The recent announcement that the government is ditching NCEA predictably grabbed the headlines. But an education story that was probably far more significant sailed under the political and media radar a couple of weeks earlier.
RNZ’s education correspondent John Gerritsen reported that less than half of students in Northland and South Auckland were passing NCEA tests in literacy and numeracy (Gerritsen is a former colleague and is basically the only journalist who is regularly reporting on this kind of data).
One South Auckland principal said as many as a third of teenagers leaving schools in Tai Tokerau and South Auckland could have no NCEA certificates. Let that sink in.
I haven’t dealt directly with Minister of Education Erica Stanford but those who have generally speak well of her.
But the North Shore is a world away from South Auckland and Northland, and scrapping NCEA will not address the underlying problems that are showing up in these numbers. It won’t make any difference whether you give a student a D or Not Achieved, they’re not getting the education they deserve.
Stanford thought scrapping Māori words from early-education books was somehow going to fix something. All it does is repeat the message that members of my whānau and many others got when they were whacked in the Native Schools – there’s something wrong with the Māori language and being Māori.
Kids that are bilingual are better at a whole lot of things, particularly being able to adapt and engage with other cultures. There’s a couple of billion people on our doorstep who are not monolingual Anglo-Saxons. And computer coding, which is the basis for all manner of technologies, is basically just another language.
What goes unsaid is that Northland and South Auckland have the highest concentrations of Māori and Polynesian students in the world. Gerritsen’s story should have been a media and political scandal but it barely raised a yawn from the beltway. That tells me both Parliament and the press gallery regard the kids of South Auckland and Northland as not worthy of their attention. Or they inherently believe brown kids are dumb and belong at the bottom. So, as you were.
Luxon keeps banging on about fixing the economy and growing the economy and any other verb he can find to attach to the economy. In the end, the economy is people. And in the next 10-20 years, nearly half of the kids entering the workforce are going to be Māori or Polynesian (and a big chunk of Pākehā are going to be retiring and facing all the health issues that come with age, which will make them a drag on the economy). The abysmal results showing up in the education stats are more significant to the economy than the OCR.
There are a multitude of reasons for these numbers. Teachers in these regions are asked to do things that are well beyond their remuneration and their actual jobs. One teacher I know said he spent about 80% of his time at a low-decile school dealing with trauma. I’ve seen first-hand where a lot of that trauma comes from – the state inflicted it on thousands of children in institutional custody and we’re living with the intergenerational impacts right now. That was a continuation of the violence the Native Schools dished out to Māori kids.
Then there are the economic pressures. Last year, the Child Poverty Action Group estimated there were up to 15,000 teenage students working 20-50 hours a week on top of study to help their family pay for basics. I’d hazard a guess that many of them would be in South Auckland and Te Tai Tokerau, and very few would be in Remuera and Khandallah.
I rarely hear from politicians – or my colleagues in the media for that matter – about the connections between educational failure and crime. But we’re happy to spend more on prisons while teachers get told that the budget is too tight to pay them what they’re worth.
Over my career, I’ve regularly circled back to education as a lynchpin for so many social and economic outcomes, particularly for Māori. I once did some rough analysis of the number of Māori boys leaving school without qualifications and arrived at a round figure of approximately 2000 a year. The obvious question then became, where are they now? And why is it that as a country we are so comfortable with these figures?
The rhetoric around gangs never seems to include why gangs find it so easy to recruit young Māori kids. If you’ve got viable options in front of you, you’re unlikely to join a gang. But 2000 Māori boys a year don’t have those kinds of options. This echoes the one-in-seven Māori boys who were taken by the state in the 1970s and thrown into welfare institutions where the only education they got was in violence and abuse. They then formed the core of our gang and prison population from the 1970s onwards.
The phrase “pipeline to prison” has become a cliché that is repeated so often it takes on an air of inevitability. It’s not inevitable. We’re just not bothering to change the things that keep it operating.
Exhibit A – the education system.
