Tapu Misa: Passionate visionaries in education reach for the sky

COMMENT

It's always the way: the minute you make a fuss of one school principal making a difference against the odds, you're suddenly confronted with many more examples of passionate visionaries chipping away at the coalface of our education system.

Indeed, after last week's article on Opotiki Primary's Tony Howe, it seemed to be my lot to get up close and personal with decile 1 schools and their dedicated leaders.

Well, two to be precise: Southern Cross Campus in Mangere (formerly Nga Tapuwae); and Tamaki College in Glen Innes (the school which was accused of cultural high-handedness when it decided against allowing its students to compete in this year's Polyfest). I had been invited to their prizegivings, to celebrate the kids' achievements and hand out prizes.

I'm not sure what prizegivings in the more salubrious suburbs are like (I couldn't even remember ever being to one in my old school, probably because it didn't hand out prizes for erratic attendance).

But at Southern Cross and Tamaki they were colourful, emotional, ceremonious events complete with graduation gowns for the teachers (they add gravitas to the event, I'm told).

At Southern Cross, the impromptu Niuean haka for the Tongan head boy was electrifying. The dignified head girl brought everyone to tears when she broke down while trying to thank her parents for their support (her Dad finally stood up and told her to "be strong, girl").

And everyone who won a prize received thunderous applause, including the Cook Island-Ngapuhi dux, who also won a prestigious Auckland University Chancellor's Award that pays for his entire undergraduate study.

At Tamaki, there were graduation gowns again, and a mix of haka, Beethoven and Mozart between speeches, which slipped seamlessly from English to Tongan or Samoan. And once again the prizewinners were applauded as if they were hip-hop stars.

It was uplifting. It was also quite clearly brown territory. As in the fictional school in TV3's just-finished bro'Town series, both schools are lacking in white faces. The roll at Southern Cross, for example, is 99 per cent Maori and Pacific, and is much the same for Tamaki College, despite being in East Auckland.

It's a sad commentary of our times, says Tamaki College principal David Hodge. He has tried in vain to attract Pakeha and Asian students to his school but is up against the fear factor (of browns) and a perception of a lack of quality.

He can't convince them that the school boasts first-class facilities and superb teachers, who choose to teach at Tamaki because they know they can make a difference there. "We have extremely high standards, perhaps because we are conscious of the assumption."

Like a lot of low-decile schools, both Southern Cross and Tamaki have been near-casualties of Tomorrow's Schools and economic policies that have had a harsh impact on their communities. Both schools have managed to haul themselves back from near closure in the mid-1990s, reversing falling rolls and raising their academic achievements.

But what they haven't managed to do is win back Pakeha and Asian students, who are well and truly ensconced in the city's richer schools.

The majority of Maori and Pacific students are now getting their education in low-decile schools. That worries educators, concerned not only about the social implications of an increasingly multicultural city being so segregated in its schooling, but also about equity.

As Dr John Hood, the former Auckland University vice-chancellor who has left to take up the reins at Oxford, told North & South magazine: "There is a huge gradient between the number of students who come to university from the high-decile secondary schools relative to the lower-decile schools, yet it's not intuitively obvious that the capability set of the population follows any gradient at all; you'd expect it to be reasonably evenly distributed throughout the community.

"When you look at statistics and see the proportion of Asian New Zealanders and European New Zealanders participating in university education is overwhelmingly high relative to those of Pacific and Maori ethnicities, and when you think the fertility of Maori and Pacific New Zealand is much higher than those of Asian and European New Zealand, you then understand that the majority of Pacific and Maori New Zealand is in lower-decile schools who are less likely to come to university, and you think about this in terms of the future workforce in New Zealand and the sorts of industries and businesses in the future that are going to add wealth in our economy and help it grow, you have to be deeply concerned with how to help this problem and help it with a degree of urgency that we have not yet seen in New Zealand."

The fact that a significant and growing proportion of the population isn't making it to university and therefore into the country's professional classes is one that preys on the minds of low-decile principals.

Mr Hodge says one of the problems is attitudinal. He calls it the "Poly ceiling" - the limits the student and his or her family often place on what they can dream of achieving. Many don't give themselves permission to succeed because of excessive humility and perceived pressure.

But the school has worked hard to counter those attitudes, and to foster confidence and ambition to go on to tertiary study. Already there has been a marked improvement: six years ago, when he started, there were only 21 students in the seventh form, and not one went on to university; this year there were 47 seventh-formers, and more than 80 per cent of them are headed for tertiary study.

He says the improvement can be tracked to the more welcoming attitudes of Auckland University, which this year opened a $6 million fale for Pacific students, and AUT, which provided nine scholarships to his students. Both have also invested in mentoring schemes to help to demystify tertiary study.

Mr Hodge says it all comes down to a sense of belonging. As more Tamaki students take up tertiary studies, they provide the role models and support for those who follow on.

Like the Southern Cross class of 2004, they will go where they feel they belong.