The stoush going on in education circles is "exceedingly diverting" as National Standards start to roll out in primary schools. The union controlled education sector, deeply influenced by modern pedagogical theory, has been fighting it tooth and nail. The idea that children are masters of their own destiny when it comes to learning does not fit well with testing to see whether they can read and write. (Hence the incessant union narrative that National Standards harm children.)
One union activist headmaster who has participated in the covert guerrilla opposition decided to release the results of tests in his school.
Over eighty-five percent of his charges failed the initial tests. "See how bad the tests are," he railed, releasing his results to prove his point. He then asseverated that teaching the pupils at his school how to read and write was tantamount to working a miracle.
Another headmaster, Louis Guy has resigned rather that subject his school to the evils he believes will come with National Standards testing. None of this is having any impact upon the Minister of Education, Hekia Parata. She responded acerbically to Mr Guy's resignation:
However in a statement she said: "If Mr Guy feels he is unable to require the teachers under his authority and 'leadership' to implement Government policy, then he has made the right decision to step aside and leave the position to a committed professional leader who is able to work with teachers."Note the inverted commas encasing "leadership". Sarcasm sometimes is becoming. Meanwhile, across the Tasman the Minister of Education, Peter Garrett is delivering a very different message to teachers they (and their NZ colleagues) are used to hearing.
Yesterday in Melbourne Mr Garrett said that while money mattered, what was done with it mattered more. ''We know what to do with the money. It's not a mystery … teaching is the answer,'' he said. Mr Garrett endorsed the finding in David Gonski's report that "the quality of an education system depends on the quality of its teachers".Mmmm. Long ago, whilst the education colleges and the teacher training institutes and the teacher unions and the educrats at the Ministry of Mis-education were offering regular panegyrics to the state-of-the art, modern, intellectually enlightened education training systems in New Zealand, they were actually turning out teachers who could neither spell, nor construct a rationally comprehensible sentence. Many will recall getting notes from little Johnnie's teacher full of spelling errors. This was going on twenty-five years ago. It has not improved.
We recently had the experience of trying to find some teacher-in-training worthy of a scholarship. In this case we were looking for a committed, serious Christian looking to have a career teaching in Christian schools. All the applicants--currently studying at tertiary training institutes--failed basic tests, like being able to spell and construct a sentence. Their zeal was unquestioned. Their dedication obvious. But they were all products of our government school system. It showed. We left our scholarship in the drawer, hoping that next year would produce a more worthy candidate.
Apparently things are different in Finland, to which the Sydney Morning Herald article also referred:
It is a view shared in Finland, one of the best-performing education systems in the world, which puts a premium on attracting the best possible people into the teaching profession. Pasi Sahlberg, the director of the Centre for International Mobility in Finland's Ministry of Education, who is addressing the federal conference of the Australian Education Union, said there were 10 times more applicants than places at Finnish universities to be trained as a primary school teacher.
Teachers in the country are drawn almost exclusively from the smartest 25 per cent of school leavers, he said. ''Everything else is much easier when you have such types of young people studying at university, who feel this is their first choice, who feel privileged they have been selected from such tough competition,'' he said. ''That's why we are in the very fortunate situation where we don't have to deal with the issue of so-called bad teachers.''
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