Are students drowning in the stream?
A recent education report from Tokona Te Raki has argued the streaming, also known as ability grouping needs to stop as it disproportionately affects the academic performance of Māori and Pāsifika students. Having now read the report, the paper does have a statistically significant conclusion that Māori does not have the same long-term outcomes as non-Māori, however, this is a correlation and not necessarily the cause of this underachievement. So yeah, I decided to go down the internet rabbit hole and see what the global situation was and if indeed streaming was a major cause of Māori educational underachievement. First things first let me define my terms so anyone reading knows what exactly what I am talking about. ‘Streaming’ is used to describe a variety of approaches by which students with similar levels of current achievement (note I do not say ability) are consistently grouped together for lessons. ‘Streaming’ can involve grouping students into classes for all or most of their