beliefs, and maybe some people who would previously have been happy with a public education are now preferring the private Christian school so that these values are still present.

[SunnyRain]

When I started reading I thought like Marydean that there was too much of a leap to the conclusion, but the numbers do seem somewhat significant.

However, I agree it's not to conclude that racism is a major factor, those families (possibly) live happily enough in neighbourhoods shared with different cultures. So I do think it's more a reflection on the reputations of the local schools.

However, if schools with high immigrant populations are under achieving, that is a reflection on there being problems in society and problems in a public education system that doesn't adequately support immigrant populations.

I would fall into this study as racist because I live in a culturally diverse neighbourhood and I intend to send my kids to private school, but I actually have no idea how good the local schools are, I don't believe in mainstream education and want to send my kids to a private alternative school. So it's my philosophy on education that influences me, not my attitude towards people of different cultural backgrounds. Would factors like philosophy be considered in this study?

Sent from my HTC Desire HD A9191 using Tapatalk

[Phteven]

I'm exactly the type of person that this study reflects, but I would argue that race is not the significant factor here but the academic performance of the schools. The fact that schools that are largely comprised of migrant communities generally perform poorly is a whole new thread!

The opposite is also true. There was a big fuss in Sydney a few years ago because former students of a selective school (which is the only Public GPS school in Sydney) felt that their children should be given preference over other students. One of their concerns was that the character of the school was being changed because so many of the students came from non-English speaking backgrounds. Most of the best performing schools in the HSC in NSW are public selective schools which have high populations of migrants. One of the only private schools that is regularly placed highly in the HSC results is a Muslim school with a large migrant population. If you take a look at the photo opp with the Premier every year a large percentage of the high achievers are non-Caucasian.

[nothing2lose]

I think there is such a thing as socio-economic cultural quarantining to protect your kids from bogans.

Nothing to do with race whatsoever.

It is likely my DD will go to a private school because most of the public secondary schools in this area are full of ferals.

Am I quarantining her from their influence? Absolutely.