Tapu Misa: Education fails the poor, brown and disenfranchised

Not long ago I was invited to talk to a group of first-time principals about what schools should be like for kids. I leapt at the opportunity. What pushy parent wouldn't take the chance to tell 138 new principals how they should run their schools?

The fact that I don't have an education degree and have never taught was a minor point. I am a parent, therefore I am bound to know better.

And they took it remarkably well. I don't know a chief executive in any other business who'd take so kindly to being told how to do his or her job, so I'm grateful they didn't throw their dinner rolls at me. But then teachers are a remarkably tolerant lot. They have to be, because when it comes to education, everyone is an expert.

So it came as no surprise to read in this week's issue of Time magazine that pushy parents have become the number one bane of teachers' lives, at least in Australia and the United States, where some 30 per cent of teachers throw in their chalk in their first three to five years on the job.

According to Australian teachers interviewed, there are too many obsessive parents pushing the interests of their (at least in their minds) gifted and perfectly behaved angels to the exclusion of other children.

Of course, they would have had to be middle-class parents. It's the middle-class parents who push the hardest, complain the loudest, and get the most attention from schools and politicians.

I don't blame parents for wanting the best for their own children, but more often than not middle-class concerns tend to drown out the real problem area in education: the tail end of the achievement scale populated by the lowest 20 per cent of our kids. That tail is the longest in the developed world, but being poor, brown and disenfranchised it is largely silent.

Which means we hear less from those who are missing out on the advantages of our education system than we do from those whom it serves best.

Witness the flurry of political action over the Scholarship debacle. Yes, it was a mess; yes, it needed to be fixed. Yes, some of our brightest scholars were undoubtedly inconvenienced. But it was hardly a life-ruining experience.

When will we get to hear the same level of outrage and concern at our continuing failure to lift the achievement rates of the poor and the brown?

At my daughter's decile 3 school, our NCEA results reflect a pattern of underachievement among Maori and Pacific students that runs right throughout the country. Yet it cannot be for lack of caring.

The parents who flocked to last week's parent-teacher interviews represented the school's multicultural student roll. Many, from neighbouring Mangere and other low-income suburbs, have gone out of their way to send their kids to the school, believing it gives them an edge over those forced to attend their local schools.

But if education is meant to be the great leveller capable of raising everyone in society on the basis of hard work and merit, the international evidence suggests it is failing. The spoils of education still go disproportionately to the children of the well-off. Not because they're smarter, say educators, but because they have the necessary "cultural capital".

According to a New York Times article published this week, class (defined as education, wealth, income and occupation) continues to be a major determinant and predictor of success. Its investigation reveals that the advantages of class last longer than a couple of generations and that its tougher for the children of the poor to move upwards than was once thought.

Understanding this should be a priority for anyone who cares about the way our lopsided society is developing and the part that education and teaching plays in perpetuating the status quo.

Yet few educators and parents seem aware of this. And even fewer politicians - most of whom, as emeritus Professor Ivan Snook told Massey University teaching graduates last weekend, "just cannot leave education alone".

Snook lamented the changes wreaked by the vast educational restructuring of the past 20 years, which brought us increased competition and the necessity of marketing and fee-paying overseas students.

Yet politicians continue to want to tinker, swayed less by what might work to raise the achievement of all students than by the agendas of their more strident and articulate constituents.

National, for example, wants to give us more competition and privatisation, under the guise of choice, which is an illusory concept at best for the children of the less well-off.

It offers a vote-catching menu of piecemeal vouchers, compulsory bulk-funding, "trust schools" and increased funding for private schools (which will continue to cherry-pick the best students to enhance their results).

Who will these policies benefit? Not that long tail of students underachieving in our schools and destined to swell our unemployment queues and prisons if we don't get this right.

What they need is a society in which every school has great teachers who understand the different learning needs of their students, backed by leadership that understands and gets alongside its parents and communities, and with enough funding to help all its children, no matter what their parents' incomes.

We might stand a chance of doing this if politicians stopped treating education as a political football.