Iwi Authority Head Commends Education Chief

Media Release Maori Education Authority 31 October 2012

Iwi Authority Head Commends Education Chief

Te Maru o Nga Kura a Iwi head Toby Curtis has come out in support of Ministry of Education Chief Lesley Longstone whose negative criticism of New Zealand’s education system as not being of world class standard, drew strong condemnation from the teacher unions.

‘Ms Longstone should be commended for stating the obvious that because Maori and Pasifika, poor working class families are not faring well then our system cannot be described as world class’.

‘It is not as though this is anything new but for too long people who are charged with making the difference for all our learners have accepted the plight of our children as inevitable and worse normal or society’s fault’.

‘How else can you explain the underperformance of our education system over the long long years in which intergenerational failure has been allowed to take root and grow’.

With many Decile 1 Maori Medium Schools now showing the way about what is possible in terms of sustained outstanding achievement by Maori, the lame dodgy excuse about the link between poverty and underachievement as the root cause has been revealed for what it is, precisely that, lame and dodgy.

‘Furthermore are Maori, Pasifika and poor working class families really supposed to blindly accept and approve of a system that year in and year out routinely fails their children. It is high time surely that the excuse mongers and blame merchants began some serious soul searching amongst and about themselves and came up with real solutions themselves instead of blaming and slamming mythical ghosts’.

Iwi are here and we are not ever going to accept that anything other than effective teaching is going to change things for our tamariki mokopuna.

Dr Toby Curtis
Chairman
Te Mara o Nga Kura a Iwi o Aotearoa

ENDS

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