Mourning The Lost Profession

The Black Widow Endemic in Schools

A new report from NZ Initiative is about to be published.  It will focus upon government schools.  The pre-release promo says:

What kinds of things matter for student achievement? Is it class size, school journals, the school building, or a flash new gym?  These may play a role at the margin, but they pale in significance next to what research conclusively shows is the most important in-school factor for student achievement: the teacher.

On Monday, The New Zealand Initiative releases its first education report on teacher quality, and it comes at quite a precipitous time. As the ageing teacher workforce moves into retirement, New Zealand needs to not only replenish this workforce but attract the best and brightest into the teaching profession. And then, for teachers to develop to their full potential and to retain the best teachers, teaching must be a challenging and rewarding career.

Apparently the report will focus upon the issues of teacher remuneration and career paths which now represent serious impediments to teaching being a life-long career for those who are actually gifted teachers.

Aside from going into school administration, there is little opportunity, challenge, and recognition for a teacher to further develop their skills and capability. Also, the maximum salary point is reached after eight years. It is obvious what kind of signal this sends: teachers have reached their maximum ability after eight years.

Here is another gripe by those in the profession--not mentioned in forthcoming report it would seem--yet a frequently enunciated complaint:  every year teachers need to spend more time and effort on bureaucratic compliance, completing reports, tables, data lists and a never-ending demand for compliance reports.  Consequently, less and less time is spent actually teaching and on lesson preparation.  Job satisfaction is dropping like a stone throughout the profession. 

Government schools are now thoroughly politicised.  They are a battle ground between unions and the government of the day, between political parties vying for electoral traction, between academic theorists and practitioners, and between the Ministry of Education and school administrators.  For any government they are a political minefield of controversy, strife, criticism, and ideological conflict which every government of the day believes it has to manage.  The result: more and more controls and oversight administered remotely from Central HQ.  This translates into ever more bureaucratic compliance, form filling, reporting, and box-ticking.  Everyone hates it.  Job dissatisfaction is endemic. 

This will simply not change.  Government schools are an extension of government and, therefore, cannot help themselves becoming bureaucratic organs of the state.  The recent initiative to permit charter schools in New Zealand is a classic illustration.  A governing idea behind charter schools is the revitalisation that can come from new and different approaches to teaching and schools.  But due to the politicisation of the issue and the controversy generated by unions and those opposed, the bureaucratic reporting burden of charter schools is to be more onerous than regular government schools!  The need to mitigate and minimise political risks has ended up tainting the whole initiative.  We expect that within five years it will have destroyed it.  The black widow will have turned on its own.