Getting education to make biculturalism work
By Andreas Schleicher Deputy Director and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary-General. I was able to add half a day to visit schools in New Zealand, something I always try to do where my schedule permits. At Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Hoani Waititi, New Zealand’s first community school offering Māori medium instruction, I was greeted by a group of ferocious warriors slowly approaching us and offering the choice between picking a fight and settling for peace. With that choice made, we were warmly welcomed with a traditional pōwhiri at the school’s marae. In Māori culture greeting others is an important opportunity for people to show respect and to set the tone for whatever comes after. That hour-long ceremony included skilled speakers crafting poetic verbal images, but most impressive was how the school’s entire student population sang with one voice, confident and incredibly dynamic and self-orchestrated, without a conductor. Principal Rawiri Wright, former leader of the tough Māori language schooling organisation and who had challenged Minister Kaye and myself at my public presentation earlier in the morning, asked me later how the range of artistic and social skills so evident among his students were featuring in New Zealand’s national standards and our comparative work at the OECD. One could argue with some of his political rhetoric, but our conversation left me thinking. And he referred me proudly to the latest results on academic performance too, which showed his students outperforming schools at the 8th decile of socio-economic advantage - despite the fact that his own school was catering for low to middle-income families located at the 4th decile. He sees these results vindicating his stance that the kind of academic performance that we value comes as a by-product of the holistic Maori medium instruction that his school offers, while he claims that attempts to add the latter as a ‘nice-to-have’ to the former were failing in New Zealand. Read more...