High School Confidential

HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

Ruatoki, New Zealand, 2007.

Introduction

In late October 2007, the small peaceful and largely Māori village of Ruatoki in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty was invaded in the early hours of the morning by heavily armed police anti-terrorism squads, in full military gear and brandishing sub-machine guns. They arrested a number of residents and boarded and searched the bus carrying Kohanga Reo children to their kindergarten. To many New Zealanders, this over-the-top repressive act was an indication of increasing State Terrorism and evidence of an encroaching police state in a country that has traditionally prided itself on its ability to dialogue and negotiate issues of difference. However, public reaction to the raids was even more daunting. More than 80% of the population supported the Police. This alone is cause for serious concern and seems to me to support the idea of an increasing racial tension. This was precipitated by Don Brash's Orewa Speech in 2004 and exacerbated by Helen Clark's pre-emptive legislation on the Foreshore and Seabed. The gulf between Maori and non-Maori seems to be widening as calls for tino rangatiratanga (Maori self-determination) become more strident and as anti-Maori sentiments become more vocal.

What does all of this have to do with High School education? Quite a bit as it turns out!

In an apparently unrelated event, I was recently having dinner with a family of non-Māori friends. They are a caring, hard-working and intelligent family. They are concerned about sustainability, global warming, house prices, drug problems, crime etc. They go hiking and camping, take their children to sports and are generally model parents. They are generous and kind – just the sort of friends that we would like to nurture and share more with. They have two children, their daughter (4) and a son (8).

The father is a local high school teacher and has been in that position for five years. He is dedicated to teaching/learning and concerned for the wellbeing and advancement of his students. He teaches in a high school (letʻs call it “Pounamu High”) that has a mixed ethnic makeup, with a large proportion of Māori students (about 45%). In the geographical area concerned, Māori children between the ages of 10-19 make up approximately 52% of all children in this age group. This is more than twice the national average of Māori as a proportion of the whole population of this age group. In 2006 there were more than 900 students on the school roll, more than 400 of them Māori. Many of these "more difficult" children come from the Ruatoki community.

My friend does not think of himself as a racist. On the contrary, if he were to be called such he would be deeply hurt. He is dedicated to making life better for all of his students, and the suggestion that he might discriminate against those students who are Māori would be abhorrent to him. But he is deeply troubled and not a little frustrated and exasperated by them. He sees them – particularly the boys - as wilfully disobedient, insolent and themselves driven by racist impulses towards himself that he neither accepts not understands. In our conversation he shared some of his experiences with me.

“They steal all of the time, and they conspire together to succeed and to hide their thefts. Last week a young Pakeha (non-Māori) girl put her cell-phone down on her desk. When she looked up, it was gone. When she complained to me, I asked who took it and all I got was a sea of blank, smug faces. So I asked her what her number was and promptly called it from my own cell phone. Of course, when it rang (down the blouse of a young Māori girl sitting some way away) I was able to retrieve it, but even the girl in possession of it continued to deny her involvement. Last week, the new Deputy Principal had her own cell phone stolen off her desk after only two weeks in the job.

I tell all new teachers to forget about their idealism, or about any notion of teaching. We are involved in custodial duties, trying to keep the lid on insolence, disobedience, blatant disrespect, crime, truancy and drugs. If we challenge students about their behaviour or seek explanations for their actions, they simply turn their backs and walk away. They appear to have no respect for authority. I hate my job!”

He told me that his experiences were not uncommon, but were, in fact the norm among non-Māori teachers. He also complained that the students’ behaviour appeared to be condoned by the Māori members of staff, who themselves “keep their distance”, “never say Hello!” and seem generally unhelpful and sullen.

My friend was very saddened by all of this, and felt hopeless to change it. He was resigned to a continuing life of conflict, non-communication and academic failure.

Māori Student Background

And fail these Māori boys do. In the School District, the average Pakeha pass rate in all subjects is 56%, for Māori it is 34%. At Pounamu High in specific subjects, Māori student pass rates were extremely low: English (29%), Languages (other than te Reo) (21%), Science (26%), Maths (30%), etc. Only in te reo Māori (Māori language) did they excel (96%).

Pounamu High School is not exceptional. Nationally, 53% of Māori boys leave school with no qualifications compared to 20% of Pakeha boys. Similarly, truancy rates for Māori are significantly higher than for non-Māori. The national truancy rate for Māori boys is 6.6% compared to 2.8% for Pakeha boys, while for Māori girls it is even worse with 7.1% compared to 2.9% for Pakeha girls. In the Region, the overall Māori truancy rate is the highest in the Nation, at 8.2%. Clearly something is not working at the High School for the Māori students, or for the teachers who are charged with their education. I felt a deep sense of empathy for my friend, and struggled to understand how it could be that such a caring person could not “get through” to his students. He concluded his description of life in the school with the rhetorical question, “Why are they all so angry?”

Which made me reflect for a moment on why this might be.

“Well.” I said, “If, as a people, you had every square inch of your land stolen by the Government on a trumped up murder charge designed specifically to dispossess you; if your leaders had been imprisoned and executed for this same murder, and then been completely exonerated and posthumously pardoned; if your land had not subsequently been returned and for 150 years you had watched Pakeha farmers get rich on its use; during which time you had lost all of your own productive capacity, and been left unable to house, clothe or feed your children; if, as a direct consequence of these deprivations, you had been disproportionately arrested and imprisoned, suffered significantly higher incidences of suicide, alcoholism, disease, poverty and child abuse and mortality as well as a lower life expectancy, then I think you might be angry. That’s what happened to Ngati “Moana””

“Ngati “Moana”? he asked, ingenuously, “Is that the local tribe?”

I was stunned and completely at a loss to know how to respond. If, after five years of teaching at a local High School with a majority of Māori students he still did not know the names of their Tribes, their status, genealogy and history – that is, their identity - then what hope was there! Too embarrassed to bring these discrepancies to his attention, I just suggested that I believed the school needed to stop everything, to face the issue of miscommunication squarely, and to resolve it communally before any further teaching was attempted. I then moved on to other matters in an act of cowardly resignation. Depressed, I went home to reflect on our conversation.

Unresolved Issues.

Several questions demanded answers.

• How could he be so unaware of the cultural identity of the majority of students in the school?
• Why did he not see that his inability or unwillingness to try to understand who his students were might be directly related to their “insolence”.
• Could he not see that from their point of view he did not respect them and yet he expected them to respect him?
• Could he not see that even the slightest sincere inclination on his part to enter into their world was likely to see an immediate softening of their attitudes to him.
• Why did he not ask them or the Māori teachers what they thought the problems at the school were about?
• Was his an isolated experience, or was it shared by other Pakeha teachers in the school?
• Was it, in fact, a widespread issue throughout the high-schools in Aotearoa-New Zealand?
• Did attitudes towards the students such as my friend’s play any part in the “failure” of the students themselves?

And perhaps most importantly,

• What does all of this have to do with police anti-terrorism raids?
  

I determined to set about finding answers to these questions. To read about what I discovered, download the full article from my website. www.TonyWardEdu.com. The URL for the article is:

http://www.tonywardedu.com/content/view/278/40/

Let me know what you think.