How to fix one of the world's least equal education systems

Friday, 1 July 2022

New Zealand has one of the world's least equal education systems, but Māori children are more likely to achieve when they're in Māori medium education.

ANALYSIS: The Government is taking steps to address inequities in education, but until Aotearoa does away with its racist legacy structures, Māori learners in the mainstream will continue to be left behind.

New Zealand is used to being on the “world’s best” lists. But when it comes to equality, we continue to score poorly. This is especially true in education.

In 2018, New Zealand was outed as having one of the least equitable education systems in the world.

The last time the OECD’s Pisa scorecard and Unicef’s Innocenti report were released, Aotearoa ranked 33 out of 38 countries.

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The gap between New Zealand’s top educational achievers and those at the bottom remains stark.

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Subsequent local research found racism and a colonial education system to be at the heart of the massive gap between those students who do well, and those who fall off the education cliff.

It found Māori students falling significantly behind on every measure of educational outcome, including secondary school retention rate, school leavers achieving NCEA Level 2, and rate of youth in education, employment or training.

In 2021, only 58% of Maori students achieved NCEA level 1, which was 16 percentage points below European students.

Eruera Tarena says new initiatives and spending are a good start, but fixing this problem means acknowledging systemic racism in education, then dismantling it.

Again, this gap was highlighted in recently released Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) data, which found those most likely to have their right to education violated were Māori.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s Education Matters to Me report found many young people experienced racism at school, saying they were treated unequally because of their culture.

While there has been a lot of focus on the impacts of coming from a low socio-economic background, research carried out in New Zealand (as well as in the United States looking at African American students) has found poverty cannot entirely account for the gap between Māori and Pākehā.

The Government has recognised the need to address these issues, and is pumping money into Māori education, but from a low base. In this year’s Budget about $200 million went towards a raft of initiatives for Māori education.

Returning to kura kaupapa can empower young Māori into higher-skilled and higher-paid careers.

Meanwhile, the introduction of the Equity Index to replace the decile system is being billed as a way to improve equitable opportunities through a more nuanced allocation of resources to schools, teachers and learners.

But there is still more work to be done.

Eruera Tarena (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui), kawhakatere (executive director) of Tokona te Raki: Māori Future Makers, says Aotearoa cannot advance equity without acknowledging and addressing the root cause of inequity: systemic racism.

Everyone is good at describing the problem, and can list negative Māori statistics, but there is a degree of “problem blindness” to what has created these outcomes, he says.

“Part of the problem is that we focus on individuals, which often leads us to blaming a person for being poor or ‘not working hard enough’, rather than raising our gaze to look upstream to see the barriers holding them back.”

Historically, racism and assimilation were official government policy, built on the idea that Māori were lesser. These ideas are like code used to programme a computer system and influence the way people see things. And they have continued to inform policies and practices across education, health and justice, he says.

“Even if their original intent has been forgotten, racism has been embedded into many policies and practices to the extent that they are often invisible to many.”

Squeezing Māori into a “one size fits one” system doesn’t work, Tarena says.

Kelvin Davis, the minister responsible for Māori education, says Māori just want to achieve as well as anyone else.

While Māori learners are less likely to achieve high levels of educational success in the mainstream system, data shows children in Māori medium or kaupapa Māori education are more likely to succeed.

Those who attend Māori immersion schools do better at reading, and achieve better in NCEA and at university or in employment.

Tarena says kura kaupapa Māori deliver better outcomes because they are designed to do so.

Māori medium education does not suffer from the same racial bias, as it has been designed to privilege Māori ways of thinking, knowing, doing and being, which emphasise cultural values, aspirations and strengths.

Currently, about 10% of Māori children – 20,000 – are in kura kaupapa. Meanwhile, Ministry of Education data shows 2403 teachers were paid a Māori immersion teaching allowance in 2021.

Te Hurihanganui is a programme designed to tackle unconscious bias and racism in schools.

The Government has set itself an ambitious target to treble the number of students in Māori medium education by 2040. But in order to hit that 60,000 figure the country will need about 250 more kura, 3500 more fluent Māori-speaking teachers, more learning support, general resourcing, and physical school infrastructure.

Meanwhile, there is a claim before the Waitangi Tribunal, calling for an autonomous Māori Education Authority – similar to that launched as a response to inequities in the health system.

Associate Education Minister Kelvin Davis (Ngāpuhi) says people tend to confuse and complicate Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Put simply, it’s article one, kāwanatanga, and article two, rangatiratanga, working together to achieve article three: equity.

“That’s what Māori want. We just want to be able to achieve as well as any other people in Aotearoa New Zealand. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation.”

He wouldn’t comment on the claim before the tribunal, other than to say any separate authority needs to benefit all Māori.

He says the starting point is to provide equitable resourcing.

“When we get that stuff right, then we’ll see the lift in educational achievement.”

The Government has spent more than $700 million on Māori education since coming into power, but Davis acknowledges it is still playing catch-up.

It is working to normalise the use of te reo in mainstream education through the Te Ahu o te Reo Māori programme, aimed at lifting te reo competency across the board.

Meanwhile, Te Hurihanganui has been developed as a way to tackle racism and unconscious bias in mainstream classrooms. The programme is aimed at delivering high-quality teaching that reflects culture and identity, and strong engagement from whānau and the wider community.