NZ Education System: Ideologically Driven Mania

Stupidity That Beggars Belief

The New Zealand government education system is a mess.  It is the product for which both major political parties (Labour and National) are to blame.  Both parties bought into the fundamental egalitarianism of the system: no child should leave school without a qualification.  No child would be left behind.  

The egalitarianism of the Left required that there be no failures, no rejects, no-one without qualifications.  In order to achieve this, the government education system has had to broaden its curriculum to the point that its entire system has become either insignificant or meaningless.  So many of the creaks and groans of the current set-up arise from the utopian attempt to build an education system which would enable every child to "pass" in some subject or other.

Simon Collins, the NZ Herald education reporter has illustrated the problem:

Pukekohe High School final-year student Atarangi Thompson is in no doubt: physics is hard.  "Some subjects like English, maths and science are a lot harder mentally to understand," she says, after a lesson that included the equation for splitting the atom and having to explain why the energy lost in an atomic explosion is equivalent to the increase in mass.

But in our system the intellectual rigour of those subjects is not given greater value. "Demonstrate understanding of atomic and nuclear physics" is worth 3 credits at Level 2 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). "Experience day tramps" is worth exactly the same.  "Walking can be hard physically," Atarangi says. "But this stuff - it's more that you need to learn more. I think that harder subjects should be worth a lot more credits."

Did you get that little gem: going on a walk will earn the avid student "three educational credits".  So will hard core, vital subjects such as English, maths, and science: three credits all.  This is egalitartianism driven mad by the gluttonous consumption of ideological steroids. 

The consequences for our school system are immediately apparent.

The first is that our schools are overstaffed, on the one hand, and (surprise, surprise) there is a teacher shortage, on the other.  There are so many more "subjects" to be taught, from advanced tiddlywink techniques to post-Newtonian physics.  Madness.  Ideologically driven myopic madness.

The second is the vast bureaucracy required to write, deliver, and administer fatuous qualifications.  The NZ Qualifications Authority--supposedly an arms length independent bureaucracy--is constantly adding worthless achievement standards and qualifications for an ever expanding list of "subjects".  It should be scrapped immediately.

A third consequence is overcapitalised schools.  The cost of putting up a new school is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.  Why?  Well, it has to cater for a huge range of subjects.  Performing arts complexes are just as necessary as science labs--and much more expensive, we may add. But these days, no good school worth its salt can be considered credible without one, so that pupils can get educational credits in the rarefied subject of spontaneous Patagonian dance.  Earning credits in performing arts is just as valuable and important to society as wrestling with Newton's Law of Gravity, after all.

A fourth consequence is widespread public incredulity and scepticism over the government education system.  People know it's a rort.  When they hear of earning educational credits (with merit) for walking in the outdoors they know it's a rort.  But they are too embarrassed to tell their children.  A vast conspiracy of silence descends on our communities.

Finally, the students themselves know it's all a crock.  These are the real victims of this Monty Pythonesque folly.  They are told that a bright future awaits them if they are diligent to work through the system with all its numerous, grandiose subjects promising the world and delivering irrelevance.  As soon as they realise the vast con in which they have been forced to participate they mentally and physically disengage and drop out.

And that's enough to make ordinary folk very angry indeed.  And so they should be.

We have nothing against trade or career orientated schools.  A far more focused curriculum has enabled the Vanguard Academy for instance (a soon-to-be-shut charter school) to succeed with students who would have otherwise been the stock standard failures of the present government educational system.  But Vanguard was set up to prepare pupils for careers in the military, the police, customs, border security, and the like.  That brought a focused culture and a focused curriculum--and students were saved from the dark recesses of failure.  Their lives were given meaning, hope, and new found aspiration.

We give the final word to the NZ Herald:

We have deluded ourselves into thinking we are doing well because students leaving school with at least NCEA Level 2 have increased dramatically from 58 per cent of school-leavers in 2005 to 80 per cent in 2016.  But in the same period our 15-year-olds' scores in global tests for the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) have been sliding in all three subjects - reading, maths and science.

Using NCEA data, you would think the educational gaps between our socio-economic and ethnic groups have been marvellously closing. In the five years to 2016 the proportion of 18-year-olds with at least NCEA Level 2 leapt by 17 percentage points for Māori, and by 13 points for Pasifika, compared with only 9 points for Pākehā.  Yet in University Entrance (UE), which does not count non-academic subjects such as "Experience day tramps", the ethnic gaps have actually widened slightly since NCEA began in 2002.

The proportions of both Māori and Pasifika school-leavers with UE rose by 11 points from 2001 to 2016, compared with an average gain across all school-leavers of 15 points.

NZ Initiative report author Briar Lipson, who helped start several academy or charter schools in Britain before moving to New Zealand last year, quotes research by Herald journalist Kirsty Johnston, who found Māori and Pasifika students are disproportionately channelled into non-academic subjects such as hospitality and retailing.  "It is hard to avoid the suspicion that at least some of this apparent improvement is based on learning that is of dubious value," Lipson says in the report.

"To create a national assessment system that pretends all subjects - from meat processing to mathematics - are equal, is a deception, and one that falls hardest on the very students most deserving of protection.  "There is no magic bullet or shortcut to educational equity. But NCEA disregards this difficult reality and instead places a deceit at the heart of our national assessment by suggesting to children that filling plastic containers holds the same value as studying literature, physics or Te Reo."

Quite.