By PETER CALDER
A broomstick adorns the window ledge in Dr Judith Aitken's 12th-floor office on The Terrace in central Wellington, overlooking the dark green of the Tinakori Hill.
It's one of those fairytale ones (why do they call it a broomstick when it's really a broom?), gnarled and dark, its bristles a bunch of twigs lashed around the base, the kind that witches ride.
"It was a present, from a friend," she hastens to tell me, keen to underline the spirit of good will in which it was given.
The woman who ends a nine-year term as chief review officer (chief executive, in other words) of the Education Review Office on December 31 tells me her friend wanted her to be able to "just fly away" when it was all over.
But she's aware that the gift may seem bleakly symbolic to many in the education system who think that the spell she has cast over schools has not always looked like the whitest of magic.
Dr Aitken was not the first head of the office responsible for quality control of schools, but it is a measure of her impact that probably every teacher knows her name - whilefew would remember the nameof the first, Maurice Gianotti.
She knows she hasn't always endeared herself to the principals and boards of trustees of the country's 2800 schools - in fact, she speculates with a chuckle that if teachers were invited to write her valedictory, it would be headed "The Long Nightmare Is Over."
Her photograph has stared unsmilingly out of page after newspaper page in that time, under headings like "Review damns schools" or "Schools just cruising, says office."
Communities, boards of trustees, teachers and pupils have winced at the public canings the ERO has delivered, and it is not hard to tap into a vein of deep resentment in Educationland at what some see as a doctrinaire, inflexible and harsh approach.
But the woman I meet - a tiny human dynamo - is as sure of her ground as it is possible to imagine.
When she took over the reins at the ERO in 1992, after a public-sector career that had taken her through Electricorp to the Ministry of Women's Affairs, she remarked that she was returning to her first love - education.
She had started as a teacher on the North Shore, teaching at Westlake College before it split into two single-sex schools and living in Browns Bay in the 1960s when the night cart still called.
"The Shore was still being tamed in those days," she recalls. "The classes went from A to F and I had F. Quite a number of the pupils didn't come to school until maybe Tuesday - the girls were involved on the ships. So I had the edges knocked off me quite significantly in those first two years."
But when she moved to Wellington - her then-husband, a "brilliant" teacher, had been moved into the inspectorate which the ERO would eventually replace - she had her own children, rather than other people's, on her mind.
"I was totally dedicated to motherhood and babies," she says, and when I remind her she once described herself as an "Earth Mother type," she throws up her hands in mock horror.
"Do you mean like knitting my own yoghurt? I never knitted my own yoghurt, no, never. But I was a dedicated, if incompetent, baker and cook - until my family grew old enough to beg me not to bake any more."
The "Earth Mother" line was actually one in which she had described herself as "an Earth Mother hit by Germaine Greer," a reference to the provocative Australian feminist whose book The Female Eunuch helped turn feminism from a 60s smoulder to a 70s inferno.
Feminism was "a change in perspective," she says, "but it was reinforced by going to university, which introduced me to what was then emerging as shifts in economic and political and legal thinking."
The distinction seems a crucial one in understanding the making of Judith Aitken, who studied public policy theory for her doctorate at Victoria.
The woman who emerges from her public statements is one who relishes the explanatory power of theory, so that feminism was, for her, a way of reading the world rather than a stirring call to take arms against a sea of male chauvinist pigs.
"I'm no scholar and never was," she explains, "but it was the impact of different theories and their ability to explain events and behaviours and processes and organisations that I found hugely exciting."
Dr Aitken's answers are peppered with references to public choice theory, systems theory, agency theory, behaviour theory - and her critics might suggest that the operation of the office for the past nine years has relied on theory to the exclusion of practicality.
"Theory," she says, "as long as it's well-developed and tested and appropriate, provides you with ways to deal with reality and practice. Schooling is a system, and by analysing the way the system works, you can determine what the barriers are to entry into that system."
I wonder if she can understand why frontline teachers might find that approach arid.
"Of course. That's why you never stop there, that's why you go on. We have follow-up workshops for at least two days in which we work through with the community what can be done.
"But in an ignorant education system which has no means of informing itself, there won't be feedback and there won't be a change at the front."
What has angered many schools that have come under the ERO spotlight is the destructive effect of publicity about their bad reviews. Some feel Dr Aitken has been indifferent to the often catastrophic effect of publicity in an environment where schools have to compete for students.
A bad review can become not only an assessment but a self-fulfilling prophecy, staining a school indelibly so that parents flee or avoid it and sending it into a downward spiral.
"Schools work in a public system," she says, "and the information needs to be transparent.
"It's difficult, but 76 per cent of all the schools that we have categorised as seriously struggling have turned themselves around without external intervention. The record speaks for itself."
Some schools have taken to a process which became known as "review proofing" - hiring expensive consultants to provide reviewers with what they think they want to hear.
Dr Aitken is unperturbed.
"It's perfectly sensible. If I'm going to have a review (as I do annually) you can bet that I take out insurance and pre-review everything."
Being the target of schools' anger and anguish - often, but not always, suppressed - must have made for a stressful nine years, I fancy. Dr Aitken smiles.
"Stress," she says, "is not a word I permit myself to use. It's never been boring. You get terribly upset people, and I always take time with them.
"On the whole, if you take care and persist with the correspondence it works out. People have got important reasons for saying what they say. And if you're paid to do nothing else, you're paid to take citizens seriously."
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