subject specialists. For them to provide effective programmes across the curriculum they need and deserve access to ongoing professional support and guidance of a kind more powerful than TKI and the like can hope to offer despite good intentions. The MOE’s much-vaunted Best (Available) Evidence Syntheses proclaim that high-quality teachers make the most difference for student achievement outcomes, and school leadership that promotes and participates in teacher learning and development has the greatest impact on student learning outcomes. While these findings are hardly news to practitioners in the field, the real issue is what outcomes are we talking about here? Since the Minister and her Ministry are fixated on reading, writing, and mathematics measures, these are seen to be the outcomes that count most with resultant serious neglect of other outcomes that are worthy of comparable value. Thus, teacher effectiveness for student outcomes beyond curriculum basics seems of little interest. They are largely unacknowledged by a governmental system that is controlling education in our country, despite occasional Education Gazette spin-ups that my inquiries suggest few teachers bother to read. Ms Hekia Parata, the Government’s second Minister of Education, is stuck on the same wave-length, but she tunes in with a velvet glove. ‘I can’t raise achievement levels. The 54,000 teachers in classrooms and their 2,500 principals can do that. We need to support them’, she is fond of saying. And in the same breath, ‘We need to increase accountability of teachers and principals’. Accountability for what? The quarter or so share of student achievement that can be attributed to teacher and school effects (the other three-quarters being attributable to personal attributes, home, income, etc.). Or accountability for student
achievement outcomes not in speaking and listening (oracy), social sciences, music, art, dance, drama, health and physical education, problem-solving, creating, etc. – but in reading, writing and mathematics? And so we have the systemic disabling of schools and teachers to confidently commit to providing children with the educational opportunities and experiences that will help launch them with confidence into a world of complexity, challenge, change and excitement. My advice, therefore, is to look beyond the narrow instru mentalist and technicist devices of current education policy in New Zealand with its denial of the factors other than school that affect student outcomes. It is time to enable our teachers to be responsibly non-formulaic, exploratory and adventurous risk-takers who competently attend to the bread and butter of literacy and numeracy, as they always have, but also take pride in giving children good daily helpings of the delights offered by a smorgasbord of rich and stimulating learning experiences across the curriculum. Don’t look to the Ministry for support or understanding. Take charge and do it yourself because the alternative may be a situation ‘where education is suffused by a cowering, utilitarian atmosphere that on the whole leaves it repressed, joyless and ineffective’ (Neyland 2010). References Ministry of Education (2011). Ministry of Education Statement of Intent 2011/12–2016/17. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Neyland, J (2010). Rediscovering the Spirit of Education after Scientific Management. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
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