Comment

Whatever one’s view on the New Zealand education system, one point seems hard to deny. While most of our students do very well, a significant proportion do very poorly, and the proportion is high by international standards.

The make-up of our disengaged is skewed by race, income level and gender. The populations whose potential is most being stifled are also those with the highest birth rates, which suggests a problem, if unaddressed, may worsen with time. Nobody in their right mind believes this is an issue we should ignore.

The controversy arises when we ask who this ‘we’ is, and two predictable contenders have emerged. On the one hand is the point of view endorsed by the current government, and pushed strongly by leading civil servants like Treasury’s Gabriel Makhlouf and The Ministry of Education’s Lesley Longstone. It says, in essence, that part of the problem lies with the education system itself.

Against this, is the view most strongly advocated by teacher unions. It says, we’re actually doing a pretty good job, perhaps even a world class job, with all our students, and the failure belongs to the broader society, in that some students don’t bring to school the necessary skills upon which an education is built.

As a secondary school teacher, I have around about 120 hours contact with any given class over a year. If those classes, on average, have 25 students then contact time per student over the year averages out at a shade under five hours. That’s the time available for one on one interaction, be it feedback on a piece of work, explaining a problem, responding to a joke, or wishing them luck for the weekend’s sports game. In reality, it’ll be less than that.

The same student, in the course of a year, will be awake for a little under 6,000 hours. So, I get less than 0.1% of their waking time to make a difference. Primary school teachers get more, maybe as high as 0.5%, or one in every 200 hours.

Teachers do have an impact, do make a difference, but immediately it should be clear that so too do a whole heap of other people and influences. Formal education represents just one of a number of variables. That this is in fact the case, was proposed recently by Wellington College principal, Roger Moses, who noted that intuitively it seems odd that the same teachers who do remarkably well with 80%, somehow are doing a lousy job with the other twenty percent.

Neuroscientists insist that the first three years of development are the vital ones. Educators have no presence whatsoever during the vital phase where the intellectual foundations are laid.

So, here’s my question. To what extent do inequalities increase during the school years, and to what extent are they already in place at entry level? If we can’t answer that, we don’t get to have an opinion on the role education is playing in the failing of our most vulnerable.

Bernard Beckett