There’s a strong theme running through this issue of NZ Principal magazine. It is that politicians create a crisis of educational failure to justify introducing a standardised curriculum with rigorous testing. That is what Education Minister Hon Erica Stanford is engaged in right now. Stanford is motivated to see New Zealand in the top ten of the OECD countries for Literacy and Maths. Both she and the Minister of Finance, Hon Nicola Willis see improved education results as the most important factor in improving future productivity in New Zealand. They are not the first Government Ministers to pair economic prosperity with educational outcomes.
It’s not that high numbers of New Zealand’s young people are failing. They are mostly doing quite well – although there is a growing group who are not doing so well. They sit at the bottom where Māori and Pacific Island ākonga are over-represented. We quite rightly should be concerned about these students. They are there because of inequities in the system, lack of high quality, timely learning support, and socioeconomic factors such as food, clothing and housing insecurity. These factors create transience and non-attendance. These students are also the young people who live in poverty, where mental health and related issues such as drug addiction and violence also thrive. They are our most vulnerable young people.
But rather than focus on the needs of these young people at the bottom, politicians always go for the standardised curriculum for all. If we think this behaviour is peculiar to the current coalition government – it is not. We had all of this from the 2008 Minister of Education Hon Hekia Parata and her national standards and many times before that, including in 1949 from the Minister of Education, Hon R.M. Algie. In 1965 the Minister of Education, Hon Arthur Kinsella, requested that NZCER develop standardised assessments for core subjects, and in1978 from the Hon Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, who similarly wanted to lift achievement. Whilst in opposition, Hon Lockwood Smith advocated a ‘back-to-basics’ approach with achievement benchmarks for each year level in English, Mathematics and Science, and on the national party’s return to government in 1990, the Minister of Education Hon Nick Smith, advanced the reforms, but paused them in 1996 due to feedback from schools regarding teacher workload and the scale and pace of change. In 2000 it was Education Minister Hon Trevor Mallard calling for high standards, weekly tests and regular reporting to parents – see Kim Hailwood’s, ‘Understanding the why behind education reforms – Contemporary reforms – mandating a one-size-fits-all to curriculum’ ( 5) for a comprehensive account of what sits behind such educational reform.
Right now, Aotearoa is having a ‘PISA Shock’ moment. According to Kim Hailwood, many countries before us have experienced similar ‘PISA shocks’ which almost always lead to curriculum reform. Tellingly, most OECD member countries are clustered in a central cohort so even minor variations can result in large shifts in rankings – a PISA shock – leading us to think that our ākonga are slipping drastically when they have hardly dropped at all. Add to this the sampling errors associated with PISA assessments, and rankings start to look a great deal less reliable, especially if countries are using OECD assessments to form their education policies.
Professor John O’Neill also addresses standardisation in his column ( 31), arguing that standardisation will not achieve equity, which Minister Stanford notes is another of her goals. He too talks about how discussions dominated by standards are almost always economic, but we cannot reduce economic inequities by forcing the same curriculum and standards on all children.
He opposes the idea that our vulnerable ākonga will be saved by the science of learning and its accompanying structured literacy and mathematics. O’Neill says that if these young people are to climb the learning ladder at all, they are far more likely to do so through those random teachable moments. Further, he notes fostering curiosity about the natural and social worlds and developing critical thinking and life ethics are equally as critical as literacy and mathematics.
President Leanne Otene adds to the debate in her own column ( 3) by asking ‘What is the purpose of Education?’ She adopts a definition of student success which extends beyond measuring reading, writing and mathematics to include, in equal measure, the broader competencies of developing well-rounded individuals who can collaborate, communicate effectively, show empathy and think critically. She adds that in Aotearoa New Zealand this also means fostering in our tamariki a strong sense of identity, culture and language while embracing te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Although not alone in a global sense, we have a long history of linking educational achievement with economic success, which makes OECD assessment programmes an attractive option for governments from both sides of our political divide. The OECD’s PISA TIMMS and PIRLS tests have become an obsession we cannot shake, and as each new set of rankings are rolled out, unless we have (almost accidentally) moved up the ladder, our government of the day will have another new standardised approach to curriculum, ready to roll. It should be no surprise that we had ‘Back to Basics’ with Lockwood Smith in the late 1980s and ‘Doing the Basics Brilliantly’ nearly 40 years later. They’re the same thing with a slightly different approach. As Lily Tomlin once said, ‘Maybe if people (or politicians) started to listen (to practitioners), history would stop repeating itself.’