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Photo: Getty

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 24, 2020

The real conspiracy is that education is for the rich

Photo: Getty
Photo: Getty

It is a scandal in plain sight: our education system is racist and the outcomes people get vary substantially depending on ethnicity, writes Laura O’Connell Rapira.

Avondale rapper Tom Scott recently took to Instagram to point out that the real conspiracy in this country is that education is for the rich. “Rich kids get private tutors and nannies that help with their homework while the rest of us get YouTube.”

It is not only people on low-incomes that believe in YouTube-driven conspiracies, of course. Rich white people voted for Trump in droves and New Zealanders, of all backgrounds, now spend more time watching videos on YouTube and Facebook than reading legitimate news sites.

But a good education is indeed a privilege afforded only to some. In an era where people can spread disinformation quickly and easily, and our ability to think critically can help us meet that challenge, equity in education is important.

In 2018, a Unicef study of rich countries found that New Zealand has one of the most unequal education systems in the world with experts naming racism and classism as the driving forces.

Investigative journalist Kirsty Johnston found that 60% of students accepted into law, medicine and engineering at university came from wealthy homes while just one per cent were from decile one schools. As the Herald headline put it, if you want to be a doctor, engineer or lawyer, “it’s best not to grow up poor”.

It’s also best not to grow up Māori. Research released last week from Waikato-Tainui, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, The Southern Initiative and BERL tracked the journey of more than 70,000 rangatahi from education into employment. They found that teachers expect less from Māori students which results in Māori students expecting less of themselves. Rangatahi become disengaged, lose confidence, have poor relationships with their teachers and achieve less than their Pākehā counterparts as a result.

In short, our education system is racist and the outcomes you get vary depending on your ethnicity.

How teacher bias creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Posters from He Awa Ara Rau.

But it’s not just higher teacher expectations that are needed to solve inequality in education. Last week John Campbell tweeted that about 10% of students at Manurewa High haven’t returned post-lockdown. Roughly 100 of those young people were senior students who’ve taken supermarket, fast food and courier jobs to help keep their families afloat. Their principal described them as, “bright, determined and motivated” but these students were being forced to decide between completing high school or getting a job to help put food on the table. What’s systemically racist and classist is that Pākehā kids in Karori or Remuera aren’t having to make that decision.

The truth is Māori and Polynesian kids are almost always going to choose to help whānau over individual aspirations. We come from cultures that prioritise the collective and it’s an instinct that has been key to our survival. But we shouldn’t have to make such choices.

The good news is there are proven and practical solutions. The Ministry of Education could end streaming in schools which, given teacher bias, hurts Māori. Horowhenua College ended streaming in 2017 and since then NCEA results for Māori and Pasifika students have improved.

The education minister could make te reo Māori a core subject in schools and include more kapa haka, whanaungatanga and concepts like wairuatanga. A survey of 500 rangatahi Māori found that 90% wanted to learn more about their identity and ancestry. Research from the Children’s Commission found the same: tamariki Māori want to feel comfortable and safe to explore their culture, they want their teachers to understand te ao Māori, and school support of their whānau is an important part of their ability to achieve in school.

The government could guarantee everyone a generous basic income while increasing the supply of public housing and decreasing the cost of living so that everyone can have a secure foundation from which to learn, play and grow.

Right now, the richest 20% of people hoard more than 70% of the wealth and the wealth gap between the median Pākehā and Māori is $109,000. Māori feature more often in the working and welfare classes because our land, which was our spiritual and economic base, was forcefully and coercively taken. Colonisation is an ongoing process that continues to harm all of us today. We live in a society where some people have million-dollar superyachts while others are sleeping in cars.

If things were tika in the world, everyone would have a warm whare, a decent income and a good education. But our broken systems mean that only the wealthy get to enjoy this way of life. That is the conspiracy we need to be spending our time and energy on.

By joining together we could build an economic and education system that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.

I hope, for our kids, that we do.

Keep going!
Getty Images.
Getty Images.

PoliticsAugust 24, 2020

The campaign to lower the voting age arrives today at the High Court. Here’s what is at stake

Getty Images.
Getty Images.

The court will be asked to rule that the current voting age, while legally valid, is a form of unjustified age discrimination, explains Andrew Geddis.

Is there any good reason to let 18-year-old people vote, but not those who are 16 or 17 years old? That’s the question the High Court starts grappling with today, in a case brought by the advocacy group “Make it 16”.

They aren’t asking that the court allow those 16-plus to vote in this year’s election. That’s not on the cards, because the Electoral Act is completely clear only “adults” (being persons 18-or-older) are permitted to register to vote. A New Zealand court can do nothing to change this legal reality.

Instead, Make it 16 wants the court to issue a formal declaration that the current voting age, while legally valid, is a form of unjustified age discrimination that is inconsistent with the NZ Bill of Rights Act, s 19. As with the “declaration of inconsistency” issued in respect of prisoner voting, the intention is to leverage such a remedy into political pressure on parliament to reform the law. By getting a judge to lay bare the shoddy basis for restricting individual rights, MPs may be shamed into doing something to fix the problem.

That’s the hope, anyway. Whether they are successful in gaining the declaration they seek will be very interesting to see. Because not only has parliament set the voting age at 18 through the Electoral Act, it’s also made that age a specific limit on the right to vote affirmed by the NZ Bill of Rights Act, s 12(a).

As such, Make it 16 effectively have to argue that the right to vote itself (as recognised currently by parliament through the NZ Bill of Rights Act) is unjustifiably discriminatory. Which all starts to get very meta: this right in the NZ Bill of Rights Act imposes an unjustified limit on this other right in the NZ Bill of Rights Act.

Furthermore, the government will no doubt argue forcefully that while 18 may be a somewhat arbitrary line for deciding who can and cannot vote, it is no more arbitrary than 16 would be. And 18 has been chosen by parliament because by that age each person is deemed sufficiently mature to understand the gravity of voting.

When voting first commenced in the 19th century, this “age of maturity” was placed at 21. It then lowered to 20 in the 1960s. Then, in the 1970s, to the current age of 18, where it stayed when MMP was introduced. So, parliament has thought about this carefully over the years and made its call on the issue.

Youth Voting participants from Waiheke College demonstrate the joy that democracy brings

Of course, that fundamental claim – that only those who have turned 18 are sufficiently mature to vote – is pretty contentious. The reasons for enfranchising people aged 16 and 17 have been well made on this site already by those currently denied the right. Here’s Azaria Howell’s argument as to why she (and those her age) should be allowed to vote. And here’s Gina Dao-McLay making the same claim. 

As a person slightly older than 18, I don’t really have all that much to add to their advocacy (which I find quite convincing). The question is whether the court will find the arguments they raise strong enough to show that the nearly 50-year-old legislative decision to discriminate against those aged 16 and 17 is not “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. Because, if it isn’t, then the court probably will issue the declaration the claimants seek.

What happens then is anyone’s guess. However, there’s a big problem with actually getting the voting age lowered to 16. The definition of “adult” in the Electoral Act – basically people who are 18 or older on polling day – is subject to that legislation’s “entrenchment provision”. Accordingly, the voting age can only be changed by more than 75% of all MPs (90 of 120) voting to do so, or else the voters agreeing to do so at a referendum.

Not even in the most fevered imaginations will a post-election House of Representatives contain 75% Labour (or even Labour-Green) MPs. As such, any change to the voting age through parliament will require National to collaborate, as was the intention behind enacting the Electoral Act’s entrenchment provision. And it’s fair to say that National has not been supportive of the call to lower the voting age, on the grounds that young people are basically socialists. (Sorry, sorry … “people [are] potentially vulnerable to parental coercion at 16, and I think those are the sorts of concerns that many of us hold about 16-year-olds voting as well.”)

As such, it may be that the only realistic avenue for lowering the voting age lies in a referendum vote on the issue – after we’ve sorted out assisted dying and the issue of cannabis, that is.

But wait there's more!