John Maslin of the Wanganui Chronicle writes on the disparities between Maori and non-Maori achievements in school 

By JOHN MASLIN This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

HALF a century of rhetoric has not translated into educational success for Maori nor has throwing money at it either, according to two leading Maori politicians.

They were responding to research from Waikato University which says more than half of Maori boys leave school without even level one of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

Despite a multi-million dollar investment to lift Maori education performance, the number leaving without qualifications appeared to be getting worse, according to Waikato University Professor Russell Bishop.

He said in 2005, 53 percent of Maori boys left school with no qualifications compared to 20 percent of Pakeha boys.
Tariana Turia, co-leader of the Maori Party, said she knew all Maori children weren’t going to make it “but we can’t sit back and watch half of our kids fail. It’s not fair and it’s not going to do much for the country either.

“We’ve got a very young population and if we don’t get our kids educated and earning then there’s going to be no money to maintain superannuation payments in future if there’s a large chunk of the population who are young and who are brown and who are not engaged,” the Te Tai Hauauru MP told the Chronicle yesterday.

Mrs Turia said the latest survey was “dispiriting to say the least”, saying it emphasised the continuing under-performance of the country’s education system. “For 50 years now Maori have been asking the state to respond to this systemic failure and it hasn’t happened,” she said.

She said growth and success of kohanga reo and kura kaupapa was showing that the children attending those schools were doing better than is being shown up in the state system but she said the question that needed to be answered was what was the reason for Maori children failing in the mainstream education system.

“The majority of our kids are in mainstream schools because their parents have a mistrust of kura kaupapa and koahanga because they think that if their kids go there they won’t be able to compete with other kids.

“More of the kids who attended kura kaupapa are passing NCEA at a higher rate than those in mainstream schools and the drop-out rate is incredibly low.” Mrs Turia said there remained the problem of institutional racism to overcome.

“I know there are schools that work hard attempting to address those issues but there are others that don’t care. There needs to be an understanding in those schools about Maori kids and the essence of who they are.”

She said Maori children were always going to have difficulty walking two paths – the one stemming from their home environment and the other they encountered at mainstream schools.

She said it was as if Maori children fell between a Maori world and a Pakeha world which made it extremely difficult for them.

“I know we have got a lot of work to do with ourselves and with our families. We’ve got to stand up and be counted too. But the system has to change.

“We want to empower our children to learn and sometimes that only takes one teacher who believes in them.”
Mrs Turia said the Maori Party was committed to taking that message to the Maori people this year to find out what people think is happening with them and why Maori children are not doing so well.

“We’re not blaming schools entirely because some of these problems do lie in the home.”
Tau Henare, National’s education spokesperson, said throwing money at a problem was not the answer.
“Over the last seven years we’ve had save the whales, civil unions and all sorts of things but at the end of the day you’ve got 2700 students who are leaving school early and who are a time bomb for the future,” Mr Henare said.

He said an answer was to offer decent incentives for people, especially Maori males, to become teachers to get to heart of the problem and “make education much more exciting for these kids”.

“It seems as if this government doesn’t see education as being a high priority.
“If it did then we would have seen a dozens of programmes or initiatives to kill the problem off.”
Mr Henare said the problem had got so bad that it now needed some “hands-on, in-your-face programmes to stop the rot right now”.

The Post Primary Teachers’ Association said the figures were disappointing especially with the huge funding that had been invested in an attempt to lift Maori educational achievement.

Union President Robin Duff said the problem needed a greater investment. “We simply have to work harder and better in this area.”     

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