Small Fish and Small Pond

As I research for my second (almost forgotten about) paper due this coming week, I have realized something. New Zealand is small. Now, this should be obvious, but I don't even mean just in physical size. I am researching their school funding system, known as a decile system so named because it divides all the schools into tenths based on the percentage of low income students and bases its funding on those percentages. Still, it's kind of a random term that doesn't show up too much, in relation to New Zealand schools anyhow, in a google search. Not only that, though, the academic journal databases have nothing on New Zealand school funding.

My mini-thesis is on collaboration and out of the literally thousands of articles, approximately two-thirds were from American sources. Most others were from the UK, Australia and Canada in descending order of quantity. New Zealanders just can't possibly catch up with the amount of research literature put out by the rest of the world -- and that's just the internationally relevant topics. So while they are frantically trying to be a respectable research base on those broad issues, there are still the "small" issues that are only relevant here in Kiwiland. So while school funding and its links to poverty are always hot topics, how are the researchers to keep up? No wonder there is a big push for practicioner research in schools... no one else can spare the time to research for an area that isn't their professional domain!

After googling decile schools and getting people's blogs as the top of my search results, I have decided to head to the library for real books that will be supported by the New Zealand library system. Perhaps the library will also have back issues of educational magazines that haven't bothered being put on the web yet. Goodness... I never realized how easy it was to be American and research any hot topic of American culture until those resources just weren't there. Sigh. Off to the library.