Auckland Grammar School students in the crowd celebrate a try in the annual First XV Rugby match between Auckland Grammar and King's College. Photo / Richard Robinson
Opinion
Bali Haque's new book, Changing our Secondary Schools, raises important and timely questions about teaching. His acknowledgement that the single most important contribution to student success is the cultural capital they bring into the classroom is supported by all the international evidence.
Strikingly, the single most reliable indicator of future
academic success is the number of books you have in your home when you grow up. But Haque's critique then moves on to what schools might be able to do to make the difference, and in many cases play catch up, with those students left behind by poverty.
Haque is correct when he suggests that the reforms in New Zealand education dating back to the introduction of Tomorrow Schools in the 1980s have been characterised by sloppy and at times plainly incompetent implementation. Whether you agree with the policy directions or not, the introduction for example, of national standards and charter schools has resulted in chaos and confusion largely because of the breakneck speed with which these changes were brought into the system. The most obvious example of Haque's critique of poorly handled implementation was the disastrous management of the Christchurch school restructuring after the earthquakes.
Haque understands that the flagship Government policy of IES, or as it has been characterised, the super principal, super teacher idea, is not about rewarding classroom teachers for staying in the classroom. It is about creating new management positions in and across schools. It fails then to provide viable career pathways for teachers dedicated to remain in their classrooms, teaching.
The problem Haque boldly identifies is that we still don't have a system to reward good teachers and manage poor or barely competent teachers out of the system. His idea that principals could make a good stab at it isn't good enough. There is clearly a Government and public desire to build a sense of greater teacher accountability (it could be seen as being one of the most significant drivers behind many of the reforms of the past 30 years).
