NZ experiment widening divide say US pundits

By Karen Burge

New Zealand's schooling system is seen as an international test case, but American researchers warn it is creating prominent winners and losers.

During 10 years of education reforms New Zealand has become a magnet for countries looking to bring in a similar system.

Helen Ladd, professor of public policy and economics at Duke University in North Carolina, and her husband, Ted Fiske, a former education editor for the New York Times, spent four and a half months in New Zealand researching Tomorrow's Schools on a Fulbright study scholarship.

They said that while the reforms had been successful in several areas, there were many warnings for those looking at a similar system.

Tomorrow's Schools had further divided rich and poor, creating winner and loser schools and students.

Poorer schools had found it very hard to compete with other schools and enrolments were polarised by race and socio-economic status to a far greater extent than before Tomorrow's Schools.

Students who were "difficult to teach" were increasingly concentrated in certain schools in poor areas.

In some areas schools had decided to hold on to students for a further two years, to the detriment of neighbouring schools and the system as a whole.

The couple visited more than 50 schools to speak to staff and students, collected data and interviewed professional groups, policy-makers, and academics who had studied the system.

They said that while parents liked the idea of choosing a school for their children, the system had led to increased competition between schools for students.

Parents typically tried to enrol their children in schools in wealthier areas and in response those schools had introduced enrolment schemes to cope with the demand.

"The Tomorrow's Schools reforms were constructed in such a way that parental choice does not exist for many families. It is schools that do the choosing, not parents."

The couple plan to write a book on the lessons New Zealand's experience offers for the United States and other OECD countries.

"New Zealand has taken these ideas much further than virtually any other country, so it offers the rest of the world a look at how such ideas might play out elsewhere."

The School Trustees Association president, Janet Kelly, said Tomorrow's Schools had created a lot of international interest.