"Razor wired by faith, privilege or wealth" schools

The Magnet and I get invited to work with state schools and with “razor wired by faith, privilege, and or wealth” schools.

These “razor wired” schools can only exist  because parents are unhappy with what state education has to offer their children. I sometimes think that “keeping my kids from mixing with your kids” has never been more desired, nor more profitable in the history of educational provision in New Zealand.

After visiting some of these walled garden campuses last term I reckon that McLuhan’s notion of a “global village”  also captures the drivers for our walled off “independent/private school” educational system.  Places where we are so frightened by "the other’s child” that in a state of “panic terror” we design schools to isolate and sequester our own children to ensure they hear a different world of tribal drums from the children of the others.

And I will admit that I am fearful that this whole mind shift towards “personalisation” for the 21st Century learner increasingly validates a walled community approach to education.  Rather than seeing education as a system for developing the collaborative needs of a democratic society - we find campuses increasingly designed as “small world/s of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”. And these razor wired fences ensure the competitive advantage of the children of the already advantaged is not challenged.…

The government finds it acceptable that state schooling is not meeting the needs of  a subculture of children:  those children with different faiths, and children with parents earning above the average parental income brackets, and as a consequence provides “integrated school funding”  to allow them access to different ways of doing school. I don’t know if anyone has ever suggested an alternative that offers say four hours of state education in the mornings and then the option to explore alternative learning in the afternoons, but in New Zealand we seem to prefer full time sequesterisation.

The latest South Pacific edition of TIME magazine  focused on the Mongrel Mob and Black Power gangs in New Zealand, and the subculture of South Auckland’s teen gangsters.

"With its remote location, small population and favourable international reputation, New Zealand is regarded as a pleasant and peaceful place to live. Yet this island nation harbours a small, unique and brutal street-gang culture that has defied authorities for more than 30 years and now appears to be nurturing a new, more violent mutation."

This article captured my attention because of the recent announcement of a $3.4 million government allocation to a “different ways of doing school” project involving fifteen schools in the Setting Boundaries Budget 2007 Education Initiatives as Support for Schools Facing Gang Issues in Counties Manukau

This initiative provides new funding of $3.4 million over the next four years for extra staffing, plus a project manager to enable schools to strengthen their pastoral care and build positive school environments. The target group is 15 schools in Counties Manukau. It forms part of a co-ordinated inter-agency response to reported youth gang activity in Counties Manukau.

I am interested in the nature of the staffing interventions that the three point four million will fund. Just what is proposed for the 15 schools to help address a gang culture problem described by criminologist Associate Professor Greg Newbold, as being “beyond control”.

"They might manage to suppress it in one area temporarily, and it will just crop up again somewhere else. The problem is generated by the cultural milieu and the economic conditions in that area."

A youth gang situation that a youth worker describes as ubiquitous

Paea says gangs are everywhere. "Every street corner has one," he says. "A lot of kids we deal with have no direction, no activities, nothing whatsoever. You've got some who have grown up without a dad—just a mum—and the only role model they've got is the older guys in the neighborhood who are gang connected. They are connected into the wrong environment, and it's the same in school: they connect with the wrong child."

The Setting Boundaries budget for extra staffing for 15 schools in Manukau acknowledges, in a similar way to the integrated school funding, that state schooling is not meeting the needs of a subculture of children from South Auckland’s youth gang culture.

And this makes me curious about the following, 

1. If we are identifying (through provision of government funding) increasing subcultures of children whose needs are not met through the state school system, then just who are the subcultures of students whose needs are met through the state school system?
2. Is level of staffing the key issue in changing schools to meet the needs of young people who have adopted a learning community that is estranged from the mainstream?
3. And if increased staffing is the answer, is 3.4 million dollars of extra staffing over four years enough to make 15 existing schools meaningful agents of change for youth gang members?
4. What are the new ways of doing school being proposed for the 15 Manukau schools?
5. What ways of doing school for kids who are part of youth gang cultures have been successful in other countries. [I am interested in reading blogs from teachers and students involved in these initiatives elsewhere]

The Setting Boundaries initiative is an exciting challenge for the Manukau schools involved.   I am going to be tracking the outcomes over the next four years. The kids targeted deserve interventions that will make a difference to the options they will have and the choices they can make in the future, just as much as the kids identified as having special faith or special parental wealth do.