An ideological war has broken out within the Commentariat in New Zealand. It does not happen very often, making it all the more diverting. The field of battle is the government education system.
On one side are the Allies--a fighting coalition of three powers which has held sway in our education system for four decades or more.
The first of the Allied powers are the Marxist education theoreticians and their followers who argue that the power structures and their ideologies in New Zealand must be broken down if the New Society is to be built. Therefore, education is a process of teaching a student to criticise everything, accept nothing, and reject everything (except Marxist dogma, of course).
The second member of the triumvirate is the oh-so-trendy "pomos"--the post-modernists--who argue that there is no truth, only narratives, stories.
Education is a process of breaking down the dominant narratives of society and getting students to think critically about all narratives, determining which are the most congenial for them.
The third triumvirate member is the pragmatists or progressives who believe in the native innocence and purity of the child. Education is a task where less is very, very much more.
These three have allied together to argue, push, bully and contend that the best education is constructivist: that is, the student must be allowed to construct his own curriculum/narrative/critical theory. The "role" of the teacher is to facilitate, to coach. Any interdiction of this vital task will cause unimaginable harm to vulnerable students: repressing them, subduing them, restraining them, misleading them.
The shock-troops of the Allies are the educational unions. They consistently unload a heavy barrage of artillery, which, when it explodes, thunders a frightening barrage of "We know best; we are the experts; you will do irreparable harm to the children of the nation". Successive governments have tried to reform the system, but inevitably left the battle field bloodied, battered and defeated.
But there is a new force in the Hood: the Economic Rationalists. They have recently discovered some fight. Actually, they argue that they (and we) have no choice: our backs are against the wall. New Zealand is being economically hollowed out by overseas competition; moreover, our social services are ravenously consuming tax payers income at a frightening rate. One way out is to up our educational performance so that everyone is employable (thus hopefully escaping a lifetime of government welfare dependency), and so that our economic productivity will rise.
The ER's have gone into battle. First there has been the introduction of testing and national standards in Reading, Writing, and Maths. Now there is a promised ranking of schools according to how well they are achieving standards. Next is the ranking of teachers themselves, and, finally, performance pay.
Here is one ER's gatling gun in action--Damien Grant, columnist in the NZ Herald.
Hekia Parata, the new Minister of Education, has an agenda. She appears to want to tackle the problem of poor teachers. It is time, she announced to principals, for them to sort the wheat from the chaff. . . .Provocative salvo. It seems that the ER's have discovered they have a voice. Long past due, in our opinion.
Parata is talking about performance pay for teachers and publishing league tables for schools based on National Standards. This is, as Sir Humphrey would say, courageous.
Teacher unions are opposed to both policies. To bolster their argument the NZEI recently brought Australian academic Professor Margaret Wu to our shores. Wu was quoted in the Otago Daily Times as saying that "we need to look at education more broadly than just students' academic results".
It is hard to imagine a more incredulously stupid comment. We pay teachers to teach - not to eat their lunch. We can and should assess success by comparing what the class knows at the end of the process from what they knew at the start. A competent principal will know which teachers are effective and which are not. A system that does not reward success encourages failure. Poor performers stay, talent leaves, children remain uneducated. Our education industry has become a sheltered workshop for useless teachers and a frustrating workplace for good educators.
The problem with the NZEI and the PPTA is that they are unions masquerading as education think-tanks. Unions exist to advance the cause of their members. This is honest work in a free society and teacher unions have been remarkably successful at shielding their members from any form of performance scrutiny. They are so good I suspect they have convinced even themselves that it is not possible to tell a good teacher from a bad one and that students learn by osmosis rather than by anything a teacher actually does or does not do.
Thirty per cent of students leave school without passing Year 12, or NCEA 2. This is a shocking result and it is worse for Pacific Island and Maori students. We are condemning a third of our students to low-paid, unskilled futures to shield lazy teachers.
1 comment:
m'mm very interesting, my only comment is that my own children got extremely good educations at the state intergrated private schools that were available to us
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