Editor
If Novopay wasn’t such a serious contractual disgrace, the random madness of its blunders would by now have transported us all to La La Land! Mind you it takes less than Novopay to send educationalists to La La Land in today’s environment. I have the great pleasure of visiting real schools that exist in real heartland New Zealand. They are wonderful. I meet principals who are dedicated, selfless, innovative leaders who continuously inspire and motivate their staff to keep the children in their schools achieving better and better results. Whether they are located in decile ten or decile one neighbourhoods (see the story in this issue p. 15), I am constantly amazed at the energy, intelligence and commitment that teachers invest in making a better future for New Zealand’s kids every day. In particular I am stunned at the work being done to help improve the outlook for kids who don’t live a life of privilege and who arrive at school with few if any learning skills, no sense of self- worth and no hope for their future. They are the kids that this Government says are their priority learners. So far so good. Schools embrace the Government’s aspiration to give kids at the bottom of the social, economic and educational ladder a fairer chance at life. Both teachers and politicians know that education is a key to making a difference for the future of these kids. They don’t want to see them grow up and replicate the cycle of unemployment and hopelessness which their parents have endured. They want to break the cycle of despair and give these kids better opportunities and real options to live worthwhile lives and make a useful contribution to the society they live in. The obvious next step is that the Government and the profession would get together and work out a plan about how to achieve the shared dream. That however is where it all goes horribly wrong and in no time at all the profession is left shaking its collective head saying ‘It’s like the ‘body snatchers’! We have been transported! How on earth did we get from there to here?’ ‘Here’ is a truly bizarre state. It is as lunatic as Novopay. It is where economic imperatives sitting way outside of educational interests or care for the future of New Zealand’s children, choke all hope of healthy dialogue with the education sector. It is where the Government, forgetting all about the educational advisors that could help them form useful policy on addressing struggling learners’ needs, retreats to its back room cabal there to spawn alien policies like Charter Schools. These are publicly funded private schools, fresh out of America and the UK, where they have failed to achieve any measurable gain for struggling kids from poor families. They invent national standards. The standards measure all kids on the same standard at the same age as if they all came from the same background and the same culture on the same day. They allow league tables to flourish. League tables are very useful things for keeping tabs on sports
results where you expect that the teams in each grade are of the same skill level and ability. Ranking the teams within a grade makes sense, because like competes against like. When league tables are applied to schools you rank the schools according to their performance as if the kids all had the same capabilities, back grounds, school facilities and teachers. This of course is arrant nonsense. These policies are as far removed from sanely addressing struggling learners and their needs as it’s possible to get. But in the back room cabal education is placed on the table as just another public service that needs to be cut back to meet the new slimmed down public service targets. Those are the imperatives that drive educational policy, not good teaching and learning practice, not sound academic theory and research, and not the view of the profession. In the cabal, there are those whose primary interest is the privatisation of public services, including education. In the current environment, they tend to win. We recently watched in disbelief as millions of dollars of scarce public education money was thrown at the elite private school, Wanganui Collegiate, to ‘save’ it. We might see this act as a precursor to what could become common practice if Charter Schools came into the mix. Like Wanganui Collegiate, Charter Schools would have no obligation to accept students who make up the group called ‘priority learners’. They would have targets to meet and the ability to eschew all the restrictions imposed on public schools such as having qualified and registered teachers, and public accountabilities. It is no wonder then that teaching professionals feel they are operating in ‘La La Land’. Everything the Government is doing in its policy department and with its diminishing resources is completely out of step with its number one objective which is to raise the achievement of struggling learners. Where is the policy to reduce the class sizes and increase the number of highly experienced specialist teachers, recommended as the best way to address vulnerable children’s learning needs? Where are the policies to work with multi-agencies to address the children’s fundamental needs for food, clothing and safety, which are precursors to formal learning? Where are the professional development programmes so that all schools can have access to training in culturally appropriate practices? Where are the policies to ensure struggling learners have access to technologies which will assist their learning? Policies which could help the struggling kids have been ignored and replaced with those that live on planet ‘never-never-land’ with Novopay! Novopay may well be the most wacky omnishambles of all time, but it is a perfect metaphorical backdrop for current education policy coming out of the Government’s back rooms.