Maori underachievement in hand
We expect a lot from our teachers. First they must be inspiring educators instilling in our children, who may be as dumb as we are, an insatiable love of learning and unquenchable desire for acquiring new skills.
Then they must be role models, nurses, surrogate parents, social workers and counsellors, not to mention providers of a caring, loving, nurturing environment where our precious children, no matter how anti-social and obnoxious, can thrive.
They must always see the best side of our children and be careful not to harm their fragile egos because that could cause life-long damage.
It goes without saying they must follow the latest education trend espoused by the government of the day and also maintain their professional skills. They must have an ear on the latest in political correctness because they are inculcators of the current orthodoxy.
And they must have thick skins and humble personalities because when things go wrong, it’s always the teacher’s fault. It couldn’t possibly be anything at home or simply an inherent lack of ability or a bad attitude. They must be first class in just about everything, be totally devoted to their profession and unfailingly dedicated to our children. Never mind that most of us non-teachers are pretty average workers and parents and human beings. We hold teachers to a higher standard although we pay them less than police officers.
How delighted teachers must have been to hear the Secretary of Education, Iona Holsted, on RNZ this week add yet another requirement to the list of essential attributes for her teachers.
Holsted, who the previous day had told a select committee about chronic and intractable Ma¯ ori underachievement in education, told Guyon Espiner that one reason was parts of the teaching workforce did not ‘‘respond well to the identity, culture and language of those students’’.
Not that she was blaming the teachers, of course not, although the bad response raised ‘‘areas of concern’’ about the sorts of people ‘‘we train as teachers’’.
The attitude she was talking about was an ‘‘unconscious bias’’, which she described as an ‘‘attitude we have that we have learned over time that affects our attitudes, our manners, our decisions that then influence how people feel’’.
Teachers wouldn’t know about their ‘‘insidious’’ unconscious bias so could not be held responsible for it. Instead everyone would first have a conversation, then the unconscious biases would be ‘‘unpacked’’ and professional development would follow.
Brilliant. How heartening the Ministry is getting to the bottom of Ma¯ ori underachievement.
But perhaps this dunce could suggest a few things wrong with Holsted’s priorities.
No-one would argue the effort to lift Ma¯ ori achievement in the education system must continue with resolve and innovative ideas.
But I would have thought any analysis of the causes of poor achievement, among Ma¯ ori students and any others for that matter, would start with the home and community. Then I would look at student abilities and attitudes and at the practices and processes designed to identify problems and to provide remedial action.
In my experience schools bend over backwards to foster Ma¯ ori language and culture and are constantly reviewing their classroom practices to ensure their Ma¯ ori students are well catered for. If they don’t they can expect a bad report from the Education Review Office and nobody wants one of those.
No doubt some teachers, like society as a whole, have some unconscious attitudes that corrode the self esteem of some students so their learning suffers.
However most kids are pretty resilient and can cope with some negative attitudes. They are probably far more susceptible to the unconscious biases of their peer group and their families.
Most of our school rolls have a wide range of nationalities and ethnic groups and funnily enough most do OK despite teachers understandably not responding particularly well to every identity, language and culture.
So if I had any spare education dollars I would not be devoting them to probing the unconscious biases of my teachers. I wouldn’t care what their biases were as long as their students were succeeding.
Those spare dollars would be going towards identifying learning problems as early as possible and fixing them.
That we have our most senior education official apparently fixating on a tiny possible factor in lack of achievement should surely concern a Government that has disposed of national standards and is getting rid of the very (charter) schools that appear to have made a difference to Ma¯ ori achievement.
Most kids are pretty resilient and can cope with some negative attitudes.