Dialogue: Education not for benefit of schools

The sight of children returning to school for another year is normally enough to make romantics like me a little misty in the eye about education, the ticket to social mobility. But that is less likely this year.

If any of the hopeful young faces in fresh uniforms on the streets next week are taking their first step up the ladder, they will not necessarily be those with the most potential.

They will merely have won a lottery.

Last year, any state school that received more applicants than it could enrol was obliged to draw up a local zone of preference. If it had any room left for applicants from out of the zone, the school was obliged to draw names from a hat.

That will seem fair if you believe that life is largely a lottery anyway, and that schools would not otherwise choose the most deserving pupils.

But that is unduly cynical on both counts. Most people in my observation get ahead on their own attributes and efforts, and I know schools were choosing the best pupils. That was the problem.

Other schools, naturally enough, resented the loss of talented young scholars, musicians, sports performers and the like in their locality. That was a problem for those schools but education does not exist for the benefit of schools.

The goal of education, we constantly hear, is to ensure that every person receives all the help required to reach his or her full potential. It is hard to reconcile that principle with steps deliberately designed to prevent those with the most potential going where the opportunities will be greatest.

The contention, I think, is that "society" is best served when all schools contain a broadly similar range of talents. It is certainly true in sport, where I have found that you perform better in better company.

But should Michael Campbell be forced to play golf in my grade to lift my game? Education is possibly the only profession that still imagines the greater good is served by holding back some people for the benefit of the rest.

When they are honest, teachers admit that they pitch their material to the middle of the class. The brighter are left bored and the slower left behind. Yet the profession has set its face against putting pupils into classes of similar ability and for the same reason it has detested the removal of school zoning.

The removal of zoning during the 1990s saw a great deal of mobility in Auckland through all levels of the ladder as parents sought the best for their children.

The trend also forced schools to watch their reputations and to compete in every way they could to attract and keep pupils. It was tough for many of them. Schools such as Avondale College proved they did not need to be in a particularly salubrious suburb to prosper.

Competition was anathema as always to the unions involved and all the prayers of the Post Primary Teachers Association were finally answered with the election of a Government containing a good number of its members and a virtually identical mindset.

The steps taken by the Government in education last year were copied from the top of the PPTA wish-list.

The union's campaign against school choice constantly complained that it was the schools that did the choosing. Nobody bothered to ask why that was such a bad thing.

I mean, if you had a talented child bidding for entry to an academy that you believed would best develop the talent, would you prefer the child to be interviewed and assessed, or take your chances in a ballot?

It probably depends on whether the child is exceptionally good or mediocre. A ballot, like much else in education today, mainly helps the mediocre.

Over the summer we have read of the pursuit of Auckland Grammar School for enrolling four boys whose names were not pulled from a hat and didn't meet other permissible criteria.

A woman whose son missed out in the ballot had complained to the Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard. To the Herald she alleged that the chosen boys had "significant" sporting or academic abilities.

The world has gone mad.

Mallard had one of his minions investigate this outrage. The investigation turned up 14 enrolments that were not within the criteria now permitted.

The Grammar board claimed administrative errors. It had, for example, awarded its Sir Henry Cooper scholarship for deserving boys to someone from out of the zone, which evidently the law now forbids. This is truly sick.

Over the past fortnight Grammar and other highly regarded schools in Auckland and Wellington have reported parents trying all sorts of ruses to get children into their zones, claiming the kids are living with grandparents, estranged partners - anybody who will let them use a qualifying address on an enrolment form.

And those who can afford to, of course, have rented, leased or bought houses in the zone. The schools will just have to squeeze them all in.

"The important thing," said Associate Education Minister Steve Maharey, "is that schools are not making the selection."

The mind of a social regulator is an interesting organism. It is fully aware that zoning creates its own real estate value and allows parental wealth and privilege, rather than ability, to decide where children go to school.

But it prefers that to social mobility.

At the end of the Grammar selection saga, the school withdrew the boys' enrolments and the Ministry of Education ordered them reinstated. The ministry had received an assurance from the school that it was not trying to select scholars or athletes. Heaven forbid.