Over the Christmas break a short interview with Christopher Luxon on the TV news caught my attention. As National’s new leader he was talking about policy priorities in the future and focussing particularly on education, where he said ‘we’ve let standards slip’.
It followed a year where the standard of schooling and teachers in Aotearoa had come into the news quite a bit. In February 2021, NZPF accused the Ministry of Education of a lack of thoughtleadership in the face of declining international test results and criticised provision of initial teacher education and professional development for established teachers.
The Ministry then commissioned a report on the mathematics curriculum from the Royal Society Te Apārangi who put together a panel of experts led by Distinguished Professor Gaven Martin. Their report released in October 2021 called for changes throughout the education system, not just within the maths curriculum itself.
In November, National Education spokesperson Paul Goldsmith released a ‘Back on Track’ plan that involved a variety of carrots and sticks to help students catch up on their missed curriculum. National were proposing extra cash for schools to develop interventions and various sanctions against schools where student attendance was poor.
But it was the interview with Luxon that interested me most, because I’ve been expecting something of the sort. It’s been clear to me for a while now that the Labour Government is vulnerable in this area of standards because of the removal of National Standards, the long period of reviewing education and Education Minister Chris Hipkins being super busy as Covid Response Minister.
It’s all left a perceived void that is a gift to the Opposition. I say
‘perceived’ because it’s not as if the Ministry of Education hasn’t been beavering away on the recommendations of the Tomorrow’s Schools Taskforce, the Curriculum Progress and Achievement review, the NCEA review and the Curriculum Refresh, all of which are intended to bring more consistency and rigour into the system.
But none of this work provides the soundbites and sense of immediacy – the silver bullets – that National can be expected to trade on to bring itself into power. National will also get public and professional buy-in from concern about the pandemic’s undoubted huge impact on school attendance and achievement. Any further bad news that can be garnered from the international large scale assessments like PISA and TIMMS will be useful to National as well.
So, this is how it can be predicted to play out from here on. National will announce some kind of education policy heavily centred on standards, testing and accountability which it will promote as a cornerstone of its manifesto going into the next election. It will likely be a simplistic ‘policy by soundbite’ idea but it will be taken up enthusiastically by many. Labour may be forced to come up with its own soundbite to show it is still up to the job.
At the moment, those in schools and kura are generally not being criticised for the slip in standards. Luxon said in the interview that ‘a big part of [the problem] was that the education system hadn’t supported teachers as well as it could have.’ Unfortunately, all that goodwill can change very quickly. Teachers, principals and schools are easily turned into scapegoats.
I’ve seen it happen here and overseas and have been writing against it for decades. I call it the ‘politics of blame’. If you want to see just how grubby and self-serving the politics of blame can get in New Zealand, then you should read my book on The Search for Better Educational Standards: A Cautionary Tale about the National Standards policy. It is all there in gory detail and former Ministers of Education Anne Tolley and Hekia Parata do not come off at all well. Nor does the Key/English government of which they were a part.
A central issue in the politics of blaming teachers and schools is how much you believe they are responsible for inequalities in the education system or how much you attribute to the ‘family background’ of students, especially their socio-economic living conditions and related culture of expectations and aspirations. All of which is certainly complex and I struggle to cover it in university courses let alone my short column here.
What does Luxon say in his interview? That he believes education is the ‘biggest enabler’ of social mobility. Well, from my research-informed point of view, it is and it isn’t.
At an individual level, we probably all know people whose lives and life-chances have been transformed by education. I am one of them. My parents did not attend university and I was the only one of my siblings to have a university education. Luckily my parents and siblings have all been able to do well in different ways given the times we have lived in. But it’s getting harder to prosper without university qualifications, and indeed even if you do have them.
At a group or structural level, what makes the difference is not so much education per se, but how well off your family is. The children of the rich have numerous advantages over the children of the poor. Indeed that’s become hugely more the case in our country in recent years. So we need to face up to the educational impact of the huge inequalities within New Zealand society. Christopher Luxon, who owns seven houses, unfortunately exemplifies one side of the wealth/poverty dynamic all too well.
Of course there’s another angle to all this, that we know implicitly but must be celebrated and celebrated again, which is that schooling is not all about academic achievement. Thinking about Māori and education in Aotearoa has particularly highlighted to me the limitation of focussing too much on academic achievement. This is because of how the reflection of Māori world views is endorsed by Māori as a major purpose of the education system. Academic achievement and enhanced life-chances may follow, but the restoration of Te Reo me ngā Tikanga Māori is a key goal in itself.
At the same time it is not just Māori that view education through a lens of cultural maintenance or restoration, other ethnic groups who are not the indigenous people of Aotearoa also have an aspiration for their culture to be reflected in schools. And then communities look to schools for numerous other purposes including ethics, citizenship, civic duty and respect for law and order, sport and leisure, the care, wellbeing,healthy sexuality and mental health of young people, special educational needs, care for local communities and environments, a safe place in a crisis or emergency, the list goes on.
It all points to schools making a difference through very much more than the academic performance of their students, something that has been highlighted by COVID of course. Let me bring these wider purposes of education down to examples of a particular issue and a particular individual.
The particular issue I want to focus on is teaching children not to be unnecessarily cruel to animals and other wild things. Because of New Zealand’s unusual emphasis on pest control and eradication, many New Zealand children, whether they live in country or city, are brought up to have very little respect for ‘pest’ animals which are seen as fair game however they are killed. Those in rural areas also become accustomed to well-established but inhumane farming practices to which our society chooses to turn a blind eye.
These attitudes enter schools in all sorts of ways, here are a few examples of which I have heard. The boys ‘playing with’, i.e. tormenting, an eel found in a muddy puddle. Children using sticks to push a nest full of bird eggs out of a tree. The school fieldtrip where an outdoor educator jokes to a class about drowning stray cats in a cage. None of these things should go unchallenged.
Schools and teachers have an important role in socialising children to be humane in their treatment of all wildlife, even if that’s not always given weight elsewhere. Unfortunately, animal cruelty in childhood can sometimes also be a possible red flag that children are witnessing or experiencing domestic violence or that they may have a greater chance of being involved in violent crime as an adult.
Let me turn lastly, to a wonderful good news story in the press as I write this column. The quick thinking and bravery of a young Manawatū man has been credited with saving the lives of three teenagers caught in a burning car south of Foxton, after a collision with another vehicle.
Taina Keelan, 23, a corrections officer at Manawatū Prison, drew on his immense physical strength and First Aid training to force open a damaged door of the burning car and extract the young people safely. He has now become nicknamed ‘The Hulk’ and widely commended for his bravery in a crisis
Taina’s whānau must be very proud of him but I hope his former teachers and principals will also take a moment to raise a glass and feel some satisfaction. If it takes a village to raise a child then we should celebrate everyone who, with the support of their schooling, has ended up making a helpful difference to the lives of others.
We all need to remember that education is about far more than academic achievement. To me every decent human being that comes through our education system is another success to be celebrated.