Laurie Loper: A massive waste of potential

Columnist Tapu Misa's probing piece, "Doing some homework on closing the gaps" (Herald, Nov 9) reminds us that we don't have remedies for the underachievement "tail" issue. It implies there are gaps in our understanding of what's involved and that we need to find better answers.

As Misa indicates, these gaps have a habit of sticking around. She quotes an American magazine, City Journal, that points to "40 years of failed and costly programmes aimed at closing the educational gap between the poor minorities and middle-class whites". And gaps have serious consequences - Misa cites the recent Paris riot situation. Our gap is serious too; we're currently ranked second-worst of the OECD countries. Making it more so, "our tail is disproportionately Maori and Pacific Island", signalling possible future, violent, social unrest.

Which brings us to causes. Here countries identify very similar things. They're mostly the all too familiar social, economic, and cultural disadvantage things. Parents usually cop a fair old rollicking, as do teachers. Boys learn differently to girls, some think. However, history tells us that no matter what's identified, and targeted, that achievement gap never disappears.

So how do we fix things? In New Zealand we are doing lots of things. One recent one is interesting. It's called Team Up. Expensive at near $16 million, it's a government attempt to get parents and teachers working together to boost learning. Snaring Tana Umaga to front it was a coup - I hope it's not the worst hospital pass he's ever been thrown. For this is yet another in the tradition of "commonsense" solutions, and these, being belief-based, don't have a good track record. Some believe you've got to fix up the disadvantaging factors before getting educational things happening. Others, like me, would argue for the opposite .

But it's when we look to the things in education that need fixing that I think I part company with Misa. The best we ever get from specific gap-changing schemes are minor and/or temporary improvements and then only in particular and limited contexts.

Such initiatives don't improve student-learning outcomes simply because they can't. They don't treat the main issue, the inherently ineffective way we learn.

We know all this now from one of our own, the late Graham Nuthall, ex-Professor of Education, Canterbury University. Using innovative, data-based techniques, he discovered how learning works in classrooms and how students learn. Importantly he found that not only teachers, but all of us hold to these mythical beliefs. They constitute an ancient, inherited culture of learning that's out of whack with how learning actually works in classrooms.

The main offender here is something he calls the "teacher-as-classroom-manager" model.. It effectively ensures few if any students will ever learn at their best. Partly, it makes teachers so busy they simply can't attend to everything that's going on.

But other things operate here too. For instance, what teachers typically use to monitor learning isn't good at telling them what's happening.

Teachers also don't know that learning is almost entirely a student-generated process, and that it's unique to individuals. They don't know that the capacity to learn is in fact spread remarkably evenly among all students so it's entirely possible all students might learn equally well and at levels higher than do the best.

Much reputable research, Nuthall's included, suggests the conversion rate of latent student-learning capacity in every place of learning is very low, possibly lower than 50 per cent.

We're talking here of a massive waste of human potential. Since low achievers aren't that big a fraction of the total student population, even if we're successful with all of them, it won't significantly reduce the total wastage - it won't ensure the skills to raise efficacy reach to the wider teaching force, and it won't reduce the number of future underachievers.

Ask parents with non-achieving offspring what's wrong and they'll say schools aren't doing their job. Ask schools and they'll say parents aren't doing theirs. But here's a curious twist. Both of these opposed groups share a strong belief in the very thing that's been found the villain here - the good-teaching model that all schools strive to provide.

We should note here too, everybody, the Government, the Education Ministry and the ERO, thinks this model is tops.

So here we are, we're all pushing the very model of learning that's stuffing the system up. I wonder how long this destructive nonsense will go on.

* Laurie Loper is a registered psychologist from Tauranga with 50 years' experience in education, mainly in special education.