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The inequality of school achievement has been highlighted in recent articles in The New Zealand Herald, and rightly so, for it is one of the biggest problems confronting the country today and shows no signs of going away.
The debate about what is to be done and why is long on solutions but very short on causes, yet it is the causes which have to be understood if interventions are to have any reasonable chance of success in significantly reducing the inequality captured by the expression 'the long tail of school underachievement'.
Many have contributed to the debate - politicians, policy-makers, academics, teachers, principals, commentators and parents - but in the end only one person really counts when it comes to doing anything about it where it really counts: the Minister of Education.
Peter Fraser understood this, and got it right. Hekia Parata understands this too, but from her recent NZ Herald article that 'socio-economic factors are often overstated' it would seem she is getting it all wrong.
This is extremely serious for it is the Minister who, with the authority of the cabinet and the support of the Government, sets the policy and determines the allocation of resources to implement policies, and if she gets it wrong then far too many children will suffer the consequences in later life long after this Minister has departed the scene.
The Minister's thinking is captured by a dualism of within/beyond school factors. The beyond school factors focus on 'the impact low socio-economic factors have on student outcomes' but 'these factors are often overstated'. The within school side contains things such as the quality of teaching and the quality of school leadership. Now, few would deny that teachers and principals make a difference, good ones especially. But whether they make 'the biggest difference to a kid's education' is questionable.
It is clear enough that when children start school they bring with them enormous differences in what they can and cannot do. Some can read and others cannot, some are able to count and others not, and so on. They bring their beyond school differences through the school gate into the classroom. When the differences are distributed across children according to their social class, gender, ethnicity or more recently by family income, such that some groups of children do well (Pakeha) and other groups of children do poorly (Maori) then differences become inequalities.
When we hold equality to be fundamental, of equals being held to be equal, then inequality takes on an ethical dimension of righting a wrong. To achieve equality may require treating unequals unequally such that the least advantaged are to be advantaged sufficiently to gain equality (but this does not mean identical houses, cars or holidays - how odd that the Minister should think this).
The Minister's initiatives to address what she has elsewhere called the 'achievement challenge' are all within school remedies which are somehow meant to be solutions to beyond school causes. The causes are nation-wide yet the initiatives are largely local - charter schools, investing in educational success and the like - and even where they are not, as with national standards, they remain firmly locked into the within school side of things. The beyond school factors tend to be largely ignored as being non-educational therefore not the business of education. So resources continue to be poured into educational initiatives, a whole raft of them where over time some come and others go with no appreciable effect on the inequality of school achievement.
But the Minister thinks otherwise, for she quotes NCEA statistics which indicate improvement. Not a good move in light of PISA results which in 2012 painted a very different and depressing picture - down in the international rankings for reading, mathematics and science and still one of the widest range of scores between our highest and lowest achievers. The government has no control over PISA but manipulation of NCEA results is a different matter. It would do our children a disservice if the goal of 85 per cent passing NCEA level 2 by 2017 was made to happen for political reasons.
If the Minister is determined to tackle the achievement challenge then she must step outside of the dualism and start to see things along a continuum from the most proximal (closest to the action) to the most distal (the most furthest away). Most immediate would be quite specific things like parents reading to their children and the things teachers say to children while at the other more general end are the policy decisions and their funding made by the government and implemented by state agencies through regulation and fiat as well as the actions of business directors and executives over job availability and monetary differentials paid to employees and themselves.
Then the inequality of school achievement could no longer be seen as just an educational matter but one which stretches right across the fabric of a very unequal society where this schooling inequality sits alongside the many other social inequalities (income, health, welfare, housing, etc) which, like a web, keep all in place. Only when the inequality of the web as a whole is addressed can the inequality of school achievement be significantly tackled.
Is there a way forward, from within education? Surprisingly there is, but not as the Minister intended. A recently she released a discussion document on updating the Education Act 1989. It contains a number of proposals for raising educational achievement. All are within school solutions and so like all the others they too are bound to fail. It is not in what is proposed that the answer lies, but in what the Minister excludes.
In the last exclusion lies the answer. She wrote: 'Matters that are not part of this consultation include...changes that would increase government spending on education'.
This is good news. More spending on education will be on within school solutions which will not dent the achievement challenge. What will are beyond school initiatives which lie along the continuum and since these are not of an educational nature then there is no restrictions on changes that would increase government spending on non-educational policies such as employment, taxation, family support, health, welfare and so on and so forth which are the primary causes of the inequalities which children bring to school and impact the most on school achievement.
It would be nice to think that before too long she will be knocking on Bill English's door requesting him to revise his policies and reorient his spending priorities to bring about one of the great transformations of education (and society) since that shaped by Peter Fraser's deep commitment to equality of education some 80 years ago.
Somehow I doubt that she will use the opportunity to do so and thus will children continue to tread along the same path of the inequality of school achievement in the future as children in the past and will continue to live unequal lives in an unequal society until such time as a Minister of Education not only has a dream of better things to come but also has the full support of colleagues to rid inequality across the board in the interests of creating a far more equal society for all.
John Clark is an associate professor at the Institute of Education, Massey University, Palmerston North.
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