July 15, 2019
Teachers challenged to buck cliches
A former school principal is calling on her fellow educators to get rid of the broken system that fails Māori learners.
Keri Milne Ihimaera has earned a doctorate for her thesis on the statutory intervention into Moerewa Primary School after it refused to stop taking year 11-13 students.
Her experience in the mainstream school system showed her there were pockets where Māori children perform well, but overall the system is skewed against them.
She says the standard for Māori is good enough, rather than the expectation of excellence applied to other learners.
"We've got examples where we can see Māori success without Māori having to compromise who they are, without having to leave their culture at the school gates, those old cliches, and so why aren't we doing more of that and less of the stuff that just quite simply doesn't work," Dr Milne Ihimaera says.
She says New Zealand prides itself on having a world leading education system, but Māori and Pasifika learners are seen as a sort of inconvenient brown tail.
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