Dialogue: Emphasis on a fair go for all holding us back

By LESLEY MAX

Paradoxes litter the educational landscape of New Zealand, creating obstructions in our halting progress towards the promised land of the knowledge society, glittering far away, perhaps unreachable. We know we must reach it, or sink into national poverty and global irrelevance.

What are these paradoxes? We were among the pioneers of free, compulsory and universal education, yet one million of our citizens over the age of 16 are illiterate in terms of full participation in this society.

Despite education being compulsory, we do not know how many children do not even attend school, because our exaggerated concern for adult privacy and autonomy stops us creating data systems to ensure children receive appropriate healthcare and legally required education. Judge Brown's recommendation to institute such a system should be enacted forthwith.

We staunchly hold egalitarian values while we watch the inequalities in our society, none greater than in education, become more and more entrenched.

We see our state education system as the mechanism to permit children born into socio-economic disadvantage to change their destiny, yet university enrolments are overwhelmingly from high-decile schools.

This brings us to the saddest of all the educational paradoxes, that it can be our admirable values themselves which sometimes create obstacles on the road to the knowledge society.

Thus, our egalitarianism, giving everyone a fair go, can mean blurred standards for admission into and graduation from our colleges of education; too many mediocre teachers, and, consequently, children who don't get a fair go.

The egalitarianism which returns us to zoning and promotes internal assessment can, paradoxically, result in employers simply favouring the product of certain schools with the reputation of quality.

We rightly value tolerance and respect for others, especially across the ethnic divides. We support communities shaping their own educational systems, and we delicately back away from the conflict that might come from close examination of the goals and the outcomes. Yet it is necessary to look closely if, in our pluralistic society, the goals of the nation as a whole and the goals of specific communities are to be met.

As one example, my perception is that many Pacific parents have a dual goal. They want their children to succeed in the New Zealand education system, while maintaining cultural values of obedience, respect for elders and preservation of language. Careful, mutually respectful cultural bridging work needs to be done, based on honest analysis, if both goals are to be met.

Among the greatest paradoxes: we see ourselves as a rational people, feet on the ground, making decisions on the basis of good information. Sadly, this is often a misperception in education.

Consider the 1997-78 Financial Review of the Education Review Office, conducted by Parliament's education and science committee. It disappeared without trace, but it should have been a bombshell.

The MPs supported the review office's conclusion that if governments are setting out to achieve a strategic shift towards a highly knowledgeable society, they have yet to effectively harness the school sector to such a purpose. They criticised the long-standing lack of information on student learning results.

The review office noted that the cognitive progress made by children before they enter school at 5 years is critical to their educational achievement. But it found that service providers do not consistently offer education programmes that identify, meet and, where appropriate, stretch individual children's intellectual capacity.

Indeed, it found that the state's investment of $277 million annually in the early childhood sector does not demonstrably add educational value to the Crown's strategic policy, but rather that its greatest benefit may be to the labour market, facilitating entry into the workforce

The MPs lamented the inadequate information on educational outcomes for children enrolled in early childhood education centres. The review office criticised the unwillingness of the early childhood education sector to acknowledge the state has a legitimate interest in the educational results.

As the operator of a home-based early childhood education programme for disadvantaged communities, where research has proven clear educational achievements in literacy, numeracy and parent and child behaviours, and which was denied a single Vote Education dollar for eight years until November 1999, I am very familiar with this prevailing mindset.

The early childhood sector is awash in values - excellent, pro-social values, including equity - yet the ambivalence surrounding intellectual development actually denies opportunity to many children from homes which are not, for whatever reason, congruent with the education system.

Just as we need a clear focus on ideological obstacles, so we need a clear focus on the biological and environmental obstacles to reaching the knowledge society.

For all of our concern for equity, children arrive at the school gate already profoundly unequal. Children with health and disability problems; children affected by the mother's ingestion of drugs or alcohol; children born into poverty or instability or to parents ill-fitted to rear them for a variety of reasons; children whose brain function is impaired by living amid family violence - all may face difficulty in learning unless there is early intervention and support.

A rational society would ensure it takes the steps necessary to increase the chance of children being born into a nurturing environment. Such steps would include attention to education for parenthood - when to be a parent as well as how to be a parent, matters almost universally and incomprehensibly ignored by the system.

A rational society would use its collective brains to achieve better results. As just one example, I am working on a joint initiative which would see tertiary students receive around half their fees in return for tutoring and mentoring children in a carefully supervised structure in which universities and schools are partners. The results should include better achievement by children; increased access to tertiary education for underrepresented groups; fewer students labouring under or fleeing debt; and enhanced social cohesion.

We can, and must, do better educationally, by basing policy-making on evidence rather than sentiment; improving information and evaluation systems; paying attention to how positive values can metamorphose into obstructive ideologies; and working to enhance the chances of each individual, from birth and even before.

* Lesley Max is executive director of the Pacific Foundation, which finances early childhood education for at-risk families.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

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