Tapu Misa: Parents are only partly to blame for educational failure

Grateful as I am to the reader who rather sniffily offered, in response to last week's column, to give me pointers on how I could get my poor, disadvantaged children into higher decile schools, he rather missed the point. I've been there, done that. So I know from experience that higher decile doesn't necessarily equate to a better school.

My definition of a good school continues to be quality teachers, visionary principal and a school culture that values learning. None of these things is the exclusive preserve of the rich schools - and ought never be.

But that's the trouble with highlighting what the evidence is saying all too glaringly about our long, predominantly brown tail of underachievement. It can be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to unhelpful assumptions, lower expectations and the blame game of which our society is so fond.

Apportioning blame can be satisfying, of course, but it just encourages a climate of defensiveness and obfuscation which isn't particularly helpful when you're looking for solutions. And when it comes to the minefield of educational failure, especially failure coloured by ethnicity, we have to blame someone - and most of those who wrote to me last week put the blame squarely on the shoulders of parents and their culture.

Like everyone else, my views on education have been shaped to a large extent by my own educational experiences. I'm the eldest of seven, and all of us have emerged from the education system literate, numerate and employable, despite being educated in relatively poor schools in working-class, state-housing suburbs.

Undoubtedly, our parents (mum a cleaner, dad a storeman) played a part. Like many immigrants they sacrificed much to get us the education they believed would guarantee us better lives.

But by today's standards they might well have been judged uninvolved parents. They weren't able to help with homework. I can't recall their turning up for parent-teacher meetings or sports days because they were almost always working.

When one of my younger siblings started school, it was my sister, only a few years older, who enrolled her.

But my mother, who'd been a teacher in Samoa, knew enough to buy me Jane Austen and Charles Dickens books when she had the spare cash (though not enough to know about the free library). Other than that, she and my father left it to the teachers.

All we had were their high aspirations for us - and their expectation that we would do well. Which was just as well because in many ways their high expectations had to make up for the lack of it from many of our teachers.

Although I was lucky enough to have encouraging - and even one or two inspirational - teachers, my other siblings weren't so lucky.

My brother walked out of his old high school the day he started the sixth form, after the assistant principal sneeringly expressed surprise that he'd managed to pass School C, let alone bothered to come back to school.

Fortunately for him my aunt was able to get him into a school across town, where he thrived. It gave him the confidence to be the successful person he is today.

But the plural of anecdote is not data, as someone once said. And in an area bedevilled by ideology, fashion, political agendas and false assumptions, hard evidence is critical.

The fact that my siblings and I are now, to varying degrees, middle-class, and expect all our children to do better than we did, does not change the fact that we are a minority and that the education system still fails a disproportionate number of our friends and relatives.

Why this should be so is one of the most hotly contested areas in education. The evidence, both here and overseas, is, to say the least, complex but it's possible to draw some conclusions.

Does family background matter? It would be stretching belief and the evidence to suggest it does not make a difference for good or ill. There are clear disadvantages that come with being in a low-income family. At the very lowest end there is chronic ill-health, transience, crowded, unhealthy houses, stressed families, meagre resources, lower education.

Here and overseas, parental education, particularly the mother's, can significantly heighten student achievement, as does knowledge of the system and the availability of resources at home - a computer and a place to study - and the richness of experiences that most middle and upper-class children take for granted.

There's evidence, too, that parental expectations and attitudes make a difference. But obviously no one believes that family circumstances are the end of the story, or the well-off wouldn't be breaking their necks to buy in the so-called good school zones.

A consultant for the Ministry of Education told me of a decile 1 South Auckland school she visited that had achieved Opotiki-like results, in contrast to some of its neighbours. The difference? A dynamic principal who believed absolutely that all her kids could achieve no matter what, and who then set about imbuing her teachers with the same conviction. She won over most and got rid of those who refused to share her vision.

Of course, there was much hard work involved and good, solid teaching in an environment that pushed learning. And, of course, it wasn't without its considerable challenges.

But, unlike many, she never lost faith.