We’ve all heard the definition of insanity: doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. That’s where we are at with education in New Zealand right now. The latest TIMSS (Trends In International Mathematics And Science Study) results are in, and once again, Kiwi kids are tracking downwards.

Look at the list of countries and read them to yourself. Look at where NZ sits in this list for fourth graders. We are fortieth behind countries like Kazakhstan, Croatia, Serbia, Armenia and Albania. So enough with the “NZ has the best education system in the world” nonsense. We don’t. Our children are being deprived of a decent education because of the hubris and stupidity of successive governments, our ideologically driven and self-interested teacher unions, and a much-vaunted but vacuous national curriculum.

What do you do with this impending train-wreck? For a start, you stop listening to the ‘experts’ who have been encouraging the driver to speed up! The leftist teacher unions have had a stranglehold on education for years, and what do they have to show for it? Continued and accelerating decline. Few governments have had the balls to stand up to them and do anything truly transformational. And when we see a glimmer of hope like Partnership Schools which were doing so much good for our Pacific and Maori students, they fight tooth and nail to shut them down.

A year or so back, I became acquainted with a TIMSS field trial in NZ in a small independent school. The school entered all its Year 10 students into the trial, and I happen to know that this particular cohort was not the most mathematically capable cohort the school had produced. Of great interest to me were the results that came back. The students were split into five small groups which sat slightly different tests. Despite this particular cohort struggling at times with the Mathematics that they were learning in the Cambridge curriculum, they aced these tests. The mean (of 2-3 students) from each of the five different test versions was significantly above the upper quartile (75th percentile) of the NZ wide results.

What is special about this school? Are the fees ridiculously high? No. Do they draw from an affluent neighbourhood? No, in fact they are in South Auckland. Do they have modern technology and all the bells and whistles in all their classes? No, they are very traditional in their approach to education, and some visitors have commented that they have the look of a deprived school. A more charitable observation would be that the facilities are basic but functional. Nevertheless, they have high expectations in terms of academic success and moral character, teachers who teach rather than ‘facilitate’, and a knowledge rich curriculum. The results speak for themselves.

So what needs to happen in education in NZ for improvement to be made? How can we get more schools performing like this little independent school? What is the solution? Here are seven things I think could help our education system.

1. The government needs to level the playing field in education

If I ran a business and paid someone to manage it for me, and if my business continued to lose revenue, I would fire that manager and get someone new to take over. Well, what do we have in our education system? Successive governments have shown that whatever they do in education does not help. Things get worse. So they should move aside. They clearly have no skill in this area. They need to stop running a hopelessly inefficient system of education and encourage more independent schools into the market place. Hence the current government created monopoly needs to be crushed. They can begin to do this by giving a tax break to all families who opt to send their children to independent schools or homeschool. These families are saving the government money and producing better-educated citizens.

Ultimately they need to get out of education altogether and allow a free market. Free up education. Charter schools were a step in the right direction. But we must be more radical. We need a market where parents can choose the school they want their children to attend. A voucher system might help provided there were very few government strings attached and a true diversity of school approaches was allowed. The removal of zoning certainly would help. These innovations would have the benefit of forcing schools to up their game. Most parents are far more invested in their children’s education than anyone else, including paper-pushing education bureaucrats. They know their children and their needs and are more than capable of selecting a school that suits their child. Schools that are not meeting the needs of children will not have many students. How sad. Maybe they will have to provide a service parents actually want. It’s called the real world. Teachers and schools do not deserve charity. They actually need to provide a worthwhile service. In a free market, schools will be forced to truly care about the education of children or they will cease to exist.

2. Ignore the teacher unions and break their power

Secondly, the government will also need to stand up to the self-interested teacher unions. They care nothing about decent education. Any true reforms that have been likely to lead to educational improvements for our poorest children they have opposed – charter schools being the case in point. They have no moral legitimacy and should be made to sit in the corner with a dunce cap on!

3. Abolish the Teaching Council and Strip Down Teacher Registration Requirements

Next we need to scrap the leftist Teaching Council; a truly inept and bloated bureaucracy that rips off teachers with a now annual fee of $157 in order to spout leftist propaganda. Quite simply, the Teaching Council is about gate-keeping. Much of their code and standards have little to do with teaching, and more to do with forcing compliance and uniformity of thinking with regards to the Treaty of Waitangi and woke issues du jour. Teacher registration, which they control, has become a joke. It supposedly protects children against incompetent and unprofessional teachers. Clearly, to anyone who reads the news, this is not the case. The truth of the matter is registration has become a political system of ensuring leftist domination of education.

With the Teaching Council removed, we would be able to reduce registration requirements to attract a more diverse range of competent people into the teaching workforce. A simpler system of registration would ensure teachers are police vetted, can pass certain cognitive tests and have satisfactory general knowledge and teaching competency. Of course, this would have the downside (or should we say upside) of weeding out a significant proportion of the current teaching population.

I am only half-joking in that last sentence. When I completed my primary teacher training some years ago I was shocked by the ability of some of the prospective teachers. One aspect of the course required us to pass an Intermediate Maths test. Many of the prospective (and I will add here women, because that is the truth) teachers struggled with this and a couple of the young men helped tutor these women in preparation for the test. Not ideal to have these sorts teaching our precious children!

4. Allow Principals to Determine Pay

This is controversial but necessary. It’s not hard to determine a good teacher from a mediocre one. Principals are educational leaders and if they can’t tell the difference, they shouldn’t be in positions of leadership. More flexibility in pay scales and an ability to pay better teachers more as a reward for their expertise will help encourage the right type of hard-working and driven people into the profession. Some say this will destroy collegiality. Nonsense. I’ve worked in business environments where some sales people earned a lot more than others. But they were always willing to advise newer or less able workmates on how they could improve.

5. Scrap the New Zealand Curriculum and NCEA as Requirements

The New Zealand Curriculum is a truly vacuous document. It gives teachers very little assistance regarding what children actually need to know. Briar Lipson has written extensively on this. New Zealand would be far better off introducing a truly International Curriculum like CAIE (Cambridge) with its external benchmarks. In the meantime, it should no longer be compulsory for New Zealand schools to use the New Zealand curriculum or to offer NCEA.

6. Introduce externally measured benchmarks

Related to the previous point is the need for externally measured benchmarks. Parents need snapshots of where their children are at. The teacher unions, of course, hated National Standards, and they would hate externally assessed benchmarks even more. These would leave little wriggle room for fudging the results, which schools did with National Standards. They have the added benefit of parents being able to determine which schools are performing well and provide an environment conducive to academic success. CAIE of course offers external examinations that are a true test of a student’s capabilities. The content of examinations is a tightly kept secret, and the only way teachers can prepare their students is by ensuring they have covered the extensive syllabus requirements.

7. Stop Seeing Schools as the Fix-Alls of Society

An unfortunate trend I have seen in education is that schools have been viewed as a panacea for all social ills. If there is a problem, schools need to deal with it. This in my opinion is also an unfortunate result of the femininisation of education.

Teaching has become feminised and more focused on caring and less on academic rigour. We need a more masculine and results orientated approach. We need to get back to the concept that schools exist to provide an academic education. They do not exist to give hugs, provide lunches, and ensure every child gets a certificate. We need to get back to the main thing being the main thing. Providing incentives to encourage more men back into primary teaching could help.

So there are my 7 tips for improving education in New Zealand. However, I’m not holding my breath with this government!