Why are Indian & Chinese kids attaining much higher than white/black/Pakistani children?

[Widilo]

I’ve been thinking this over today. DS recently went to a Kumon class (if you trawl through Mn threads over the years this is generally much hated on MN). All the kids coming out were Indian or Chinese, all the kids in her group Indian or Chinese. A smattering of black children and 1 white child (DS). DS won’t be going back (it was a trial class) because it just seemed to be repetitive rote learning of hundreds of sums, but clearly this is working somewhere along the line?

stats linked here www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/gcse-results-attainment-8-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest

In practical terms, rote learning of simple mathematical functions allows quicker, accurate, robust calculations in everyday matters & particularly for exams where churning correct answers at speed means more points & more time to answer the more complex weighted questions.

Points mean prizes.

It's not just about rote learning, It is much more complex. Culture, the drivers for migration, standards of living prior to migration, level of their parents education, work ethic, where they live, what investment has happened in schools there and so on.

One of the most underperforming groups is white working class boys in rural areas, white working class boys in Central London who attend a new build academy which has attracted lots of investment and is surrounded by people living an aspirational lifestyle may well do better than those boys who live in an isolated rural area and aspire to work on a farm and therefore see no point in gcse's.

Indian children who move here are likely to have parents with skills and education already, with a strong motivation to be successful. The same is true of white kids. What the data isn't showing you is a true reflection, there are millions of children in India living in poverty being raised by parents who didn't go to school, who don't read with their kids or send them to tutors who won't have good gcse outcomes, but they typically aren't the ones who migrate here on account of having no money or skills.

Again for other ethic groups like black children, we can't measure the impact of decades of racism in communities, for example how trusting will parents be of authority when you look at things like the Windrush Scandal. This has a complicated impact on culture and aspiration, for example some bright young black boys in London are attracted to gang culture in a way that a bright young Chinese boy wouldn't be.

The government does identify under performing groups and schools get additional money to support them. The bigger issue is of course that education is woefully underfunded and only those whose parents can afford to top it up with tutoring, swimming, sport and music lessons. Or who can afford to move to a more affluent area with a grammar school or state school populated with children from similar backgrounds will have get the best outcomes.

My experience is that Indian families tend to view a child's success or failure as a reflection on the whole family, their image and honour and so the expectations are high and the pressure is even higher. There is a lot of competition with other families in the communities. At least one parent is heavily involved in the children's education, often the stay at home mother. It's not always a healthy dynamic though because there is less time to explore the child's creativity or hang out with other children out of school but on the flip side they'll probably grow up to be a dentist or doctor earning a big fat pay check!
For example, one Indian mum from my DC's school would not allow her child to go to birthday parties or playdates with any of the children of the school. From Y2 she had her child studying for 11+.
I think there is a lot to say for persistence and practice over natural raw intelligence when it comes to exams but I'm not sure pushing average children is healthy. They need to have the talent and drive from within otherwise their success will not really feel their own. Well, that's my view anyway and I back it by the successful musicians and athletes who were pushed by their parents and coaches when they actually hated it and it wasn't what they truly wanted to do in life.
Guide your children yes, support them, yes, motivate them yes but there comes a point where it's clear the parents are pushing for their own image and old age investment in their children to look after them.
This is not about all Indian families, just my observation of the many Indian families I have known.

There are children arriving at secondary school who aren't secure in their number bonds to 20?! How has that happened? It must be very uncommon!

I can see multiplication being an issue as children need to work it out as unfortunately learning by rote isn't happening as well as the why. In my day, we were explained why and memorised them so we knew them quickly. I don't really know why that isn't in fashion any more.
Or why we no longer memorise poetry, I never did but my mother and grandmother did in school.

I don't know much about Kumon but rote learning has a place, eg times tables, spellings, memorising key facts for exams, vocabulary in other languages, reciting poetry.

Like anything one extreme or the other is unhelpful.

The moving away completely from rote learning and seeing it as ‘bad teaching and learning’ is unfortunate in our culture.

Most Indian women work, 72% of Indian women vs 73% of white British women work. There aren’t a lot of SAHM’s I’m the only one that I can think of in my extended family. It’s not the norm in Indian families.

OP - the simple answer is that Indian and Chiinese kids are higher achieving as they work harder.

The British have a weird attitude to academics. It is accepted that to do well at sport or music, you need to practise. But somehow at school, it should come naturally, and that if you work you’re not really clever.

This is not a common attitude in other countries. You get out what you put in.

If you want your kids to do well, then yes doing lots of sums will make them better at maths. My kids did Kumon and both benefitted from it. It did not teach them everything but being quick in timestables gave them so much confidence at school. Once they were doing well, they saw themselves as ‘good at maths’. Now they are flying at A Level maths. But good foundations from age 4 helped.

It is this, isnt it. It is the attitude towards education in the UK.

antelopevalley · Yesterday 22:51 I think expectations for children from parents in Britain can be quite low.

and this. It is. You just have to look at any of the many mumsnet threads on teachers. That often disgusting attitude passes down to your child's attitude towards work in class and at home.

Kumon works because of the bigger picture. These are parents who are determined to support their children through their education.

I’m a (white) secondary school teacher, and just in response to the question in the thread title, I think there’s an assumption that what you say is true (Indian and Chinese children are expected, and supported, by their families to pursue high academic attainment) in a way that other children may not be, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because the assumption affects the way we as teachers see them and treat them. There’s an implicit expectation that they’re high achievers (which kids tend to live up to - it’s why schools have policies of high expectations).

TL:DR - institutional unconscious racist bias and sweeping generalisations in school staff (this is definitely a thing. Have a look at the exclusion figures for black boys vs other races and genders.)

My DDs (who both turned out to have various SpLD and memory processing issues) both turned up to (and left) Secondary without knowing number bonds to 20. In fact I'm not convinced DD2 knows number bonds to 10 in any meaningful way.

This was despite my having a maths degree and therefore being very keen they should learn basic maths facts. They just wouldn't stick.
No one at primary every really noticed so i can well believe it isn't as uncommon as you might like to think.

Eh - plus the answer to why 2+2=4 doesn't get taught (and doesn't matter) until at least A levels, and even then only as a footnote. It doesn't get explored unless you do degree level maths.

The answer is - it is a tautology. The way that we set up the rules (axioms) of arithmetic mean that it just does. You can easily set up different rules, that end up with different answers (for example, complex numbers, or matrices, which behave differently. For example, in 'normal' numbers, the square root of -1 doesn't exist. But you can change the rules by saying that the square root of -1 = i, and there you go, it now exists. And with matrices, A x B does not equal B x A)

Not sure how useful it is to tell a young kid that why 2+2=4 is because 2+2=4. Because, even though at the end of the day maths is an intellectual game with no basis in reality, its a very useful skill.

Do you mean rote learning the underlying phonics? In which case I agree with you. Otherwise I'm not sure what you mean?

I am Arab and education wasn't optional growing up, it just wasn't.
Other girls had Britney Spears posters in their rooms, I had educational ones. First thing I saw when I opened my eyes was times tables.

Other girls had TVs and music systems in their rooms, I had a desk and chair. I did have toys growing up, but my room was neat as a pin and expected to be used for studying.

I see posters on here talking about school refusers and mental health days etc, simply not a thing in my culture. I'm not saying I agree with it, if I had said to my dad that I wasn't going to school and he couldn't make me...my God he would have made me and he would have made me regret it til Kingdom come.

Never mind school homework, my parents would set homework as well. We used to say "homework means homeowner"

Someone mentioned the Asian grades and yep, we had the Arab ones:

A - average
B - belt.
C - cane.
D - do you want fries with that.
E - everyone knows you're a failure I already called the Aunties.
F - find a new home

Kids doing brilliantly at school does not always mean they end up high achievers or happy and balanced ( nor vice versa)
I would think its cultural expectations and refusal to accept less than the best from their childrens attitudes to work that is a common attitude amongst some immigrant cultures, but Im pretty sure if you go to china or india then a much wider range of abilities and attitudes and social classes would be evident.

It is still in the curriculum. It's just known as maths fluency now.

I do agree that some schools , particularly certain academy chains, seem to forgo regular fluency. We do it daily in ours.

But you have the children who engage and the ones who don't. I never really understood the expression 'you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink' before teaching. It's getting worse since I started 20 years ago. Behaviour has declined, many more children have limited boundaries and this does reflects in their learning.

I think when corporal punishment was stopped at home, which is a brilliant thing, they never really taught parents how to discipline their children without resorting to violence. Or admit that it will take a long time, without the threat of violence, especially if you have a 'spirited' child to achieve high behaviour standards and that you have to keep preserving over years..not try something once or twice and decide it doesn't work.

Some parents worked this out for themselves. Many did not and need to be actively told and supported.

I appreciate this is not what you are talking about and actually I am from an immigrant background that values education very highly.
but my child missed a huge amount of school due to serious mental health difficulties and getting angry and trying to force them did not work. Presumably their parents together could have physically forced her to go to school - although not sure of the legality of using such force - but once they were there they couldn’t cope and couldn’t cope when at school under their own steam.
obviously not what this thread is about but some mental illnesses are debilitating. You cannot cure a mental illness simply by forcing in the way you can’t a physical one.
hit a nerve

Totally cultural expectations and norms.

An Indian girl in my daughters Y5 class is made to do two hours extra work after school each day (including sessions with a tutor and Kumon). She also practices her musical instrument for an hour a day. Her parents describe her as lazy and that she should be doing more. In fact, they worry about how “little” she does. She’s 9 and summer born.

She has been told she is going to Oxbridge and she can be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

Then add in the other six Indian families in the year and they are all doing the same but also comparing notes and grades with each other. The school has no class rankings for grades and you are only told your child’s scores. The Indian parents have made class rankings for their seven children and they expect their child to be top.

This is what they experienced with their own education back in India - to them it’s normal. They ended up with successful careers and are ambitious for their own children.

If everyone was doing over 10 hours extra work with their child then I’m sure results would improve. It doesn’t mean others are less ambitious for their children. It means that stuff away from the classroom is seen as being important in a child’s life.

Some things, such as times tables, are worth learning off by heart.

I'm a bit perplexed by the responses saying that understanding why 2+2=4 is unnecessary or tutor territory. If you understand what '2' is, then you should also understand that '2 and another 2 is 4'.

My 3 year old son understands this without the need for rote learning - e.g. I hold up two fingers on one hand and two fingers on my other hand and ask him what two and another two equal.

I highly recommend Numberblocks. He watched the the episode on ’12’ and immediately grasped the concept of arrays and could then recall (rote?) the various factors of 12.

All knowledge is a combination of understanding and memory recall. I think understanding the 'why' and 'how' is by far the most important part of maths.

I do agree with the British attitude of innate intelligence v working hard. I went to school in the UK and US, and in the US it was a point of pride to say how much you studied/worked, whereas in the UK it was more common to say you didn't really study/take it seriously, and the pride came from the idea of natural aptitude.

I've met some very pushy parents over the years, education is everything and they make huge sacrifices to send even just one dc to private school for instance (usually a boy) from the wider family. Things we spend money on aren't considered a priority, after basic housing (far more crowded than I would put up with), bills and home cooking, it's all about investing in the children's futures.

One Asian friend explained that they never eat out and he's never been on holiday except to return ashes to India. 2 kids in private school on an income like ours, didn't even consider we could afford it

It is interesting to see how much maths teaching has changed in this country in the last fifty years. When I started primary school, the emphasis was very much on memorisation of mathematical facts - the how - rather than thinking about the why. You were given one method and had constant repetition until you knew how to do it. Concrete maths was learned before abstract maths. I can remember rows of sums on the board. Times tables were vital. I still believe this method works as if, for example, you know instinctively that 7X7 = 49 then you don’t hav to work out that seven apples costing 7p each will total 49p. Understanding often comes after knowing how to do something rather than before and l believe this is how Kumon maths works. Unfortunately, in many schools, as I found when my own children were small, there are many methods taught, often extremely complicated methods, and children can become confused. If Kumon maths can alleviate this then it can only be a good thing. A child’s ethnicity is totally irrelevant but l think many families could learn from the dedication of the backgrounds you cite.

Most primary schools would follow the CPA method for maths. Concrete, pictorial, abstract.

Like anything though, some places will do it better than others. If it's a chain, schools can be told they must to it X way when in fact it might not be quite right for their cohort/school.

We'll all have to get used to that though if all schools are to be made academies.

Someone up thread mentioned an Indian parent prepping their child for the 11+ from year 2. This isn't uncommon in the white British families where I live. My daughter has had a tutor (just once a week for now) since year 2, I want her to have as much choice regarding which secondary school to choose as possible.

Some stuff needs rote learning. If your DC's school doesn't prioritise that, then either you do it at home, or you outsource it if you can't/won't.

I don't think hours of tutoring every week is good for children, though - in China and Korea this is considered normal, and their children are some of the unhappiest and most stressed in the world.