Editorial: A harsh lesson

The most surprising thing about the Government's embarrassing backdown on education changes was that it was so long in coming.

The class size issue was badly misread by National - and it didn't matter how many studies and statistics they had on their side, it was never going to wash with New Zealand parents, let alone teachers and principals.

Primary school maths will show you that more kids in a class equals less attention per child.

There may be some merit in trading class size for a focus on improving teacher quality, but 1) you'd have to do one hell of a sales pitch, which Education Minister Hekia Parata didn't pull off and 2) why should you have to trade class size for teacher quality?

No parent (I would hope) would dispute that those teaching our children should be up to scratch. But there should already be systems in place to ensure this and if not, it's the education management and training systems that should be under scrutiny.

Some think performance pay for teachers would improve quality, but it's a flawed concept that this country would struggle to implement well.

Why? Because who knows how to measure teachers' performance? There are too many variables, not least of which is student ability.

Yes, there need to be checks and balances when it comes to our children's education - it's too important for there not to be - but teacher performance can't be easily measured by revenue, sales, turnover and the like as it can in other jobs.

As in other industries, performance pay does exist in one small form - good teachers looking to step up can earn positions of responsibility where available.

But this isn't what some in Wellington have in mind. Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf was reported in March as saying raising teacher quality was "the single biggest issue the country needs to tackle to raise living standards".

That's putting an awful lot of responsibilities on schools.

You'd have to ask - where do parents fit in the grand scheme of things?

By all means find a way to improve teacher quality and make sure poor teaching is addressed. But as the Government has learned - don't dare do it by bulking up our kids' classrooms.