Every so often an excellent editorial appears. This one, from the DomPost is well worth a read.
Just who is in charge of our public education system?
Is it Anne Tolley, education minister in a Government overwhelmingly voted into office last November? Or teachers? The answer should be Mrs Tolley.
But recent events suggest that those whose job it is to prepare young minds for the future believe they are at the wheel. They need to be bluntly disabused of that notion.
At least one school head has outrageously threatened publicly to undermine the education policies that contributed to National's election win last year - it promised to set literacy and numeracy standards for primary-school kids, and make the results available to parents.
Teachers, afraid that, because such results will be subject to the Official Information Act, the public will be able compile "league tables" that show how each school compares with its fellows, pretend theirs is principled opposition. Rubbish. Their objections are political - this Government is not stuffed with former teachers and university lecturers - and visceral.
They fear any weaknesses will be exposed and that parents, some of them able to see for the first time that the empress in front of the class is naked, will opt to send their littlies to a school that does better.
Head teachers have been unmasked as complicit in attempts to derail Mrs Tolley's plans.
Though she insists that most of the sector is working with the Education Ministry to raise pupils' achievement levels, she cannot be anything but furious that Auckland primary school head Paul Heffernan has boasted publicly he would "even fudge the results big time ... ".
Why has this public servant still got a job? He, and those who agree with him, need a reality check. They are not the pivot around which education should revolve. Though inspirational teachers are integral to the process, at the heart of public education should be the six to 16-year-olds for whom it is compulsory.
And regrettably often, these kids are let down. Last year, research showed that 90 per cent of prisoners are "functionally illiterate" - their reading and writing skills are inadequate to cope with the demands of daily life.
Yet most of these inmates passed through a New Zealand primary school. As these kids struggled to read, write and do arithmetic, their teachers happily collected pay rises they saw as entitlements.
How can these teachers live with themselves knowing they have failed so many children? How do they explain the uncomfortably long tail of under-achievement throughout the public education system? How do they rationalise the millions the taxpayer must now spend helping the illiterate and innumerate recover wasted years?
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The Government wants New Zealand to have a populace whose basic skills are such that they provide a foundation for further study in an increasingly competitive world, or that allow the less academically gifted to cope comfortably in an increasingly complex and technologically dependent society. And, ideally, they want children to learn the basics at primary school, rather than have the taxpayer pay for remedial education later in life. What, for heaven's sake, is there to object to in that?
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