Another train ride home, rolling hills green under a stone-grey sky, studded with sheep and cows and rows of pine trees to eventually be harvested. A fantastic day thinking with my boss at my day job. We tackled some really interesting theoretical issues and it was delightfully fun.
A central story that stays in my mind, though, is from my Auckland day. On that day, I was sitting with a focus group of teachers—about seven—and we were talking about the ways that the New Zealand educational system was organised and how that compared with the US (the teachers were curious). We talked about a variety of differences, beginning with the levels of control that sit over schools in the US (federal, state, district) which NZ doesn’t have at all. “So how are the schools funded?” one teacher asked. I explained that schools were funded by property tax and that the most expensive neighbourhoods tended to be able to fund more than the less expensive neighbourhoods. “You’ve said that wrong,” one teacher told me. I told her I thought I’d said it right. “The way you said it, it sounds like schools with poor kids get less funding than schools with rich kids,” she explained, outlining my mistake. No, I told her, that was right.
The seven teachers in a circle around me exploded in shock and horror. “That’s not fair!” a teacher who teaches in a decile 10 (the highest SES level) school told me. “In my school, the parents have the time and the contacts and the skill to do lots of fundraising to make up the differences in funding between our school and other schools with more state funding.” (Remember that in NZ, the schools are broken into deciles and they are funded in opposite proportion to the wealth of the kids—so that the poorest kids have the most resources.) “My school is decile 3,” another teacher said, “and our parents are working so hard just to make ends meet that there’s no way we could do extra fundraising.” A third teacher, who had asked the question in the first place, was still overcome by her horror. “If you give the poorest kids the fewest resources,” she said, “they’ll never have a chance. They’ll always be poor and their children will be poor.” Her eyes filled with tears. “What kind of society does that to its children?”
Of course I know this system isn’t fair. I know she’s right and I’ve known that for a long time. I think of the urban and suburban teachers in my IET programs, and the horror of the teachers from wealthy suburbs who complain that they don’t have a computer for each child and then discover that in some schools there aren’t computers for any children—or libraries or music teachers or paper or books. This is a painfully stupid system. And yet when was the last time you heard any politician offer a different perspective of suggest that we should change the funding systems (other than in extremely liberal enclaves like Cambridge MA)? There are some issues that become so bedrock that we never even really think about them. And sometimes those issues are shockingly unfair, and it takes an outsider to remind us.
Here in New Zealand, the schools are funded in opposite relation to the wealth of the students. And still, the highest decile schools are the ones that are most popular ones, and the property values in those neighbourhoods go up because the schools are there. So the rich kids here get the same benefit as the rich kids in the US. But here, the poor kids have schools with computers. They have schools with nice facilities and lower student-teacher ratios. They have schools where there are cutting-edge ideas about how to reach poor kids. There are poor kids here and rich kids here, just like in the US (although they’re neither as poor nor as rich as those in the States). But here the poor kids have a fighting chance to stop being poor. And the rich kids see that living in humane ways is a way of life. That’s one kiwi product we might consider importing to the US along with the lamb and apples…
1 comment:
Interesting this. Behind the different funding policies, is there a similar privileging of class? - a privileging that goes back to the “kind” of money that funds one’s chances – a “rich” dollar or a “poor” dollar? I’m interested to know whether and to what degree this poorer and less popular dollar shapes the children’s view of their improved chances to transcend poverty. From what you’ve said before about NZ’s curriculum objectives, ‘self-esteem in community’ is high on the agenda and that (along with the funding) is an important ingredient.
In the UK, I’m not sure whether that ingredient is a staple in the educational larder. Schools in many poorer areas are better funded than those in wealthier areas, which in turn are often better funded than the growing numbers of private schools. Teaching standards often follow the same pattern. But self-esteem… in which the kids expect more for themselves… that still seems to follow the ‘rich dollar’ even when there's fewer of them shared around.
Education systems serve different wider systems which have differing agendas for their poorer classes. Is it possible that economic, political and foreign policies actually have a use for lower literacy, reasoning and expectation? Could a transfer of an educational ethos of hope actually be antithetical to certain agendas; and if adopted might they just miss the targeted population groups? I think the true wealth of a nation is reflected in the conditions of its disowned and neglected poor. A nation reveals it's own shadow.
You know, I think individual teachers and parents have the power in their own hands and hearts to reach our children, regardless of the wider systems. We have the power of gods in the eyes of these delicate and impressionable minds. We can change lives in the reckless word that is overheard. We implicate them when we speak of our burden and load. We honour the future man’s dignity when we quietly take him aside after class. We contaminate his children’s lives when we shame him. Our eyes convey love, indifference and disgust. We can fund our children’s education with the gold of our noble service to their humanity. It is in that investment that their own hopes are fertilized - shaping the way they view their chances; informing their expectations of and for themselves. We can show them the way to their own power in community… encourage them to divert the money wasted on Christmas Cards and ‘World’s Best Teacher’ mugs to computer funds. Parents would be relieved, trees would be saved and shelf space cleared.
But remember, the greatest men and women who have ever walked this earth never had a laptop - present company excepted!
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