A welcome end to segregation in schools

Welcome aboard. I’m Joel Maxwell and I’m going to be your pilot today. It should be a smooth flight: weather conditions are promising, with plenty of blue skies and a strong tailwind, and – ahhhh – just looking at the forecast, I see we have a 100 per cent chance of brown people . . .

The final destination for New Zealand’s educational white flight is looking hilariously, refreshingly, ethnic in recommendations from the Government’s school system review. I was delighted by some of the specific details tucked away in the 148-page document from the Tomorrow’s Schools review. Mostly, to be honest, the recommendations that would forcibly reshape enrolment zones cooked up by schools to keep their classrooms free of poor kids.

I relish the thought of a particular type of

Pa¯ keha¯ parent, who bought an expensive home in the right area just so their little Tarquin or Annabelle could attend the white – I mean right – school, being forced to watch a glorious cavalcade of new brown faces enter the front gates. Ha.

It was about time we reviewed a system based on the quaint notion of pitting schools against each other in educational cockfights – Mad Max with 1B5s and protractors. It was set up about 30 years ago and forced schools to compete for students. The intergenerational bonuses, the compounding interest reaped by the privileged, weren’t just built into this system of ‘‘competition’’. The entire thing was a hustle. There was no competition, just more gold stars and smiley stamps for existing winners.

If you don’t believe me, here are some of the review findings: ‘‘Affluent families exercising choice resulting from competition are likely to have pushed up housing costs, in desired school zones, edging out other families who depend on affordable housing.’’ And: ‘‘Competition has made our schools more segregated.’’ And this: ‘‘Analysis of enrolment schemes has shown that some schools have deliberately formed enrolment schemes that avoided low-income areas in their locality.’’

The report points out that school rolls ‘‘drive school staffing, funding, and principal salaries’’. No wonder schools pandered to the delusional, segregationist urges of some of our parents to get their kids into the right classrooms.

As usual, Ma¯ ori were left behind by the wonders of competition. About a quarter of students nationwide go to schools drawing from the poorest communities (decile 1 to 3), but about half of Ma¯ ori kids do. It’s a jarring disparity in supposed choice.

So, assuming you want to, how do you get out? Well, you need to make it into the advantaged schools’ out-of-zone ‘‘skim’’ (that’s the report’s word) of poor kids with academic, musical or sporting talent.

The good news is that change could be on the way. All enrolment zones would be reviewed ‘‘and adjusted as necessary’’ so they are fair and reasonable, under the recommendations. If neighbouring schools can’t decide their turf amicably, then the decision would be made by new regional educational hubs set up to take over some board of trustee duties. Out-of-zone enrolments would be capped by the hubs, and the number of these students at a particular school could be forced down over time.

There has been criticism of hubs as another layer of bureaucracy, but some decisions need to be taken out of schools’ hands. In this case it would see students, and the associated funding they carry, spread more evenly across schools.

Frankly, if you get upset by poor kids or brown kids going to your school, then this Government has done at least one thing right.

Iknow, some people are saying they should get the chance to offer their kids the best opportunity for a good education. But your kid’s success isn’t decided by a fancy administration block, and high-decile community. Some of the best learning, for some students, takes place in supposedly poor schools.

Meanwhile, other people are thinking they don’t want the character of their school changed with a flood of the wrong kind of people. Frankly, if you get upset by poor kids or brown kids going to your school, then this Government has done at least one thing right. Believe me, the change will do you and your school good.

The truth is that, much like life in general, things get nasty when you pit schools against each other. One of the sadder things I came across as a general reporter covering the occasional education story was the strange case of coverage-envy. A story on one school would trigger a gloriously passiveaggressive complaint about uneven coverage from another trying to extract its own publicity. Now I understand why.

Segregation is generally acknowledged as a destructive, unjust, thing – but somehow we always seem to find our way back here. Poor divided from middle class, brown from white, and even, it appears, colleague from colleague.