Project Yields Gains for New Zealand’s Maori Pupils
Guided by student input, researchers help schools narrow achievement gap.
Like the United States and many other countries around the world, New Zealand has been stymied for decades by achievement gaps between students of different ancestry. In New Zealand’s case, concern centers on students who are Maori, members of tribes that inhabited its islands hundreds of years before Capt. James Cook put them on the map in the 1700s.
Maori students make up nearly half of all schoolchildren in a nation of 4 million. Yet, compared with their peers of European heritage, most of whom are of British descent, Maori students drop out of school, fail courses, and rack up suspensions at disproportionate rates.
In an effort to erase such disparities, a group of New Zealand researchers from the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, and the Poutama Pounamu Research Center, in Tauranga, decided to seek solutions from the source: Maori students themselves. “What limits your educational success?” they asked the students. “What...
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