Editor
I recently thumbed through Cathy Wylie’s latest book Vital Connections. It quickly became compelling reading. See review in this issue (p.23). The book is an examination of how effectively the self-management model of schooling has worked over time. What is captivating about Vital Connections is that it gives such insight into the present state of education in New Zealand. Wylie takes us back to the 1980s, when under the financial management of Roger Douglas the Government embraced a neo liberal approach to almost everything. Education did not escape the onslaught and the outcome for schools was the introduction of the Tomorrow’s Schools policy, which stopped short of complete privatisation. Wylie argues that in the process of establishing self-managing schools, important features were lost, most importantly, connections. Few principals would disagree. Under self-management, an element of competition crept in and many schools became isolated from each other and from formal and informal local clustering arrangements. Disconnects also occurred between the Ministry and schools and many especially regretted the loss of their relationship with the school inspectors. School inspectors, according to Wylie, fulfilled roles beyond visiting and inspecting schools. They also identified principal and teacher needs and using their knowledge of local talent, connected schools together, facilitated mentoring of individuals and helped schools create clusters for the sharing of good practice. Schools felt that they had professional support within their own locale to call on. This connectedness provided confidence for schools, principals and teachers. In fact, collaborating and sharing was central to the culture of the profession. The benefits of having a collaborative culture are immeasur able and lead to a more effective teaching force and enhanced learning for children. The schools with fewer resources to manage everything alone suffered most under Tomorrow’s Schools. They also tended to be the schools with the greater number of students not achieving so well. These were the very students self-management was supposed to help. The year 2008 swept in a further raft of reforms – an echo of the 1980s. The reforms are born of the same philosophy, same rationale for change and the same promise of lifting achievement outcomes for the same proportion of kids that were not succeeding in the 1980s. It is such a good example of the famous George Bernard Shaw quote ‘We learn from history that we learn nothing from history!’ The same neo liberal path gets the same results. The ‘underachievement issue’ was never resolved by the Tomorrow’s Schools policy and will not be resolved by today’s
attempt. What is likely to happen however, is that the world class education system we had built, which gave over 80% of Kiwi kids an internationally acclaimed, high quality public education, will be weakened and at worst be replaced by privatisation. The most palpable difference between the policies of the 1980s and now lies in the articulated rationale that was advanced to support change. In the 1980s the motivation was to get rid of the so called bloated bureaucracy and centralisation of the system and devolve educational responsibility to communities so that schools could be more responsive to children’s immediate learning needs and have the freedom to be creative in their teaching approaches. This, a voting public was assured, would result in lifting the achievement of those children who were not experiencing educational success. Early adopters led the way and built innovation, creativity and a wider selection of learning opportunities into their schools’ curricula in an effort to reach those children not enjoying success. When the NZ curriculum was overhauled, there were even more opportunities to reach these children. We were beginning to see real advantages of the self-management model, particularly where schools had reconnected through the formation of new clusters and affiliations. Creative approaches were being taken which would lead seamlessly into the demands of twenty-first century living. Children were learning within authentic, meaningful contexts. The inquiry model of learning was becoming commonplace in our schools and for the first time the system provided the freedom to establish Kura or Māori immersion schooling options. The new education reform agenda, springs from the same neo liberal philosophy as the 1980s but the rationale for change this time is to pull back to the centre in order to prepare for privatisation. First is to create a set of nationally standardised measures. This initially seems like a contradiction, a recipe for the strangulation of innovative practices, a narrowing of the curriculum, especially as the standardised measures are only about two subject areas of literacy and numeracy. It certainly is a recipe for the death of creativity but not a contradiction of neo liberal philosophy. It is simply taking the philosophy to an extreme which is the dismantling of the public education system and replacement with private. In case there was ever any doubt, the MP John Banks, promoter of the charter schools idea recently (Q&A May 14) said of his expectations of a coalition deal with the National party, ‘What I expect in return is some of the policies that the ACT party passionately believes in, like the private provision of education . . .’