Like many of my readers, I have enjoyed the work of Dr Guy Hatchard throughout the Covid debacle. He has demonstrated himself to be a non-conformist and a man who can think outside the government constructed ideological box. That being said, I want to disagree with Dr Hatchard on a post he wrote recently entitled ‘The Pandemic was Yesterday Today we have a Serious Problem‘.
In the article, Hatchard points out that non-conformists are often the creatives that drive progress. I think we all know this from experience to be the truth. However, where he goes wrong is when he explores how the New Zealand education system is leading to fewer non-conformists and creatives.
As mentioned in previous posts, I have some knowledge of a small independent school in New Zealand. Situated in a low socioeconomic area of the country, you would naturally assume it would struggle to attract students. Not so. It has waiting lists at almost all levels. Despite local state schools having millions of dollars thrown at them in building upgrades, parents are desperate to move their children into this small independent school. Unfortunately, the school is at capacity in most year levels, and has to turn away many of those who apply.
So what’s going on in these other schools? There are of course multiple factors. One is discipline. Some schools seem reluctant or unable to deal with difficult students. In one of the local schools, teachers are instructed to leave the classroom with the rest of the class when a student ‘loses it’ and begins destroying things. Independent schools tend to have more ability to deal with discipline issues because a contract exists between parents and the school. Truculent students can be dealt with effectively by putting the onus back where it belongs – with the parents.
A second issue is of course the academic side of things. Unfortunately, the New Zealand curriculum is content-light and this is supposedly one of its benefits. Children will be able to learn skills in a way that caters to the interests and knowledge of their local community. This sounds very nice in theory, and in higher decile communities it has less of a negative impact than in lower decile communities. In lower socio-economic areas this ‘skills-based’ local knowledge approach tends to leave children from knowledge poor communities trapped. They are not provided with the knowledge that will help them succeed in society.
On a related note, there are low-expectations. Students applying to enter this independent school must sit placement tests, and the results of most children who apply from the local schools are depressing. Children can get through intermediate without knowing virtually anything about fractions or even basic numerical skills. In English, many students are unaware of basic conventions such as capitalization and punctuation. They write as they would text. Speaking of texting, these children often have atrocious handwriting because they have done most of their ‘learning’ on devices.
Unfortunately, for some children, they will never make up the lost ground. Those who spend their primary years in these state-run institutions may be doomed academically. High school teachers cannot be expected to teach cognitively challenging concepts in preparation for the rigours of university to children who are innumerate and illiterate. It is not fair or realistic.
So my advice to you if you are living in a low-socio economic area is to look very carefully at your options. If you want your children to succeed in the world, you might want to look at other options. If you are relatively well-educated yourself, you might consider home-schooling. If you are not, you might consider doing everything you can to get your child into a school that focusses on giving your child a knowledge-rich education. If you cannot afford to do that, the next best thing is to join your local library, and get your child reading widely. If your local school is focussing on things like environmental issues or cultural groups, realise that as nice as these things might be, if they are taking time away from attaining knowledge, your child is being cheated out of an education that could raise his sites, his future prospects, his future earning potential, and his future living standards.
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!
In response to a recent study conducted by The New Zealand Initiative highlighting a possible knowledge deficit in New Zealand education, NZ Principals Federation president Whetu Cormick responded in the New Zealand Herald saying:
“For a child in Bluff who might be interested in muttonbirds, they are not going to be interested in the fact that there are seven continents in the world,”
“We need to continue to develop a curriculum that is relevant to the community and in partnership with the community.”
A press release from The New Zealand Initiative suggests these comments reveal a particular weakness in New Zealand education.
The New Zealand Initiative and Whetu Cormick represent two opposite ends of a spectrum in education on the role of knowledge. Is there a set body of knowledge children should be given? What should be the role of knowledge in education? To answer these questions is complex and much depends on personal worldview and one’s perspective of the purpose of education.
The New Zealand Curriculum
For those of you who are not clear on education talk, ‘curriculum’ is simply Latin for ‘course of study’. So what position does our New Zealand Curriculum take on the role of knowledge?
The current New Zealand Curriculum is very open-ended. To give you an idea of what this looks like, consider Mathematics, which in the New Zealand Curriculum is one of the more prescriptive subjects. For level 3, which equates to roughly two years of school (Year 5 & 6), there are 17 main achievement objectives. By way of contrast, the Stage 5 (just one year of school equivalent to NZ Year 5) Cambridge Primary Mathematics syllabus contains 98 learning objectives. It’s fair to say then that our New Zealand Curriculum rejects the older traditional knowledge-rich approach for what could be described as a ‘skills’ or ‘outcomes-based’ approach.
Potential Benefits
One of the main benefits of this approach is the ability of teachers and schools to have the freedom to decide how best to educate the children in response to the needs of their community. Not every community is the same, and a one-size-fits-all model of education is not going to suit every community, let alone every individual child. I think many parents desire that their children learn in a way that reflects their concerns and worldview. Having a government decide what every child should learn about every subject does sound rather Orwellian.
Potential Dangers
Nevertheless, there are a number of dangers inherent in such an open-ended curriculum.
Firstly, it ignores the truth that there is a body of knowledge that our children need to grasp to lead successful and useful lives. One classic example of this is in reading comprehension. More competent readers are better, not because they have acquired superior skills in reading per se, but because they have a better knowledge-base that allows them to understand what they are reading. Another reason we need to have a common body of knowledge is that it facilitates communication in civil society. In communication with others, we assume certain things. Communication becomes difficult and more likely to lead to friction in society when different groups do not have a large shared body of knowledge.
Secondly, this approach is likely to lead to the entrenchment of inequality in society. In a world where we teach children what we deem is relevant to them, we are in danger of depriving them of the knowledge they need to make socio-economic gains. Teachers know that some children come to school with a knowledge deficit. Others have had privileges that come with more educated and wealthy parents. Schools can have a role in reducing this knowledge gap, but only if they are willing to see education as taking children outside of their known world and providing them with the proven riches of the great past civilizations, cultures and thinkers.
Education should be about breaking down barriers and giving children wings, not making assumptions about what they deserve to know. We should bring the best of the past to our children so they can enjoy these treasures that may be outside their community’s immediate knowledge.
Thirdly, an open-ended curriculum such as the New Zealand Curriculum actually requires a very knowledgeable and educated teaching profession who can make sound decisions regarding what needs to be taught. It is doubtful that this is the case. While few would doubt the enthusiasm and diligence of most teachers, given that the entry requirements for a primary teaching degree are some of the lowest in degree courses it seems unlikely that teaching is attracting our most knowledgeable and educated talent.
A fourth concern is that an open curriculum is likely to be hijacked by the issue du jour. This is in fact already happening. The school climate strikes in 2019 are symptomatic of this. Well-meaning and passionate children missed school to protest against climate change. It does seem that very little balance is being provided by schools and teachers on this issue, and our children are being used as pawns in a larger political game.
Faulty Assumptions
Finally, the move toward an outcomes-based model and away from a knowledge-rich curriculum seems to be built on a number of faulty presuppositions. The first is that knowledge itself is unimportant. One does not need to read too widely to find educators arguing that knowledge is irrelevant in the age of Google, “because you can just look it up”. While this might seem a fair enough comment for an adult who has a relatively solid basic grid of knowledge from which to draw, for a child, it is often the case that they will not know the questions to ask. They don’t know what they don’t know! To become a skilled expert in any field, a comprehensive knowledge of your subject (and of course application of this) is always going to be a requirement.
A second faulty assumption is that education should follow the interests of the child. In the Herald article mentioned at the outset, Whetu Cormick is reported as indicating that the curriculum was right to let teachers choose topics that interest their students, because students could always find out other facts on the internet. But perhaps this thinking has things around the wrong way. Children will look up things in encyclopedias or get books out of the library or google them based on their interests at home. They will do this anyway. What they won’t naturally look up is what they may not yet be interested in or even know about. And some of this is the knowledge that a civil society requires adults to know for human flourishing.
A final faulty assumption is that there is no hierarchy in knowledge. Muttonbirds and continents. Are they are equally important? Does it just depend on what you are interested in? Perhaps we could think of knowledge as a jigsaw puzzle. When my children and I attempt a jigsaw puzzle, we always begin by putting the corner and edge pieces together. It would be very difficult to begin with picking a middle piece at random. Certain pieces of knowledge and indeed subjects are like the edge pieces of a jigsaw. They are essential if we are going to get our puzzle anywhere near completed. School, and particularly the primary years, should be about getting those edge pieces put together. This will help our children as they go through life and put in the pieces they are going to need in their particular calling.
