Every respectable study puts us in the top five in the world and no worse than top 10 in any specific category.
I don't know what your primary school years were like, but I adored my teachers.
This week, our Prime Minister declared our primary education is in crisis.
According to John Key, one in five children can't write, do simple maths or even read.
Three out of 10 teachers are incompetent and school principals don't even monitor our children's learning properly.
We are sliding down the international education achievement scale and our country's future is at stake.
The danger is so serious that the Government is implementing education National Standards immediately so it can identify and expose the guilty teachers and schools.
Anne Tolley, the education minister, has had her other portfolios stripped from her so she can dedicate herself full-time to expose this apparent danger to our children.
The teachers say Key has got it all wrong. In any event, any new system needs to be trialled first as they don't want another debacle like we had around the NCEA.
Key and his Cabinet aren't having a bar of it. Key accuses the NZEI, the teachers' union, of obstruction because they want to protect useless teachers and avoid any accountability.
Key has marshalled his MPs to hold taxpayer-funded public meetings around the country and has mailed out glossy propaganda to warn parents of the problem and his proposal to fix it.
(As an aside, the publication is decorated in National Party logos yet $200,000 of our money was used to pay for it. Helen Clark was lambasted for doing less. I'll look forward to Rodney Hide making a complaint to the Solicitor General.)
In response to Key's version of reality, the teachers are going on a nationwide bus tour to put their side of the story to public meetings. But unlike the National Party politicians, the teachers pay their costs.
I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to have better ways of knowing how their kid is going or holding their teachers accountable.
The NZEI says it has no problem with that, either. But it says the Government's proposal doesn't deliver that.
If he's serious, why couldn't Key wait for a pilot to see if it works? Isn't that what any responsible organisation does before it restructures its entire operation?
Key claims our primary schools aren't performing. Yet every respectable study puts us in the top five in the world and no worse than top 10 in any specific category.
Key uses the Education Review Office report as his reference. Key claims 30 per cent of teachers were inadequate, whereas the report actually said 70 per cent were great, 20 per cent adequate and 10 per cent "limited".
This includes new and fixed-term relievers. Any employer who had that sort of assessment on their employees would be delighted.
I'd love to see a similar test done on our MPs. I'm sure the results would be the reverse.
Key claims he needs the National Standards so they can identify and support the one in five kids who needs help.
He allocated $12 million. That averages out at $140 for each student needing help. Yet the remedial reading programme alone costs $2000 for each pupil. At the same time, his Government announced it is cutting $95 million out of education.
Finland has the best education system. It has made a sustained effort to reward its teachers. All teachers have Masters degrees and the competition is so fierce only one out of every eight applicants for teacher training is accepted.
And, by the way, Finland has no National Standards for schools or teachers. It trusts the professionals who educate its children to get on with their vocation, not to become politicians' playthings.
Is there a wider political agenda Key isn't sharing with us? Privatisation and vouchers, anyone?
