Andre Agassi dropped out of school in the ninth grade to pursue his tennis career.
He turned professional when he was 16 years old and went on to become a world champion.
But he deeply regretted the fact that he did not have quality education.
The belief that nothing has greater impact on a child’s life than education led him to establish a charter school for underprivileged children in a disadvantaged area in his hometown of Las Vegas.
Opening in 2001, with year 3-5 students, the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy is now a full new entrant to year 12 school with a roll of over 600. Students are chosen by ballot and almost all go to college.
There is a waiting list of over 800 children.
The school’s long-term goal is to rank in the top 100 high schools in the nation on the US News & World Report rankings by 2016, and for all of their graduating students to attend and compete at the country’s top 100 colleges and universities.
Sharp Contrast
This striving to achieve a high national ranking is in sharp contrast to the hysterical opposition of the teacher unions to the publication of New Zealand National Standards.
National Standards were introduced into primary, intermediate and some secondary schools in 2010 to provide guidelines for the tracking of student progress and achievement through the first years of school.
The idea is that if a child falls behind, National Standards will highlight that a problem exists and the school can take steps to help the child catch up.
The standards are used to assess all children in years 1 to 8 (aged 5 to 12) as being above, at, below, or well below benchmarks in reading, writing and maths.
About 1900 schools provided the requisite information to the Education ministry, while 188 schools failed to do so. Maori language schools are not required to provide their data until next year.
The results paint an interesting picture of educational achievement in New Zealand. Of the 360,000 or so primary-age students who have been assessed, 76% had reached or exceeded the national standards for reading, 72% for mathematics and 68% for writing.
Top flyers
New Zealand was identified as a ‘top flier’ in 2010. Others included Shanghai, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, Canada and Japan.
The OECD believes that by enabling countries to compare their performance in education with that of other countries, it will be easier for them to find ways of improving the efficiency of their system and gain the greater benefits.
NZCPR Guest Commentator Dr Barend Vlaardingerbroek, Associate Professor of Education at the American University of Beirut (with a PhD from Otago University) maintains a special interest in the New Zealand education system.
“Boys are over-represented in special needs classes, drop-out and expulsion figures, and more of them leave school without qualifications. Committees and commissions in several countries, New Zealand included, have looked into the problem of the educational woes of boys as a group,” he said.
Difficult task
Finding ways to improve a country’s educational achievement is not an easy task, but the National Standards data helps to show the way.
It is clear that pupils at the lowest-decile schools are more likely to perform below national standards than those at the highest-decile schools.
But claims by the unions that ‘poverty’ is the problem and extra funding would fix it are misguided. As school principals are quick to point out, just because a school draws on children from lower socio-economic backgrounds, does not mean that they cannot achieve at levels equal to or better than other children.
One of the main factors in some schools achieving higher benchmarks than others (irrespective of the background of the children) is the strength of the three-way relationship between parents, students, and their teachers.
When that relationship is strong, children do better, and this is reflected in their National Standards results.
The above is the edited version of the views expressed by Dr Muriel Newman, Director of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, in her web-based free weekly Newsletter, NZCPR Weekly. For full text, visit www.nzcpr.com
