I now have children in primary school and observe that most continue to do their utmost in the service of their students.
My mother, if she were still alive, would be appalled to hear the comments this week from former teacher champion Bali Haque, now safely back from a pleasant sinecure in Rarotonga to give our teachers a blast, telling them to quit with the "victim mentality" and questioning their supposedly long holidays.
I had to wonder, is he angling for a job alongside Hekia Parata, Minister of Education? Because he is taking a line that the minister herself would be proud of, and sounds as though he might have been briefed by her most splendid offsider, a 30-something ex-engineer who understands as much about education as I do about the allure of the Act Party.
Provocation and disrespect of the teaching profession is their calling card.
All disrespect offered to New Zealand school staff - including the fact they continue to not be paid properly by the absolute turd of a payment system, Novopay, and that non-payment barely seems to bother the ministers involved - helps underpin the fundamental way in which our education system is changing, and is all for the worst.
We keep hearing that the New Zealand education system is excellent, except for the "tail" of underachievers. What our current Government could have done is look to countries in which the "tail" has been reduced - Finland, Canada, Estonia, South Korea - and emulate some of the ideas that make those systems great (great in the sense not just that students test well, but they achieve, regardless of their socio-economic background).
In these systems, the public system is well funded and prioritised; collaboration is actively encouraged between colleagues, and there is not the focus on relentless testing of a few national standards. In Finland, considered the best system in the world, kids are subject to only one standardised test in 12 years - the one they sit before graduating.
Crucially, authorities in the countries with the best standards allow independent groups of educators to set education policy, and people, including governments, respect that. They don't have to put up with the drum beat of misinformation and propaganda ours are increasingly subject to.
We, instead, are turning down the educational path set by America and the UK, where constant testing, an insistence on "marketplace choice", charter schools featuring barely trained or untrained teachers, and performance pay are increasingly the buzzwords.
The right wing will big-note the success of the handful of charter schools already in operation, and some may well do a great job. But they are well resourced, small operations taking in students that have been sent there by motivated parents - they are in no way comparable to public schools. Their continued existence and expansion will come at the cost of the demise of our public system, and to be told anything else is pure spin.
It depends what we want as a country. It seems, given our voting choices, that we've bought the predominant line about whiny teachers, stroppy teacher unions, and the brilliance of performance pay. (I wonder, will nurses and social workers be the next to have it foisted upon them?)
I would prefer to leave the teaching, assessment and professional development up to teachers themselves, respecting their ability to provide an excellent, fair and well-rounded state education system, and the ministers in charge to tend to things they are better at. Like using unintelligible marketing gobbledegook as the language of education.
Or wearing a yellow rosette with particular flair.
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