Whose Mokopuna Matter?

I was invited to write this opinion piece for the Aotearoa Educators Collective. It was published by them on 18 July 2024.


I am a Pākehā educator and researcher, a former school principal in South Auckland for over 30 years, and an education consultant working with schools and teachers across Aotearoa, in Hawai’i, and currently connecting in an advisory role with an indigenous early childhood movement in Tucson, Arizona.

My 12 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren identify first and foremost as Māori, with most being fluent speakers of te reo Māori. Almost all of my great-grandchildren have been raised with te reo Māori exclusively as their first language.  Those of school age are learning in Kura Kaupapa Māori, and in both Māori and English medium environments in what I describe as whitestream schools.

The central focus of all of my work is identifying our whiteness, our personal and institutional ‘White spaces’, understanding how they alienate and marginalise children like my mokopuna, and eliminating those barriers in our schools and in our practice.

It is unfortunately no surprise therefore, to recognise the huge, glaring white hole in the Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG) Report: Redesigning the English and Mathematics & Statistics learning areas in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministerial Advisory Group, 2024).

Let’s be clear, this is not ‘redesigning’ at all. It is yet another example of a system doing exactly what is has always been designed to do, to create, and even worse, tolerate, a social hierarchy, inequality, and inequity not far removed at all from our earlier policies of integration and assimilation that aimed to make us all the same i.e. all White.

The coalition’s education policies double down on the myth of meritocracy, the idea that if children work harder, get back to basics (call it structured literacy, the science of learning, the common practice model, or whatever new name politicians come up with) they will succeed on their merits because after all, we don’t want to say out loud those words like race, racism, inequity, culture, or identity. ‘He iwi kōtahi tātou’ is still in our whitestream DNA even if we pretend to have moved on.

Racism

So, if this is a longstanding problem, what is different and frightening about the MAG report and the education policies rapidly being implemented by the coalition government in 2024? The difference is the blatant and unashamed racism underpinning and driving the change, and the fact that politicians advancing these policies are wearing their racism like a badge of honour.

Racism that negates gains made by Māori, for Māori, and with Māori across the board. Blatant racism, White supremacy, and outright rejection of the Crown’s Tiriti responsibility in the coalition’s stated goal that they will not “advance policies that seek to ascribe different rights and responsibilities to New Zealanders on the basis of their race or ancestry.”

Anti-racism research calls out race-neutral policies, like these that are endemic in the coalition government’s decisions, as failing to reverse the gaps and barriers that exist because of structural racism and as a threat to racial equity for indigenous and minoritised groups. The research finds that only race-conscious policies—policies that may disproportionately help indigenous and minoritised communities can dismantle those structural barriers (Jayakumar & Kendi, 2023; Maye, 2022).

The elimination of so-called ‘race-based’ policies by the coalition government to attract and placate their right-wing voter base simply says we couldn’t care less about addressing racism and inequity. In fact, we’ll not only happily encourage it, we’ll hide behind seemingly benevolent but still racist statements about the common good and working for all ‘New Zealanders’.

I can’t see a Tiriti partnership or the rights of Māori anywhere in the coalition’s policies in education.  So, what does that mean for my mokopuna and all mokopuna Māori in our schools?

Decolonising and Indigenising

It means we have to speak out. We cannot remain silent about the racism, White privilege, and supremacy that almost overnight cancelled the professional development priorities introduced by the previous government that focused on cultural capability, supported by the principles of critical consciousness, inclusion, Kaupapa Māori, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Those priorities were a shift and a small start in the changes we need to make.

In her keynote address launching the priorities Professor Mere Berryman said:

To bring about transformative change, requires both a cultural shift, that is a relational approach, founded in Kaupapa Māori, thereby indigenising the education system, and a structural shift that is founded in critical consciousness, thereby decolonising the education system.

I believe that decolonising is the job of the coloniser – that’s us. Indigenising is the absolute right of Māori, that’s not us.

Neither decolonising nor indigenising is going to happen when our focus is narrowed to literacy and numeracy goals. Neither is going to happen as the government reverses the gains made in the Aotearoa Histories Curriculum by pledging to restore ‘balance’ thus supporting the ACT Party’s position that the curriculum “focuses on colonisation too heavily and “pushes a number of left-wing narratives.”

 Obviously, right-wing narratives are acceptable though as we see in the refresh of the English Curriculum, for the second time in two years, from an approach in 2023 that gave practical effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, reflecting local tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and te ao Māori, to a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum that makes Shakespeare compulsory. Whose knowledge do we mean? Definitely not the knowledge of mokopuna Māori.

This smells all over of MAG member Elizabeth Rata’s own personal and commercial interests in the professional development she delivers in this approach. The same Elizabeth Rata who criticises the indigenisation of our universities and was one of seven White signatories to the infamous Auckland University’s letter that opposed parity for mātauranga Māori with other bodies of knowledge in the school curriculum particularly the science curriculum (Ngata, 2021).

This blatant misuse of power is further confirmed in the leaked emails sent to Radio NZ where Rata states she already has her “English writing team, dates and venue all ready to go”. The Education Ministry agree this is outside the scope of the MAG’s terms of reference but have still accepted Rata’s selections. Association for the Teaching of English president, Pip Tinning, says that the sector has not been asked for nominations for a curriculum writing group and that it seems that the ministerial advisory group was overseeing the curriculum changes. (Gerritsen & Radio New Zealand, 2024)

Frightening!

Whose Knowledge Matters?

In the international journal, Educational Linguistics, Cushing writes about the knowledge-rich ideologies of curriculum design prevalent in England since the early 2010s:

The knowledge-rich project is underpinned by a colonial, missionary and conservative narrative that the homes of working class and racially marginalised families are illiterate, degenerate, and symptomatic of cultural, linguistic, and cognitive deficit – and these defects must be compensated for through Western-centric curricula. (Cushing, 2023)

Sriprakash et al. (2022) describe how knowledge in schools is “part of the ongoing settler colonial project, focusing on the global reach of whiteness and its function in sustaining racial erasures and the active denial of colonial violence.”

Is this what we want in our schools? It certainly is the government’s goal. The coalition is hell bent on implementing flawed and failed policy from overseas as if it was something new.

The announcement of the introduction of testing, using euphemisms like ‘checkpoints’, ‘phonics checks’ and ‘progression monitoring’ is yet another example. Professor Georgina Tuari Stewart calls it “the return of National Standards by stealth” and labels the tests “useless and clearly harmful to children”. (Expert Q&A, 2024)   We know very well just which children were harmed by the National Standards testing regime.

Neutrality is a position

What frustrates me the most is our silence. Thank goodness for this Collective and the concerns raised in the Collective members’ comprehensive review of the MAG report (Aiono et al., 2024). Kudos too to the minority of principals who will choose to take a stand and either refuse to implement policy that will damage children, or who will at least adapt their implementation to suit their communities and whānau. How are we supporting them?

Those principals and groups who stood up against the previous standardised testing debacle were targeted by a vindictive Minister of Education at great personal and professional cost (Milne-Ihimaera, 2018). We cannot allow that to happen this time round. Do we know who those who will take a stand are? Do we have a forum that supports them and connects them with each other?

Neutrality is a position. It’s the choice we make to roll over and play dead and just allow racist changes to happen unchallenged. The unfortunate truth is when successive governments introduce change without any credible evidential base, when individual politicians and advisers misuse power and demand we ‘jump’ to suit their flawed policy promises, the majority of us simply ask ‘how high?’ We might complain to each other, but inevitably we start implementing the change aligning ourselves with the minority of educators who think they might work, when we know they will not. As a profession, we seem unable to unite, so divided we fall. We tolerate, then perpetuate, the harm this direction will do to mokopuna Māori and we accept they will be collateral damage. Obviously, only some of our mokopuna matter.

References

Aiono, S., Hunter, J., Anderson, V., Eden, R., & Sandretto, S. (2024, June 17). Review of the Ministerial Advisory Group Report March 2024: Redesigning the English and Mathematics & Statistics learning areas in the refreshed New Zealand Curriculum. Aotearoa Educators Collective. https://aecnz.substack.com/p/review-of-the-ministerial-advisory

Cushing, I. (2023). The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: a raciolinguistic perspective. Educational Linguistics, 2(1), 51–71.

Expert Q&A. (2024, June 19). Standardised testing in New Zealand schools. Science Media Centre. https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2024/06/19/standardised-testing-in-new-zealand-schools-expert-qa/

Gerritsen, J., & Radio New Zealand. (2024, July 10). Leaked emails on rewriting curriculum show process not followed - teaching association. New Zealand Herald.

Jayakumar, U. M., & Kendi, I. X. (2023, June 29). ‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal.’ The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/supreme-court-affirmative-action-race-neutral-admissions/674565/

Maye, A. (2022). The myth of race-neutral policy. https://www.epi.org/publication/the-myth-of-race-neutral-policy/

Milne-Ihimaera, K. (2018). Te ohonga ake i taku moemoeā, ko te puawaitanga o ngā whakaaro: The Moerewa School story. Unpublished doctoral thesis: Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi.

Ministerial Advisory Group. (2024). Redesigning the English and Mathematics & Statistics learning areas in the refreshed New Zealand Curriculum for primary, intermediate and early secondary school students: Years 0 to 10.

Ngata, T. (2021, July 25). Defence of Colonial Racism. Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions. https://tinangata.com/2021/07/25/defending-colonial-racism/

Sriprakash, A., Rudolph, S., & Gerrard, J. (2022). Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State (Pluto Press, Ed.).