Another Education Anathema

Educrats Show Their Slips

A fresh brouhaha has broken out over government schools in New Zealand.  The Prime Minister, John Key in his inimitable political style informed the nation in an off the cuff remark that he thought school league tables was not a bad idea.  Government schools would be ranked from best to worst according to how their pupils scored on national standards testing in reading, writing, and maths. 

That casual, informally delivered comment generated a predictable carpet bombing fire-storm from every educational union.  This in itself is a very strange situation.
  Unions exist to protect the interests of their members.  Usually they concentrate upon things like member pay and conditions, leave entitlements, insurance and retirement.  In New Zealand, the teacher unions have taken it upon themselves to act like a political party: they exist primarily to criticise government policy and directions in government schools.  Imagine the conniptions in the public square if, say, a transport workers' union began to slag off a trucking company because it was going to buy a transport business in Europe, or was going to diminish the number of its  Directors, or was not going to decrease its capital expenditure. 

Yet teacher unions do this kind of thing all the time, and no-one turns a hair.  Few see anything unusual in it--which shows how effective they have been at manipulating and indirectly controlling the media and politicians.  It's high time they were cut down to size, or de-registered as unions.  But we digress.

What's wrong with league tables.  Everything.  They are terrible.  They do great damage.  So says an enlightened expert: 

An expert on school league tables says introducing the system here would lead to schools narrowing their teaching focus, competing for the "best" students and rejecting those who fall behind in order to reach national targets. 

Professor Martin Thrupp, of Waikato University, spent six years in Britain researching education markets and accountability in schools.  "People love to see the numbers - which schools are doing better - but within schools, there's a lot of anxiety."

Incidentally, David Farrar calls our attention to the sad reality that Professor Martin Thrupp is far from a disinterested academic.  He is an active union supporter advocating against government policies in education on behalf of the union.  But the media consistently cloak this with nomenclature such as "academic expert"--something which, in this case, the NZ Herald reporter swallowed hook, line, and sinker--as the media typically do.

 The polemical professor continued:

Professor Thrupp said that . . . . [h]is research showed a competitive nature developed between schools and the focus soon turned to reaching national targets.   "Schools begin to say no to students - children with disabilities, children with difficulties in learning, children who come from poorer backgrounds.  "There becomes a national standards economy - a way of thinking where they narrow their teaching focus to just reaching those targets."

Let's think a bit more about his verbal barrage.  We have a zoning model in New Zealand, where schools are obligated to take local children.  Parents have some leeway putting their children into neighbouring schools, if they prefer.  And that's where competition for students amongst schools arises.  It exists now.  Ranking schools according to their effectiveness in teaching reading, writing and maths would only serve to sharpen that competition upon something that is really, really important.

This, says Professor Thrupp creates anxiety in schools.  This is a rhetorical slip.  As a good unionist he is supposed to say that he is all about what is good for the pupils.  But this is sly misdirection.  The real concern of the teacher unions is, well, the teacher unions.  Professor Thrupp does not want under-performing teachers to become anxious about their poor performance.  Professor Thrupp has been caught showing the union's slip beneath his skirt.

Moreover, Professor Thrupp introduces another chestnut.  We professional educators are concerned about children from poor backgrounds, learning difficulties and disabilities.  We care about them.  We want to ensure that they are well taken care of.  Poppycock.  New Zealand has a long, long tail of Maori and Pacific Island kids who "graduate" from our union controlled schools unable to read or write, who descend into the underclass out of which they came, to spend the rest of the lives on drugs and alcohol, indolent and criminally bent, and--as far as society is concerned--a waste of space.  The current education system has done nothing for these kids for decades.  But every attempt to change up is opposed by the teacher unions--unless it means more teachers. 

League tables can be used to rank schools on pupils' marginal improvement  as well as absolute standard achievement.  Schools in Decile One (the lowest socio-economic areas) which register higher marginal improvement could achieve much higher rankings on the marginal improvement scale.  They, after all, would be achieving off a low base with plenty of scope for high marginal achievement. 

Another criticism is that schools will narrow their teaching to focus upon--well-- reading, writing, and maths.  And the problem with that is?  What the hide-bound, ante-diluvian education academics seem unable to grasp is that if pupils cannot read, write, and calculate proficiently, virtually all other subjects--apart from kapa haka--are lost to them.  It is precisely the school that concentrates upon getting the basics done really well that is able to broaden the curriculum out to a wide diversity of subjects.  Try teaching French to students who cannot read or write.  Try teaching physics to pupils who cannot understand nor calculate fractions and decimals.

The hide-bound educrats and unionists have another hidden agenda--an ideological one.  A leading unionist pulls the skirt up higher:

NZ Educational Institute president Ian Leckie said international evidence on the effect of league tables on quality education was "damning".  Mr Leckie said league tables would ultimately change what Kiwi children would be learning and how they would be taught at school.   "League tables lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and a consequent loss of creativity and individual learning."  (Emphasis, ours)

Now, let's be clear  For Leckie and his fellow unionists, educrats, and academics quality education is one where the child is taught as little as possible by hegemonic teachers and content-based curricula.  Quality education is where a pupil explores his inner being, self-reifies, and becomes creative.  For Leckie and his cohort, quality education is individual learning.  Teaching reading, writing and maths to achieve defined standards is the very opposite of individual learning: it is collective educational slavery.  For Leckie it is harmful and damaging to children.  We are not making this up.  This is precisely what our national educrats, education unionists, and theoreticians believe. 

If ever there was a time to clean up government schools it is now.  If Prime Minister Key and his colleagues knew the truth about the government educational establishment they would be much more aggressive about confronting it head-on.  It remains an open question as to who will win the battle.