Tapu Misa: We all need to do our homework on closing the gaps

What's holding black kids back?" asked an article in the American magazine City Journal a few months back. After chronicling 40 years of failed and costly programmes aimed at closing the education gap between poor minorities and middle-class whites, the article's author, Kay Hymowitz, took the side of the billionaire comedian Bill Cosby, who'd been yelling the answer from the rooftops during a nationwide crusade.

According to Cosby, it's black parents. Pure and simple.

Cosby says: "Proper education has to begin at home. What we need now is parents sitting down with their children, overseeing homework, sending children off to school in the morning, well fed, rested, and ready to learn."

Can't argue with that. We can all tell the difference between the offspring of those obsessive types who spend their every waking hour plotting their child's educational advancement and those who'd rather watch Coro St or Idol.

Indeed, according to a Herald on Sunday story in the weekend ("Schools beg parents to show they care"), many schools think some parents aren't making the grade. Among those frustrated by the apparent lack of parental interest was De La Salle College in Mangere, which complained that only 40 of the school's 900 (mostly Pacific Island) parents bothered to turn up for the recent parent interview night. Apparently, the rest weren't able to tear themselves away from the televised final of NZ Idol.

Given the chaotic, assembly-line approach of most parent-interview nights, where parents are lucky to learn anything meaningful about their child's progress in the allotted 10 minutes (if there's a problem, why wait until the end of the school year to let parents in on it?), I think Rosita may have been the better bet.

Which is not to let slack parents off the hook, just to say that a lack of involvement doesn't always mean a lack of interest, no matter what bro'Town says.

A fortnight ago, when the Education Review Office shone the spotlight on the long tail of underachievement in our schools, it kicked off another round of finger-pointing about whose fault this whole sorry state of affairs is.

The fact that our "tail" is disproportionately Maori and Pacific Island, and that the achievement gap here is wider than in most comparable countries means we should probably invest a bit of effort in getting it right. No society can afford to consign so many of its young people to an ethnically distinct and alienated underclass. Not without the kinds of problems we're seeing on the streets of Paris right now.

But maybe you've seen the Ministry of Education funded advertising campaign - where Tana Umaga enjoins us parents to get more involved in our kids' education. Its focus on partnerships between school and parents is on the right track, but I can't help looking covetously at the $15.9 million being spent on this campaign without wishing it had gone into proven programmes which actually work with families rather than just telling them what to do.

But to return to City Journal's question: what's holding so many of our kids back? Unfortunately, for people who like simple solutions to complex problems, the answers are a long way from being pure and simple.

Any society serious about closing the achievement gap, says the US educational magazine, Educational Leadership, has to look at the problem "complexly", and appreciate the powerful social forces at work.

For example, of the 14 factors listed by education writer Paul E. Barton as shown by research to affect achievement, six are the responsibility of schools - curriculum rigour, teacher experience and preparation, school safety, and class size - while eight take place outside the school gates: low birthweight, hunger and nutrition, television watching, and parent availability and involvement.

Richard Rothstein, author of Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap argues that closing the gaps requires a seismic shift in policy, because the achievement of children is "the product not only of what they learn in school, but of a wide variety of factors, including home and neighbourhood influences, and social and economic conditions".

"Children will do better in schools where teachers are better prepared with higher expectations, and where the curriculum is better. But improving our schools alone won't fully close the achievement gap, as children from middle-class families will continue to have advantages outside of school that put them ahead of their lower-class peers."

These advantages are many and varied. (I'm paying $90 a session for a tutor to explain NCEA maths to my child because her teacher doesn't have time for one-on-one explanations, and I don't have the ability. The tutor's other clients are from private schools.)

The idea that the gap can be narrowed by such things as the quality of neighbourhood life - the availability of medical services, libraries, affordable housing, youth programmes, quality pre-schools and after-school programmes - and by giving poor children the kinds of experiences that their middle-class counterparts take for granted, is one that Scott Gilmour is already familiar with.

Gilmour, a North Shore businessman, introduced the I Had A Dream programme to New Zealand in January 2003, when he adopted a class of 8-year-olds from the Decile 1 Wesley Primary School in Mt Roskill, to whom the programme provides out-of-school mentoring, tuition and "enrichment". Provided they stay at school, I Had A Dream will pay for the tertiary education of every one of them. It's a long-term commitment. When I met Gilmour, he was about to join the kids rock-climbing. He knows better than most how real the gaps are. Once, preparing for a trip to Rangitoto, the children were told that it was what you saw when you went over the Harbour Bridge. "What's the Harbour Bridge?" asked one. On a trip to the Waitomo Caves, one of the mothers sat at the back of the bus, determined not to sleep, in case she missed something. She'd lived her whole life in Auckland and had never been outside its confines.