KEY POINTS:
Donna Awatere-Huata says the Ministry of Education is in a rut, and has no idea what to do about educational underachievement among Maori children.
They're in deficit-theory mode, she says, and she's half right. I've no doubt there are still teachers who throw the towel in as soon as they see a poor brown kid come through the school gate.
It's well known that our increasingly entrenched tail of underachievement snags around a fifth of our students, a disproportionate number of them Maori, Pacific, poor. We're not alone in that. Britain faces the same challenges, as does the US, where George W. Bush's ambitious but underfunded No Child Left Behind programme seems to have made little difference to the achievement gaps between black and white students, and between the children of the poor and the middle class.
The social and economic consequences of this ought to be keeping us up at nights. Do we blame parents or teachers? Is it a failure of the home or the school? How much is due to poverty, and how much to institutional racism, or poor teaching?
There's been much intense study and debate devoted to the causes and the solutions. And too many failed initiatives.
What's becoming increasingly clear is that raising the achievement levels of our most disadvantaged students requires more than a little tinkering around the edges, more than a few special programmes, and a few exceptional teachers and principals. It requires extraordinary effort on the part of teachers and schools, and a commitment of resources to public schools that few political leaders, if any, are proposing.
What kind of extraordinary? Paul Tough profiled the hugely successful KIPP charter schools in a November 2006 New York Times article, and found teachers working up to 16 hours a day, 60 per cent more class time than most public schools, and an emphasis on clear rules and conduct ("Work Hard" and "Be Nice"), and commitments from both parents and students to high standards of work and behaviour.
"The message inherent in the success of [these] schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them."
A multitude of studies have shown that poor children fall behind rich and middle-class children early, and many never catch up, so deeply ingrained do their intellectual and academic disadvantages become.
Plenty of reasons have been advanced for this, the most obvious that better-off households function differently from poorer ones. The parents tend to be better educated, and more likely to stay married; the children have more books, watch less TV, eat better, get sick less, get more sleep, and don't suffer the instability of frequent house moves.
Studies have shown that the middle-class children benefit not only from their parents' ability to provide them with a broader variety of experiences and activities, but also from a parenting style which allows them more freedom to engage their parents in conversation as equals, ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules.
Even the basic building block of IQ vocabulary is affected by class. A study by University of Kansas child psychologists published in 1995 found that by 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1100 words, while those whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies half that.
The difference was the number of words the parents spoke to their child. Professional children received an average of 487 utterances an hour from their parents, while welfare children heard 178. For welfare children, those utterances were 2 1/2 times more likely to be "discouragements", prohibitions and words of disapproval and more than six times less likely to be words of approval.
The psychologists concluded that hearing fewer words, and lots of prohibitions and discouragements had a negative effect on IQ, and that hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences had a positive effect on IQ.
Poor children have the odds stacked against them. Not only are their parents more stressed, but so are they, say neuroscientists. Newly published research suggests that children who grow up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development, and their language development and memory.
If we won't make poverty a priority, we should at least take a more realistic approach to what's needed in our schools to ensure poverty isn't a life sentence.
The reality, as Tough writes, is that "even the best, most motivated educator, given just six hours a day and 10 months a year and nothing more than the typical resources provided to a public schoolteacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers".
