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| Cartoon by Nick Kim |
I'm looking for the right word to describe my feeling when I read this op-ed, from the NZ Initiative's Dr Michael Johnson.
He writes:
For two decades, New Zealand’s school education system has been in a death spiral.
In 2007, the Ministry of Education adopted a curriculum bereft of knowledge. A few years earlier it had implemented NCEA, an unorthodox ‘standards-based’ approach to school qualifications. NCEA encourages fragmented teaching and rewards superficial learning.Around the same time, Teachers Colleges were absorbed by the universities. The universities’ initial teacher education (ITE) programmes do not prepare new teachers well for the profession. Trainees have too little classroom experience during their training. The quality of the professional mentoring they receive is highly variable. The coursework focusses on the wrong things.
Data, both domestic and international, demonstrate the dismal consequences. Our young people are less literate and numerate, and generally less knowledgeable, than they were 20 years ago.
That all sounds all too sadly correct, except .... what's this about twenty years ago? The problem began loooong before that. Where was Dr Johnson that he didn't notice?
In 2005, the Labour department here found that more than half-a-million New Zealand adults have inadequate literacy and numeracy skills! Half a million!
In a briefing to incoming ministers [reported the old 'Dom Post' back in November 2005], the department said though the latest adult literacy and numeracy survey was nearly a decade old, 18 per cent – or 530,000 adults – had "very low" competencies. Living standards would slow in the next decade unless "skills and adaptability" of the existing workforce improved.
They didn't.
Things got even worse. Much worse: the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) reckons that around 48% of New Zealand adults have low literacy skills — forty-eight percent! — skills, while 50% have low numeracy skills. These rates are not just "higher than the OECD average," they are a complete fricking disaster.
Nothing has been done to arrest this. But the trajectory was set long ago, condemning several generations to functional illiteracy and innumeracy.
But there's one thing that hasn't declined: the amount of indoctrination in the classroom. That's only increased.
Here's a random sample of what I was already saying over the last two decades, indicating the problem has been around longer than 2005 ...
- When literacy dives at home, as it has -- more feel-good crap and less real learning seems to be the motto of the state's factory schools both here and the US -- then it becomes easier to hire literate workers 'outsourced' from offshore.
Outsourcing the literate – NOT PC, 2005 - Illiterate graduates of the State's factory schools have been let down by a system that promotes the government's chosen values ahead of promoting real learning. We are all the losers.
Neither free nor education – NOT PC, 2005 - Literacy and numeracy rates are already at an all time low. Any honest educator would be horrified at at that, and scrambling to reverse the situation. Instead, the government's ministry of educators instead intend to continue the process that delivered that across the board failure.
Recipe for indoctrination – NOT PC, 2005 - As a new report by consultants McKinsey and Co makes plain, spending on NZ's factory schools has rocketed in the last few years, while results have ... slid back.
So we're left staring into the maw of a great truth: throwing money at education doesn't give you better education. The less that's spent on the factory schools, the worse the results; the more that's spent on the government's factory school, the worse the results. We're left to deduce that education isn't a function of the money that's thrown at it; what matters more is what that money is spent on.
What it's been spent on in recent years is bullshit, mush and toxic swill.
Education: Buying less with more – NOT PC, 2007 - “Education in the government's factory schools is pumping out an ever-increasing number of functionally illiterate and unemployable youths - good for nothing beyond stuffing a ballot box."
Illiterates still sadly surging forth. Ambulances positioned firmly at cliff base. – NOT PC, 2008 - Things are bad all over. Literacy figures across the western world have been getting worse and worse for years … Can you imagine then, in a world of rampant and increasing illiteracy, a school which goes against fashion and where students are actually taught to read, and to write well?
Reading, writing and teaching that works – NOT PC, 2007 - It’s not just that teachers don’t want to be found out for their lacklustre teaching – although that’s the motivation for many of them – it’s that today’s fashionable educational theories mitigate against any objectivity at all, or even genuine education.
Standards? What standards? – NOT PC, 2009 - If there’s a silver bullet for improving the appalling literacy rates of the youngsters who leave NZ’s factory schools it’s not National Bloody Standards, it’s phonics. Phonics from an early age to teach youngsters properly what those marks on the page sound like, and at a later age to repair the damage of those teachers who told them the marks themselves didn’t matter – that it was okay just to guess.
There’s a frickin’ elephant in the schoolroom – NOT PC, 2009 - I posted this morning about the complete and calamitous systemic failure that happens when government departments go wrong. Here’s one of the biggest, confirmed by just-released Massey University research: the minimising and belittling of phonics in teaching reading (begun by “The Look-Guess Lady” Dame Marie Clay and spread though govt Teachers Colleges, and govt schools with govt-mandated curricula) which has been disastrous.
New report says bring back phonics to fix widespread illiteracy – NOT PC, 2013
Despite having his blinkers on earlier, apparently, Dr Johnson is excited now nonetheless that Education Minister Erica Stanford appears to be "on a mission to turn things around." He looks forward to "a new, knowledge-rich curriculum [which] is on the way." He is thrilled that "work is being undertaken to reform NCEA."
Basically, he is fired up that a small change in the state's factory school system now will effect a major turnaround from many decades of piss-poor pedagogy peddled by that same system —and by he himself.
I alluded in posts above to the tragedy that the primary object of the state's factory schools is neither literacy nor numeracy, but pumping out youngsters fully inculcated with the state's chosen values. That indoctrination is only going to increase under Minister Stanford, not decrease. As it has and will under every minister.
'The only way to change that is not minor tinkering from a minister however highly (allegedly) motivated. The only way is a complete separation of school and state—in the same way and the same reason as the separation of church and state.
Free the children! They have nothing to lose but their illiteracy, and their indoctrination.
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