Perhaps I didn't explain why I could understand why they might do this well enough. The subject line of the post starts with "Racist" to explain what is going on. My initial reply was trying to chuck another data point in that there could be other reasons than racism.

As far as I can tell they aren't banning anything. The books will all still be stocked and can be used in the classroom whenever. The only thing they are doing is pulling them from the early readers list.

I don't know what your background is, you could be a teacher aide that works with kids on a regular basis and all of this stuff is your day to day grind, but I'll try and explain it as I know from dealing with the reading system.

When they start teaching kids to learn to read, they make them learn a bunch of lists of 'sight' words that they can read without really needing to decode or understand them properly.

When they have built up enough individual words they start getting them to read sentences that chain together these sight words, they start out like "Girl looks at cat".

Once they have built up enough of a vocabulary they introduce books called early readers that have multiple sentences and usually they will try and chuck a new word into each story. These build up over time as they move up through the levels.

In parallel with this the structured literacy approach is for them to start learning to read the words one letter at a time, read the individual sounds of each letter out and verbally 'blend' them into the sound of each word. After the first couple of years alot of kids should be able to do this well enough to figure out new words, english, Te Reo, perhaps other languages.

As far as I can recall, there is no Te Reo in any of the sight word lists. I suggested elsewhere that probably there should be.

The reason I was filled with dread every time "At the Marae" was in our book bag was that there was a disproportionate number of new words, compared with our usual one or two in a book where we could try ( and often fail ) to blend the words together or if my kid was frustrated or feeling lazy he might just guess what would fit in the context of the sentence.

This is something that applies to anyone who is struggling with reading, this is a good chunk of most classes, it's not specific to any particular special needs group.

If there was a bunch of books that introduced Te Reo one or two words at a time and built it up like the magenta readers, it would be fine.

What they look to be choosing to do is to move the Te Reo until after the child can decode the words and blend them themselves. For most kids this is when they are in year 2 or so.