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Ethnically Diverse Schools Are BetterResearchers study the benefits of ethnic diversity in schools |
By Vlad Tarko, Senior Editor, Sci-Tech News
12th of May 2006, 13:16 GMT
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"Bullying happens in every school, and many students are concerned about their safety," said Jaana Juvonen, UCLA professor of psychology. "Bullying is a problem that large numbers of kids confront on a daily basis at school; it's not just an issue for the few unfortunate ones. However, our analysis shows students feel safer in ethnically diverse classrooms and schools."
Psychologists from UCLA and UC Davis have now studied, as part of a larger research project concerned with bullying in school, more than 70 sixth-grade classrooms in 11 Los Angeles public middle schools with predominantly minority low-income students. They found that students are more likely to feel safer, less bullied and less lonely in ethnically diverse schools.
Juvonen and her colleagues used the following classification:
African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Caucasians. They considered classrooms diverse when multiple ethnic groups were represented in relatively similar proportions. Researchers think that when ethnic groups are fairly equally represented, bullying and harassment may decrease, because such aggressive behavior often happens across ethnic "boundaries". In addition to that, an ethnic balance of power may have other benefits, including opportunities for cross-ethnic friendships, the researchers noted.
Somewhat surprisingly, they found that this relationship between ethnic diversity and bullying was not affected by differences in academic performance. These findings hold equally well in worst as well as in the best schools. This is important because some politicians in the US have argued in favor of ethnic segregation in schools on the assumption that this improves academic performances. This idea however seems to be totally wrong.
"Other research at the college level has found that students from all ethnic backgrounds may benefit from ethnically diverse environments," co-author Adrienne Nishina, an assistant professor of human development at UC Davis, explained. "We know that when students have positive social and psychological experiences at school, they do better academically."
Researchers argue that middle school students who are bullied in school are likely to feel depressed and lonely, and that harassment at school interferes with the ability to learn.
Moreover, today's increasingly multicultural environment requires social skills that can be best developed in ethnically diverse schools. "The skills needed for young people to successfully negotiate today's increasingly global economy can best be developed through exposure to very diverse people, cultures, and points of view," said Sandra Graham, principal investigator of the current project, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Education. "Diversity benefits everyone; in fact, it is critical in contemporary America and especially in states like California, where the population is changing dramatically."
However, Graham, Juvonen and Nishina note that more than 50 years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which explicitly outlawed racial segregation of public education facilities, most students in the United States continue to be educated largely in ethnically segregated schools.
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