Pressure Towards The Mean: Do We Really Want To Abolish Streaming?

Levelling Down: What will happen when streaming is no more? Will the children of New Zealand emerge from the public education system with the skills and qualifications necessary to foot-it in the modern world? Or, will their education be limited to whatever the least engaged and least talented students allow their teachers to impart? 

ABOLISH STREAMING, that is the demand of the Post-Primary Teachers Association (PPTA). They are not alone in their determination to put an end to the “blatantly racist” practice of grouping secondary-school students according to their intelligence/academic ability. The Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins, considers streaming “inequitable” and the Ministry of Education agrees with him. With forces as powerful as the Minister, the Ministry, and the Union ranged against the practice, its days would appear to be numbered.

Which leaves New Zealanders with the vexed question of what will happen when streaming is no more? Will their children emerge from the public education system with the skills and qualifications necessary to foot-it in the modern world? Or, will their education be limited to whatever the least engaged and least talented students allow their teachers to impart? If that is the outcome, then all the opponents of streaming will have achieved by its elimination is a society managed by traditionally-educated immigrants equipped with all the internationally recognised skills and qualifications that young, publicly-educated New Zealanders no longer possess.

Although driven by demands for equity, the abolition of streaming in the public secondary system will not make New Zealand a more equitable nation. No more than the students themselves, will parents be fooled by the randomised mixing of individuals of radically different abilities. The mums and dads of highly intelligent and powerfully motivated children will do everything within their power to ensure that their offspring are pushed and extended to the fullest extent of their powers. If they cannot get this from the public sector, then they will turn to private providers or themselves. The reformers’ push towards equity will not end in a narrowing of the class and racial divides, it will force them wider apart.

Māori middle-class parents will be as keen to see their offspring extended as middle-class Pākehā parents. Those who cannot afford the $30,000 per year fees of the leading private schools, will do all within their power to move their families into the zones of the most prestigious public schools, where the strong class bias of the “good schools’” catchments will lessen the impact of streaming’s abolition. Māori middle-class parents are well aware that as diversity quotas are achieved, and the need for positive discrimination declines, social advancement will increasingly depend on having the right credentials. Though they can hardly come out and say so, the drive towards racial equity – of which the abolition of streaming is part – is not in their own children’s interests.

There is, after all, a very powerful justification for streaming. Highly-complex, technologically-sophisticated civilisations, based on science, simply cannot do without the rigid hierarchies of competence that keep them functioning. The streaming process is, therefore, absolutely critical to the social and intellectual winnowing required to concentrate and develop talent. Streaming isn’t just about grouping the smartest students together, it’s about acculturating the smartest students to being smart. Streaming encourages students to value and accept their larger capabilities. In a non-streamed environment, the pressure is inevitably towards the mean – in every sense of the word.

The supposed downside of this meritocratic imperative is its negative impact upon those of lesser competence. New Zealanders, in particular, jibe at the very notion of hierarchies. They tell themselves that they are egalitarians, and fool themselves into thinking that egalitarianism means every person is the same as every other person – even when they know this isn’t true. (Just ask them if they would select an All Black team on that basis!)

New Zealanders have forgotten that their public education system was not conceived as an environment in which every student gets an “A”, but as a place where every kid capable of getting an “A” receives the professional instruction and educational resources he or she needs to be awarded an “A”. It should not matter whether you’re Māori or Pākehā, rich or poor, male or female, gay or straight: if you’ve got the talent, then you should be equipped to go as far as it can take you. And if getting “As” in academic disciplines isn’t your thing, then the education system’s job is to find out what is your thing – and develop it to the fullest extent.

That is what Charles Beeby and Peter Fraser meant when, together, they defined the education policy of the First Labour Government:

“The government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his powers.”

Apart from the relentless use of the masculine pronoun, the phrase that most sticks in the craw of twenty-first century educators is: “for which he is best fitted”. The PPTA’s argument is that the cultural logic of colonisation leads racist Pakeha teachers to the view that Māori and Pasifika are “best fitted” to be hewers of wood and drawers of water: a stereotype into which, for the rest of their time in secondary school, the system will do its best to squeeze them. Get rid of streaming, argues the Union, and this evil colonial project is made much more difficult.

Except, of course, transforming secondary school classes into random collections of students of every colour from every background is, itself, a pipe dream. Different races and different classes live in different places. Getting rid of streaming at Auckland Grammar will look quite different from getting rid of streaming at Northland College. And even if the Ministry of Education could magically produce perfectly random collections of students (much as the US Supreme Court tried to do by “bussing” kids from one side of town to the other) the Bell Curve would still not be denied – only those kids at either end of it.

It is a matter for considerable regret that the PPTA, in its determination to overcome the effects of colonisation, shows every sign of establishing a new regime where the “soft bigotry of low expectations” will only end up making the racist outcomes worse.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 October 2022.

Virginia Crawford's Duty To Offend.

Tough Love: It is impossible to listen to the Fraser High School Principal, Virginia Crawford’s, speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them.

THE PRINCIPAL OF Hamilton’s Fraser High School, Virginia Crawford, has been roundly criticised for warning her students about the strong correlation between truancy and failure in the world beyond high school. The push-back against Crawford’s address culminated in a walkout by around 100 of Fraser’s senior students on Monday 24 September 2018. But, what if she was telling the truth?

Very few people have been willing to test Crawford’s claims empirically. To ascertain whether the behaviours she warned her students against: truancy, substance abuse, petty crime; are, indeed, common factors in the much more serious social indices of functional illiteracy, long-term unemployment, prolonged periods on social welfare, repeated incarceration, mental health problems, sexual assault, domestic violence and, most disturbingly in relation to young New Zealanders – suicide.

This is strange, since a great deal of work has already been undertaken in this area by those convinced of the efficacy of the National Party’s “social investment” initiative. The whole point of the social investment project was to identify the “warning signs” of individual and/or family dysfunction so that the authorities could intervene and, hopefully, forestall, that individual’s and/or family’s decline into irremediable social pathologies. Those warning signs were precisely the behaviours alluded to in Crawford’s address.

“Every student who walks out of the gate to truant is already a statistic of the worst kind, highly likely to go to prison, highly likely to commit domestic violence or be a victim of domestic violence, be illiterate, be a rape victim, be a suicide victim, be unemployed for the majority of their life, have a major health problem or problems, die at an early age, have an addiction - drugs, gambling, alcohol or smoking.

“The more you truant, the more likely you are to end up as one or most of those statistics. I don’t want you to be one of those statistics. Economic research confirms everything I am telling you. It’s been proven. Some young people at Fraser today are still proving that message to be true.”

One of the Principal’s sternest critics is Herald columnist, Deborah Hill Cone, whose argument is best summed-up in the old aphorism: ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him.’ “Being told by an authority figure you are certain to become a grim statistic is more of a danger to young people than skipping class”, Hill Cone warned Crawford. “In some very pervasive, unconscious and dogged ways we become what we are expected to be.”

There is something quite touching about Hill Cone’s faith in the individual’s ability to rise above the awful impetus of social causation and statistical correlation. “And try to remember this,” she advises the students of Fraser High in her Monday column, “your principal, Virginia Crawford, has absolutely no idea what your life is going to be like. None of us do. And she has no right to tell your story.”

Many would argue, however, that Crawford not only has the right, she has the duty, to speak plainly and forthrightly about the awful statistics to which so many of the students attending Fraser High School are likely to contribute in the months and years ahead of them. Telling them, as Hill Cone would have her do, that: “It’s your soul, and your story to construct” is all very bracing and Kiplingesque, but it is highly debateable as to whether it will do as much good as telling them that buckling down and working hard at school is just about the only way out of the dead-end working-class suburbs which for so many of them constitute the boundaries of the known world.

A number of the parents of Fraser High School students have taken offence at Crawford’s comments and are threatening to withdraw their offspring from the school until such time as its errant principal is replaced. Like so many of us, they do not like to think too much about the uncanny ability of insurance underwriters to correlate specific behaviours with specific outcomes in the setting of their clients’ premiums. Rather than condemn Crawford for her predictions, might it not be more helpful for their children’s futures to ask themselves whether the behaviour they have been modelling in their own lives bears out or refutes the Principal’s fears?

Nothing did more to shatter the rigid boundaries separating New Zealand’s social classes than the First Labour Government’s ringing affirmation that every New Zealander “whatever his [or her] level of academic ability, whether he [or she] be rich or poor, whether he [or she] live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he [or she] is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his [or her] powers.”

It is impossible to listen to Crawford’s speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them. She knows that there is a vast, beautiful, exciting and intensely rewarding world beyond the borders of “Nawton or Dinsdale or Western Heights” – just as she knows that the students of Fraser High School who play truant on a regular and prolonged basis are, statistically-speaking, the ones least likely to ever get to see it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 September 2018.

Picking Apples

One Bad Apple: Between them, the Education Minister, Hekia Parata, and the Finance Minister, Bill English, hope to develop a government-wide data-capture system which will allow schools to identify the "at-risk" apples in their catchment area and prevent them from turning bad. At-risk identifiers include: families in which at least one parent has been to prison; the child, or a sibling, have suffered abuse; the family has been supported by social welfare benefits for a prolonged period; and the mother has no formal educational qualifications.

ROOT-AND-BRANCH RADICALISM is not something we tend to associate with the National Party. But, Education Minister, Hekia Parata, is ready to change all that. Her review of education funding promises to lead New Zealand towards a radically new way of allocating resources for our children’s education. Some of the ideas under consideration will leave the world gasping.

 

That the Minister has her heart set upon something truly radical is confirmed by her treatment of professional educationalists.

 

When it became clear that the Minister was ‘thinking big’ in relation to education funding reform, NELP, the National Educational Leadership Partnership (an umbrella group encompassing school trustees, the teacher unions, principals’ representatives, parent-teacher associations and special-needs students’ advocates) eagerly offered to help.

 

Ms Parata was having none of it. Before you could say “provider capture” she’d informed NELP that the “consultation phase” would come later. That would be the proper time for people like themselves to get involved.

 

Now, some might argue that any government intent on making its policy innovations stick wouldn’t dream of embarking on a programme of radical reform without the sector’s enthusiastic support and participation.

 

And, let’s be clear, NELP did offer. In a statement of principles to the Ministry of Education its members declared:

 

“NELP is proposing that it work with the Ministry to co-construct the principles and terms of reference of the resourcing review, and be part of the review process, including the analysis of the research and data, and in the subsequent development, testing and implementation of promising model(s).”

 

The radical solutions being contemplated by Ms Parata, however, are not the sort that lend themselves to indulging such airy-fairy participatory notions as “co-construction”.

 

Like her colleague, Finance Minister, Bill English, Ms Parata has been seized by the notion of using “government-wide data” manipulation to identify all those very young citizens unfortunate enough to have been born into inadequate and/or under-performing families. Statistically-speaking, these are the apples most likely to turn bad and spoil the whole bunch.

 

Who are these “at risk” citizens? According to advice supplied to Ms Parata by the Ministry of Education, they are the pre-school offspring of families in which at least one parent has been to prison; either themselves, or a sibling, have suffered child abuse; their mum and/or dad have been supported by social welfare benefits for a prolonged period; and if their mother has no formal educational qualifications.

 

The Ministry argues that if resources could be directed specifically to those schools preparing to enrol these potentially ‘bad apples’ – thereby dramatically improving their chances of remaining fresh and wholesome – then the outcomes, both educationally and socially, would be far superior to those achieved by the present, statistical scatter-gun approach of decile funding.

 

In those suburbs of our major cities where “concentrations” of these bad-apples-in-waiting are detected, the local school (using a yet-to-be-devised formula) would find itself in the running for an extra-specially thick wad of additional cash.

 

Radical stuff! But why stop there? If it is possible to identify early these bad-apples-in-waiting, and if the key factors in their breaking bad are all related to domestic dysfunction and family failure, then why not remove the children from that environment altogether? Why not set up special schools for the children of inadequate families and break the cycles of failure and dysfunction once and for all?

 

And if acting on government-wide data works for the bad apples, why not develop a statistical profile for families likely to produce exceptional children?

 

These would be the families in which no one had ever been sent to prison; there was no history of child abuse; no record of a relationship with the Ministry of Social Development; and in which both Mum and Dad had gone to university. The statistical likelihood of above average success would be further boosted if the family income was sufficient to endow the children with truly massive lump-sums of cultural capital.

 

In suburbs where there were concentrations of these potentially ‘super apples’, the state could facilitate the setting-up of special schools where their particular talents could be identified early and fully extended in an environment free from family distractions.

 

Ms Parata could call the schools for fixing bad apples “Borstals”, and those for producing upper-middle-class super-apples, “Private Schools”. National would be lionised for instigating an educational revolution. What could possibly go wrong?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 March 2016.

It Was A Fair Cop, Hekia, And Treasury's To Blame

Suck It Up, Minister: Education Minister, Hekia Parata, was forced to reverse her government's own policy on class sizes in the face of massive public opposition. Had she possessed sufficient critical intelligence to challenge the policy's prime promoter, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, she could have saved herself - and her government - a very large serving of very dead rat.

IN THE END, it all comes back to Treasury. Education Minister, Hekia Parata, like so many politicians before her, has taken the advice of Treasury’s ideologues, and paid the price. This willingness of right- and left-wing politicians to drag their careers over a cliff, by following the lead of an agency which has consistently failed to tender either reliable or useful advice to government, bears testimony to ideology’s uncanny knack for over-riding the urgings of electoral common sense.

The debacle over class sizes may be traced back to Treasury’s advice to the incoming Minister of Education following the 2011 General Election. Faced with an intensifying fiscal crisis, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, saw an opportunity to attend to Treasury’s unfinished business with this country’s disconcertingly independent educationalists.

The proudly professional culture of New Zealand’s highly regarded education system (we rank sixth out of thirty-four OECD countries) continues to stand athwart Treasury’s relentless ideological advance.

It thus constitutes a standing rebuke to Treasury’s otherwise unassailable neoliberal mandarinate. Its collegial values and altruistic purposes sit most uncomfortably within the neoliberals’ highly individualistic and competitive reading of human nature. While achieving a large measure of success in the universities (attributable mostly to New Zealand academics’ timidity and lack of solidarity) Treasury’s neoliberal policies have been staunchly and successfully resisted in New Zealand’s primary and secondary schools. This is due, almost entirely, to the strength of New Zealand’s two main teacher unions – the NZEI and the PPTA.

Before New Zealand’s teaching profession can finally be “neoliberalised”, it will first be necessary to break these teacher unions. There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most brutal, is to do what Scott Walker, Governor of the US state of Wisconsin, did: pass legislation stripping state employees of their right to collective bargaining. The second, and much more effective, way to break a union is to undermine its members’ solidarity: to divide and conquer.

The classic method of decollectivising a workforce is the introduction of performance pay. Once workers’ remuneration ceases to be reckoned by the job to be done, and is set, instead, by the boss’s perception of how well each individual worker is doing the job, the ability of the workforce to maintain collective cohesion and purpose rapidly falls away.

New Zealand has, of course, already attempted a legislative “final solution” to the union problem. But, although the Employment Contracts Act (1991) proved highly successful at breaking the power of private sector unions; public employees – especially teachers – by sticking together and fighting back, have resisted every attempt to set one colleague against another, undermine the union, and hand the education sector over to Treasury (and its political handmaidens) for neoliberal “re-education”.

It is, therefore, very difficult not to read the Treasury Secretary’s advocacy for trading-off a few extra pupils in every class-room for a lift in the quality of the country’s teachers, as a way of admitting performance pay (and undermining the teacher unions) by the back door.

Prime Mover: The author of the "class-size-increase-for-improved-teacher-quality" trade-off, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf.

Citing the highly contestable figure of “one in three” school-leavers entering the New Zealand workforce as an educational failure, Mr Makhlouf argued strongly, and very publicly, that this scandalous “output” of the system could only be rectified by encouraging better teaching. By this he did not mean that we should embrace the Finnish policy of keeping a very high teacher-student ratio while, at the same time, ensuring that teaching remains one of that country’s best qualified and well-paid professions. No, what Mr Makhlouf wanted was an opportunity to pit teachers against one another in a quest to find “the best” teachers, and then, presumably, offer them individual employment contracts and higher pay. This competitive model would also have identified “the worst” teachers, allowing them to be purged from the system. School staff-rooms would thus become battle-grounds where “winners” prospered and “losers” lost their jobs. Collegial values, ill-adapted to Treasury’s new “survival of the fittest” environment, would be driven to extinction – followed closely by the teacher unions.

The triumph of the competitive market model within the teaching profession would, inevitably, see its operating principles installed in every class-room. The transmission of skills and knowledge, the system’s outputs, would be subjected to detailed empirical measurement. Every pupil would be “tested”, and every school’s resourcing determined by the results of those tests. New Zealand’s internationally admired education system would very quickly join the derelict systems of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Was Ms Parata really seeking this disintegration of New Zealand’s education system? Of course not! Why, then, couldn’t she decode Mr Makhlouf’s policy prescription? The answer is simple: to decipher neoliberal ideology one needs to adopt a critical perspective; and that presupposes ideological agnosticism.

Had Ms Parata felt equal to challenging Treasury’s ideologically-driven recommendations, she’d never have been required to undertake her embarrassing political “reversal”.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 June 2012.