KEY POINTS:
Call me deluded (many have), but I'm happy with the education my kids are getting at our local decile 3 high school - and, shockingly, not unhappy with NCEA.
Among my daughter and her friends, all clever young women who sat NCEA Levels 1 and 2 last year, I've detected absolutely no drop in levels of ambition or competitiveness. If there are students out there content with mediocre marks, I haven't met them.
When last year's NCEA results came out, it was the number of Excellence grades that counted most with my daughter, as it did with a friend's son who cried when he got fewer Excellence grades than he'd expected.
I'm not saying I think the school and NCEA are perfectly formed. I wish there was less homework; I find the marking system unnecessarily complex and the grading too narrow. I think it would be a retrograde step for NCEA to have less external assessment, which is more rigorous and less susceptible to teacher bias.
We've had great teachers at our school, and not-so-great teachers. We don't have the variety of courses that bigger schools can offer, or the modern facilities that private schools take for granted - big halls, modern gymnasiums, swimming pools, state-of-the-art technology.
But I'm in no doubt that my children will do well. They already have advantages, not the least of which is a stable family life, access to books and the internet, exposure to interesting people and experiences, and their parents' ability to pay for most of the things they need to succeed.
They're getting as good an education as our circumstances afford. And that's a pretty good one.
But elsewhere in Auckland, dissatisfaction reigns. Parents who feel sure their children are being cheated by NCEA are pressuring their schools to offer overseas alternatives, while students writing to this newspaper complain that NCEA just isn't challenging enough for their big brains. Unlike, say, the Cambridge exams, which seem largely designed for Third World countries without qualifications of their own.
So now even schools that perform spectacularly under NCEA, like Auckland's St Cuthbert's College, are considering offering overseas exams to keep parents happy.
As usual, it's the middle-class parents, whose kids are already among our most advantaged, doing most of the pushing.
But if anyone should be complaining, it's the poor.
We have the second highest level of relative educational inequality in the OECD, to match our level of wage inequality. Only 5 per cent of Year 9 students entering a decile 1 school will graduate from Year 13 with the grades to go to university.
And it's not NCEA that's the problem. It might make us feel better to blame it all on poor parenting, too, but that can't account for such widespread disadvantage.
Martin Thrupp, of Waikato University's School of Education, said in a recent lecture, what can help is what he calls "education's inconvenient truth": persistent middle class advantage.
It's not enough that the middle classes send their children to school already loaded with the advantages of money, resources, networks, skills and time. They're forever looking for ways to give their children an edge.
Hence, the push to get their kids into rich schools, alongside other middle-class kids, and the resistance to any change that might erode that edge, like NCEA.
Thrupp says they get away with it because they have too many friends in education.
Among them, teachers and principals, who seek out wealthy schools and high-performing middle-class kids because it makes them look good; politicians and policymakers, sensitive to the demands of the noisy, electorally muscular middle classes; and even academics, who have acted as apologists for "non-reforming reforms" which prop up middle class advantage at the expense of the poor.
Even zoning, once determined by the Ministry of Education, now works in favour of the well-off, with many school zones redrawn to allow "middle-class schools and families to seek each other out, and cut out areas of poorer housing".
By keeping out poorer children, our richest schools serve parents "seeking to advantage their child's future prospects compared to others".
But as American educationalist, Kati Haycock, has written, they're also ensuring that children who have less to begin with are given less school, in fact, "less of everything that both research and experience tells us makes a difference."
In England, the ethical dilemmas of school choice are acknowledged. Prominent Labour politicians are guaranteed of public rebuke whenever they put their children into private schools.
But here, in our once proudly egalitarian country, most people regard the choice of a high-decile school as "value-free". Of course, it isn't, but self-interest rules. Even Thrupp admits to sending his children to a middle-class school.
He says poor schools need huge amounts of extra staff and other resources to offset the effects of poverty, but "this would be electorally unacceptable while all schools are needing to find money".
So would the introduction of a capital gains tax to dampen the investment activity that's helping to push up house prices and keep the poorest 30 per cent of households at the mercy of landlords.
But that's another inconvenient truth.
