Dialogue: Surveys aside, we've too many illiterate children

New Zealand finished near the top of the class in an OECD literacy report, but there is no reason for smugness, writes TOM NICHOLSON*.

New Zealanders will move heaven and earth so that every citizen can watch rugby matches on television. We take to the streets to protest about overseas causes. But we are silent when it comes to fighting for the right of our own children to read and write.

Press releases from the Government have praised the results of an OECD literacy survey (called the PISA report) that showed New Zealand came third in a comparison of 32 countries, behind Finland and Canada.

Other countries that were also winners in the survey, such as Australia, Canada, Korea and Ireland, have sung the praises of their own education systems during the past week.

Of course, in places like ours, it is understandable to praise these new results after negative results over the past 10 years showing that literacy standards were slipping.

The latest OECD survey tested a quarter of a million 15 and 16-year-olds. New Zealand scored highly on average, but so did similar countries. We were in third place, but the next group of countries (Australia, Ireland, Britain, Japan and the United States) were not statistically worse than us. The findings were good news for New Zealand, but only if you believe in averages.

A high average score can be the result of all children doing well in the test. Or - and this is the case for New Zealand - it can be a result of the high scores of some pulling up the low scores of others.

What the latest survey shows is that New Zealand is a country of haves and have-nots. We had twice as many excellent readers as the average for the OECD, and these students pulled up our overall average.

What the survey did not say was that many of our students are far from literate in terms of being able to read at a level where they can succeed in the information society.

We are failing many of our students while other countries are making sure that nearly all their students succeed.

In Korea, 90 per cent of students are reading in the middle levels. Very few are at the highest or lowest levels. In contrast, we have 66 per cent in the middle levels, with the rest split between the top and bottom levels. There were 14 per cent below the minimum level.

In Ireland, only 11 per cent were below the minimum level.

New Zealand was placed well below the OECD average in terms of helping all their students to succeed. A country can be proud of its success in literacy only when everyone is reading. New Zealand has a tail of failing readers who desperately need help, and are not getting it.

It could be argued that in this latest survey the tail of poor readers scored better than the average of the bottom group for other OECD countries scoring at the bottom, but should we be proud of that?

We have an education system in which for years now thousands of children queue for reading assistance but do not get it. Many children right now need reading tuition, but the queues are too long. They are not even put on the waiting list.

In 1999 there were just 68 reading teachers for the whole country to tutor the thousands of children behind in reading. These are children who had gone through reading recovery when aged 6 and did not recover, or needed help at 6 but missed out.

Ministry of Education statistics for 1999 showed that 1700 primary age children received tutoring that year. That is a huge caseload of 25 students a teacher, which adds up to about one hour of teaching for each child each week of the school year.

Nearly 40 per cent had completed reading recovery or had been referred on. A further 51 per cent did not receive reading recovery at all. There was also a waiting list of nearly 1400.

This year the Government funded 60 more positions, which will reduce the waiting list, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Then there are all those students in secondary school who cannot read their textbooks, are doomed to fail and do not have enough reading specialist help available to them.

One way to reduce the queues for reading tuition is to be more successful in our teaching of reading. There are multiple ways to teach reading, and phonics is one. A Government select committee report in September mentioned the word phonics 26 times and strongly endorsed the need to teach more phonics.

Then, just a few weeks ago, the Minister of Education rejected the call for phonics, making New Zealand the only country in the world that still advocates a reading approach that does not have a strong emphasis on phonics, by which children are taught to sound out words.

A possible explanation of our reading problems is that many of our children come from homes in which their parents do not speak English. But this is also a problem for other OECD countries.

In Europe, millions of refugees are pouring into Greece, Italy and Spain from war-torn places such as Bosnia, Albania and parts of Africa. This is a huge educational problem for many countries in the OECD.

I have spent many years as a university academic helping poor readers and campaigning for them. I have had to search for sponsors to fund reading lessons after school for needy readers, for children who do not get help from the Government. And there are individuals and companies who have come to our aid with donations. So some people do care.

But as a society we need to hold back on self-congratulation until there is help for all who need it.

Yes, we are doing well on average. Yes, we have very good readers, but we should not hold our heads up high until every child can read. We have to get rid of this cargo cult mentality that the present whole-language method is the one best system for all children. That if we wait long enough, it will solve all our problems.

We have waited 30 years; it is time to stop waiting. It is shameful that any child should leave school without literacy. Every child has the right to read. We do not care enough for the many unfortunate, illiterate children in our own backyard. It does not have to be this way.

* Professor Tom Nicholson is the co-head of the University of Auckland's School of Education.