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CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Many students in New Zealand have a story to tell about “streaming” — being grouped into separate math classes based on their perceived ability to master the subject.

Manaaki Waretini-Beaumont, now 18 and an environmental science major at the University of Canterbury, learned about the downside of streaming when she enrolled in Avonside Girls’, a 1,000-student high school in Christchurch.

Avonside starts at Year 9, equivalent to eighth grade in the United States, and ends at Year 13, equivalent to 12th grade. Before the start of her Year 9 term, Waretini-Beaumont and her fellow students were divided up into groups to take tests in “maths,” reading comprehension, and patterns and shapes.

Afterward, the students were separated into lettered groups that spelled out the word B-I-N-O-C-U-L-A-R-S. Waretini-Beaumont was a “9-N” student in mathematics — as she describes it, “the top of the middle block.”

But she said she didn’t feel comfortable as one of the few Māori students in the class.

“I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be in that space,” said Waretini-Beaumont, whose iwi, or tribal affiliations, are Te Āti Haunui-A-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Apa, Ngāti Paoa. “If there was something I wasn’t understanding, I felt like I wasn’t able to say that, because I’m supposed to be in the smart class with all these smart people.”

So she shifted to another mathematics class with her Māori friends, who were in the “S” classes. 

“Being in two different spaces, I could really see the change,” Waretini-Beaumont said. “At the top classes, the teachers’ language towards the students was always positive and it was always encouraging. And they really wanted students to learn and were trying to help them.”

In the classroom where her friends were assigned, in contrast, the mathematics work mostly amounted to simple worksheets — “coloring pages and word find,” Waretini-Beaumont said.

Related: Sign up for a limited-run newsletter that walks you through some of the most promising solutions for helping students conquer math.

For years, much like in the United States, New Zealand has worried about sliding student proficiency in mathematics, as captured by both national and international test scores. Later this month — the beginning of the New Zealand school year — the country is launching an overhaul of mathematics instruction that education leaders hope will reverse the trend.

But other groups in the country have been trying to approach the problem of academic achievement from a different angle. They believe that streaming is driving achievement gaps in the country, including in mathematics. Tokona te Raki/Māori Futures Collective, a think tank focused on youth, has been working since 2019 to persuade schools to voluntarily end the practice by 2030. The initiative is called “Kōkirihia”— Māori for “take action.”

Streaming is just one of many ways that schools group students by academic ability. Ability grouping can include separating students into vocational or university tracks at different schools as early as age 10, as is common in Germany and other Western European countries. But it could also include teachers creating informal and non-permanent groupings within their own classrooms to provide enrichment or extra support to students who need it.

In New Zealand, critics say streaming pushes two groups into so-called “cabbage,” or lower-level mathematics, at a disproportionate rate: Māori students, who are indigenous to New Zealand, and students who are Pasifika, the New Zealand term for people from Samoa, Tonga and other nations in the Pacific Islands.

In the 14th century, the Polynesian ancestors of today’s Māori migrated thousands of miles by canoe to what they called Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. Hundreds of years later, English settlers came to engage in trade and now represent the majority ethnic group in New Zealand. In 1840, the two groups signed the Treaty of Waitangi that established New Zealand’s bicultural identity.

Many youth with Pacific Island backgrounds are descended from people who were encouraged to move to New Zealand after World War II to address a labor shortage.

Both Māori and Pasifika are a fast-growing, and young, population. By the 2040s, more than a third of children in the country are expected to identify as Māori, according to Stats NZ, the country’s official data agency.

Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend

The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s official stance discourages streaming, but the country’s more than 2,500 schools operate with a great deal of independence: Principals have similar powers and responsibilities as school superintendents in the United States, and each school has an elected board that sets policy and manages budgets.

New Zealand does not track streaming or ability grouping by race or ethnicity, but surveys show it is common: Eighty percent of students are in schools that group students by ability level in mathematics, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment.

Other data shows a wide academic gap among students of different ethnicities in New Zealand.

In the Auckland region, the country’s most densely populated of 16 regions in all, 76 percent of Asian students left secondary school with the highest of three levels on the country’s National Certificate of Educational Achievement in 2022. Like a high school diploma, the NCEA Level 3 is a minimum qualification to enter college in New Zealand.

About 66 percent of Pākehā, or white, students left school with that credential. About 46 percent of Pasifika students and 40 percent of Māori students did the same.

In comparison, the high school graduation rate by race and ethnicity in the United States in the 2021-22 school year was 94 percent for Asian American/Pacific Islander students, 90 percent for white students, 83 percent for Hispanic students, 81 percent for Black students and 74 percent for American Indian/Alaskan Native students.

Misbah Sadat, the newly appointed principal at Kuranui College, a high school 50 miles northeast of the capital of Wellington, began actively working to “destream” mathematics courses soon after emigrating to New Zealand in 2009 and becoming a teacher there.

As head of mathematics at a high school called Horowhenua College, she started by identifying promising Māori students on her own, moving them to higher level classes, and mentoring them, as described in a Ministry of Education newsletter.

Related: OPINION: As a middle-class Black student, I was tracked into lower-level math classes that kept me back

Eventually she convinced her colleagues at Horowhenua to create mixed-ability classes rather than dividing the students. She continued the same work as deputy principal at Onslow College in suburban Wellington, where she worked before her new appointment.

The streaming practice comes from a patronizing mindset, said Sadat, who was also a math teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Schools are telling parents that their children might be lost and overwhelmed in a more rigorous class. In actuality, “We have demoted some students to learn crap,” she said. “And then we are saying that at age 16, ‘You are dumb at maths.’ How dare we decide what a young person is capable of or not capable of?” 

Both of New Zealand’s unions for elementary and secondary teachers signed onto the pledge to end streaming by 2030. In a newsletter to members, the elementary teachers union noted that its members have noticed “a sense of ingrained hopelessness that comes with being in the ‘cabbage’ classes.”

But in the same newsletter, another teacher said educators struggle with the mix of abilities in one classroom, along with managing behavior challenges.

David Pomeroy, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, is studying schools that have committed to reducing their reliance on streaming.

It’s a difficult task, he said. So many teachers are accustomed to the practice, since they went through it in school themselves. Parents of students in high-level classes are worried their children will be shortchanged. Teachers also say that it is easier to work with students who are all roughly on the same skill level.

And then there is an emotional connection to the practice, Pomeroy said. Unlike in the United States, lower-level mathematics classes are often taught by teachers who have a lot of classroom experience and who express real fondness for their students, he said. Pushing students too hard is seen as setting them up for repeated failure, which teachers were reluctant to do.

“Even if they accepted streaming wasn’t the right next step, they wanted to protect them from anything that could damage their confidence,” Pomeroy said.

For schools that have made a commitment to reducing or ending streaming, he said, one useful tool has been to bring mathematics teachers in different schools together so they can work through challenges, such as lesson planning, and share successes.

Related: Racial gaps in math have grown. Could detracking help?

The research into the benefits or harms of academic tracking or streaming show mixed results. In 2016, a group of researchers compiled all the best U.S-based research on ability grouping and acceleration at that point, going back for a century. They found certain kinds of ability grouping, such as placing highly gifted students together, was a benefit to those students. But grouping students in high- or low-performing classes did not show any benefit or detriment for students.

The New Zealand Initiative, a right-of-center think tank, said that the country should conduct its own research on the effects of streaming in the country, rather than relying primarily on research done elsewhere and on qualitative reports that primarily capture feelings about the practice. “Research suggests that lowerstream students are often taught less engaging content by less experienced teachers. So, it may not be streaming itself that increases gaps in achievement but streaming done poorly,” the initiative said in a report.

But the efforts to reduce streaming voluntarily seem to be catching on.

When looking at all academic subjects, not just mathematics, principals on a 2022 PISA survey said 67 percent of students in New Zealand are grouped by ability into different classes for at least some subjects. That’s a drop from 2015, when 90 percent of principals reported that students were grouped into different classes in their schools.

The change is welcome, said Waretini-Beaumont, who works on social media for Tokona te Raki. Streaming “has more impact than just cutting off some opportunities and stopping someone from doing calculus,” she said. “Our grandparents have been streamed and they don’t know it was even a thing. They just thought they were dumb.”

Contact Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or [email protected].

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

This story about academic tracking was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.