Stuff: Middle class parents, your kids will be fine at a lower-decile school

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It’s that time of the year when parents start putting their children’s name down for high school – and for all the middle-class mothers and fathers fretting over where their offspring end up, I have a simple message: relax, it’ll be fine.

Of course parents want the best for their children, and worry about the quality of their schooling.

But that can’t be the only thing that’s in play, because one of the most profound trends of the last few decades is white flight: the growing tendency for middle-class Pākehā parents to shun low-decile schools, even if they’re just down the road, and try instead to get their children into higher-decile establishments.

This shift can’t easily be justified on quality grounds, because, as the New Zealand Initiative think-tank found in a 2019 report, Tomorrow’s School, “there are no significant differences in school performance between schools of different deciles”.

If richer schools get better grades, it’s because they have richer students. So middle-class parents can send their kids to the local low-decile school knowing that the teaching will likely be as good there as anywhere else.

Easy for me to say, perhaps, because I’m not the one making that decision. But I went to precisely the kind of school that makes middle-class parents nervous: Petone College, a decile 3 high school in Lower Hutt with a majority Māori and Pasifika intake.

It was an unusual choice for a child from wealthy Eastbourne, and the pupils at my decile 10 primary school were quick to make that clear. I was going to a school “for cabbages”, I was warned, and the “Polynesian kids” would sell me drugs, or beat me up, or possibly both.

Since 12-year-olds have few original thoughts, these children were presumably just channelling their parents’ prejudices.

Either way, they were wrong. No-one beat me up, nor even tried to sell me drugs. My Bursary marks were more than good enough to get me into university. And I gained something just as valuable as university entrance: I learned a little about lives very different to mine.

I don’t mean that I suddenly “knew” what it was to be poor; you can’t know, really, unless you live it.

But my eyes were opened. I saw the toll taken on my peers by poverty, discrimination, dysfunctional families and the feeling that no brighter future awaited them.

I heard kids say it was going to be “great” to turn 16 and go on the dole, and rather than being enraged – as an outsider to the school might have been – I could see the hurt behind the statement, the desire to save face.

On the lighter side, I also learned something about a wide array of cultures – different foods, forms of art, ways of speaking, senses of humour – that I’d have missed at a more monocultural school.

All this made me a better-informed adult, a citizen better able to grasp what goes on in this country.

And in retrospect, I was always going to be fine academically, in part because well-off kids come with so many advantages. Children actually spend very little time at school: something like 900 hours a year, out of a possible 6000 waking hours.

In every one of those waking hours, well-off children are, for the most part, blessed by having less stressful home lives, quieter places to study, and parents who have the time, energy and confidence to readily help with homework.

Most education researchers, unsurprisingly, would say that a family’s background – its social and economic status – accounts for around two-thirds of the variation in kids’ marks, with schools determining as little as one-fifth.

Middle-class school choices clearly aren’t just about quality. Prejudice, alas, is real. On a Stuff story about white flight some years back, one parent anonymously commented, “Fair enough. I’m not putting my kids where they’re going to be spending all day with loser kids.”

The billionaire Bob Jones, who may unfortunately not be alone in his views, decries low-decile schools as “filled with low-decile people”.

Of course schools vary in their orientation and character, and so do kids. You want the two to match up. I get that. Still, it’s hard not to notice that the “loser kid” schools have a predominantly poor, Māori and Pasifika intake.

So I would urge all the middle-class parents shunning their local school to look deep into their hearts, and ask themselves whether it’s really about quality and character, or whether something less pleasant lies beneath.

And, above all, I’d ask them to remember that low-decile schools generally provide a good education, and that if they send their kids there, they will almost certainly be fine. I went to one of those schools, and I was fine. If you send young George there, he’ll be fine. Little Isla? She’ll be fine, too. I was fine. They’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.