Tom Nicholson: Reading vouchers would boost thousands of children

Opinion

The National Party's education policy includes giving parents remedial reading and maths vouchers if their children are struggling. Parents will give the voucher to one of a list of reputable agencies and their child will receive free tuition outside school hours.

Is this a good idea? Yes, indeed it will be a life-saver for thousands of children who struggle every day with literacy and maths.

Yet strangely, the reaction from the schools sector has been overwhelmingly negative. What seems to rankle is that the Government would be giving money to parents and not to schools. It would be empowering parents to make their own decisions about how to help their children.

The arguments against reading and maths vouchers for children who are failing are that:

* Programmes are already in schools to help them, and these programmes are very successful.

* Any extra money should go to schools and not to outside agencies because schools will do a much better job.

* It will be a cruel and horrible punishment for children who cannot read or do maths to attend after-school lessons.

* The only children who are failing in schools are those who cannot speak English or whose parents are transient.

All these arguments are incorrect. Schools are totally unable to cater for the many children who are behind their classmates in reading. Thousands are on waiting lists, and many children do not even get selected for the waiting lists because they are not reading poorly enough.

Even worse, there is no independent research evidence to show that remedial reading programmes in schools actually work.

Some education lobby groups say the voucher money should go to schools. Why should the reading voucher money go there, rather than independent agencies, when the school is where the problem started in the first place?

If the money went to schools, children would simply get more of the same instruction that is already failing them.

It is claimed that poor readers will be too exhausted after leaving school at 3pm to attend any further lessons. Yet more than 10,000 children attend after-school coaching every day in commercial tuition centres.

Most savvy children know that if they want to get ahead, they need to work that little bit harder than everyone else. So why should we deny children who are failing and embarrassed about their poor reading, and spending most of their school day not able to cope, the opportunity to do some extra work and get better?

It is also claimed that most of the children who are struggling with reading are immigrant children and children whose parents move from one school to another all the time.

Yes, these children often do struggle but there are many thousands more who come from all walks of life who also struggle.

My experience of directing a university after-school tuition programme over the past five years is that the children we see come from right across the board, from the rich to the poor.

The vast majority of them are bright, chirpy children who have not learned to read because of a faulty reading method called whole language that schools have to implement. The funding for our reading clinics comes from private donations and businesses but we also rely on parent donations where possible.

Another argument often made is that the children who fail are from transient homes, so vouchers will be of no use because these parents do not care about their children.

But I have worked with many parents who have very little money but who make the effort to bring their children each week for a one-hour reading lesson.

I recently attended a literacy day festival in Otara, one of the poorest suburbs in Auckland, and the place was swarming with parents. So I cannot accept that poor and transient children have parents who do not care about them.

Reading vouchers are necessary at this time as an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to rescue many thousands of children who will slip through the cracks of our education system and whose lives will be ruined because of lack of literacy.

But this is a short-term measure. The real problem is that schools are saddled with the whole language reading method that fails too many children and that excludes other methods such as phonics.

The opposition to National's policy on vouchers for struggling readers is irrational and shows little regard for children who fail. Here we have a political party that is concerned about children who struggle with basic academic skills. Why are we so threatened by this?

The whole country went berserk over the NCEA scholarship exam debacle because the students who failed were our star pupils. But pupils at the bottom of the pile get no such attention. They wither on the vine in our schools because they are not stars. Yet they are failures that we have created and that we should take responsibility for.

* Professor Tom Nicholson teaches in Auckland University's faculty of education.