Maori after Brash: 'Could do better'

By DIANA McCURDY

Educational experts are divided over why Maori students underachieve, variously attributing it to teachers, socio-economic status and cultural differences.

As a group, Maori have a lower level of formal qualifications than most others in the population. They are suspended from school at three times the rate of non-Maori and they leave school earlier than other students.

A New Zealand Council for Educational Research study points the finger firmly at socio-economic status. The study, Competent Children, has tracked 500 New Zealand children since 1993 and found that performance in literacy and maths is linked only superficially to ethnicity. When mother's education and family income levels are taken into account, the differences all but disappear.

"As far as we are concerned, it's largely to do with resources available to children," council chief of research Cathy Wylie says. "There's no ethnic difference in terms of aspirations or in the sense of education being valued. It's really what you bring to education."

Children from low-income backgrounds don't have the same access to learning resources such as books during their early childhood, she says. From their very first days in school, they are disadvantaged because school resources are not as familiar to them as they are to middle-class children.

Post Primary Teachers Association deputy general secretary (policy), Bronwyn Cross, says her classroom experiences here and overseas back up such findings.

Having come from a working-class background herself, she believes the traditional anti-intellectualism of lower-income groups affect academic performance.

The predictors of academic success are fairly easy to spot, she says: the number of books in the home; the education of the mother; even whether the family sits down to dinner together (a sign of a middle-class family).

"There isn't a country in the world where the working class succeeds more than the middle class."

Others, however, believe such attitudes are dangerously incorrect. As long ago as 1973, Ranginui Walker argued that, as teachers were predominantly Pakeha, education was theorised and delivered from a single cultural perspective.

As a result, Maori children saw little relevance in the education system and Maori people were ambivalent about education.

A more recent Education Ministry-sponsored project, Te Kotahitanga, goes one step further, concluding that teachers themselves are the main cause of the problem. It claims Maori students are set up for failure by teachers who expect them to struggle because of their cultural and social backgrounds.

In the study, a research team led by Professor Russell Bishop from Waikato University spoke to Maori students, their parents, principals and teachers.

The most important influence on Maori students' educational achievement, they concluded, was how well they interacted with their teachers in the classroom. However, teachers' low expectations of Maori students created a self-fulfilling prophecy of Maori failure.

The researchers called for changes in teachers' professional development to help them learn how to change negative classroom interactions with Maori students.

Auckland University pro vice chancellor (equal opportunity) and distinguished professor of Maori Studies Dame Anne Salmond says Te Kotahitanga is not the first piece of research to reach such a conclusion.

In a recent Ministry of Education report Adrienne Alton-Lee raised questions about New Zealand's track record. "Research over at least two decades has revealed that mainstream teachers in New Zealand hold inappropriately low expectations for, make inappropriate assessments of, and/or provide lower levels of praise for, Maori students in English medium New Zealand classrooms."

The research seems unequivocal, Dame Anne says. Young people from all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds can achieve - it just depends how they are taught.

In New Zealand, the apparently benign stereotype that Maori are good at sports and art and not very good at maths has far greater ramifications than most people think.

While Dame Anne accepts it may be difficult for well-meaning teachers to stomach the idea that their subconscious attitudes affect their students' progress, she adopts a firm attitude.

"I think that after a couple of decades teachers should be thinking that maybe they [the researchers] have a point."

PPTA apiha Maori Te Makao Bowkett warns against blaming teachers, but says they need ongoing support and professional development to ensure they can understand and meet the needs of their Maori students.

If Maori students do not feel school is relevant to them, she says, they will - and do - look elsewhere for stimulation.

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