Dear Teachers
Let’s be honest shall we?
You have been betrayed by useless unions and abused by Governments who know you have useless unions.
While Key was in power the NZEI and PPTA wouldn’t fart without Key’s written permission and the ongoing war to minimise and privatise education continued with no checks or balances. You now find yourself with under resourced environments teaming with children. Many of these children have special needs and cause enormous disruptions in your class.
You have been left to clean up the poverty, the lack of community investment and general breakdown of society.
As a profession, Teachers are the most important contact points for development we can get in a democracy. You are a frontline for values to a society we wish to be.
Yet where is the recognition of that importance?
Where is the wage you can live on?
Where are the classroom sizes you can teach?
Where are the social services that can bring many of those children up to a standard where you can teach them?
Where is the resourcing to upgrade your skills in an education environment that us constantly changing?
Let me say it again, you have been betrayed by incompetent Unions and abused by politicians in power who know how incompetent your Unions are.
Look at how your Unions are now just thinking about working together for better bargaining leverage…
Primary and secondary teachers unite in campaign for better pay
Primary and secondary education unions will join forces in their campaign for better pay and conditions for teachers if their wishes are not met.The primary teachers’ union, the NZ Educational Institute, and the secondary union, the Post Primary Teachers’ Association, made the announcement late this afternoon.
In a joint statement from national presidents of the PPTA and NZEI – Jack Boyle and Lynda ) Stuart, respectively, they said:
“We know that this Government has inherited a teacher shortage and a desperate situation for children with additional learning needs because of the failure to plan and fund education properly; and we acknowledge that they are working to try and fix it.
…don’t you dare congratulate them! Why the fuck are they only now considering that decision? How incompetent are these Union Leaders to only now be thinking of working together?
When National are in power, they simply see Teachers as Taxi drivers in an Uber world and want to dismantle the structures to make all learning online, when Labour are in power they are too frightened to do anything meaningful for fear of getting labeled too weak to the Unions.
Right now Labour, while rolling in budget surpluses, won’t provide the real investment beyond crumbs to older Teachers.
Add the incompetence of your Union Leaders and you have the working environment you are all doomed to now.
Unless.
Unless you fight back.
Do you want the respect, the investment and small class sizes? There’s a really easy way to do that.
Ignore your useless Union leaders, ignore the useless Education Minister and strike.
Strike.
Strike.
Rolling strike after rolling strike.
If you really want your jobs respected, organise mass multi-day strikes. Just go on strike for one full week, then threaten the next week, then the next.
If you all went on strike for 3 weeks Chippy Hipkens would be on his knees begging.
If you all went on strike for 3 weeks, Jacinda would find the money.
If you all went on strike for 3 weeks, Winston would find the money.
If you want Teaching to be respected, then fight for it.
Otherwise, take the crumbs they offer and shuffle away like the nurses did.
The choice is yours.
Be respected or be trampled.
I support your call for continuing action by teachers, Bomber. But I think you’re wrong about the unions holding teachers back. After all, the union is the teachers in it, & their representatives come from the ranks.
Since the gnats shat on labour laws, the PPTA have been amazingly stroppy. One of the most militant unions around. The NZEI have struggled but not with the same intensity so perhaps joining together was not always the best way forward like it seems to be now.
In this case Bomber, I think you got carried away by your emotions fuelled by some ignorance.
Well said, JANIO. It was not the unions fault. By all accounts the teachers union is one of the best ones.
I can’t remember exactly when it was, but sometime over the last ten years, when the PPTA accepted a pathetic offer by the National government I realised then that they weren’t prepared to push hard for what teachers actually needed. I wish they had dug their heels in when National was in power.
The main problem for our children is the full fruition of accountability politics seeing mindless technocrats in senior management in our schools.
Philosophical reasons for doing things are gone, learning as an organic process has gone, checklist accountability for paint-by-numbers, limited, scared principals is what it is about.
It is too late for teachers to fight back now. The real battle was lost years ago.
Leadership in the job is about leading others to ‘play the game’, forcing others to play the game.
The pleas about getting our best and brightest into the profession, the calls to attract them with good salaries and the hope that teachers be given status are silly, strange, vain hopes. What’s needed to do job as it has been writ by neanderthals like Tolley and Parata and carried on by the timid new lot, are drones.
Wanting teachers to be respected? Over years an environment has been created where respect is given to those who toe the line, who play the game.
Senior leaders right through the profession have bred a neutered, limited lot. Out of that barren lot to expect challenge of the status quo is too much.
And the Field Officers who should have been supporting members in cases of corporate bullying by principals and suck up senior management have been worse than useless.
You keep using the word ‘union’ yet this is clearly incorrect.
When they were set up in the past these two ‘unions’ called themselves the Post Primary Teachers ASSOCIATION, and the New Zealand Educational INSTITUTE.
These nouns were deliberately chosen to avoid being confused with the rough tough blough trade unions that represented blue collar workers.
This appeases their precious middle class values and spins at ‘professional’.
They also undermined the Golden Rule of unionism by having two separate organisations for the same job thus completely eviscerating what strength they may have possessed.
I have been in both worlds in the past; trade unions and the PPTA. The latter aren’t worth a roll of toilet paper.
Good comment!
Their pay offer is generous for a sector delivering poor results and outdated skills to students.
An argument could be made for replacing high school with internships and vocational training. Unfortunately the education sector has become another poorly preforming NZ monopoly. In Australia and most western countries you can gain trade qualifications in high school.
Teachers have allowed their working conditions to deteriorate under 9 years of National and done ZERO about it. Now Labour are in power, they are striking – angry because there is no magic wand to fix their working conditions IMMEDIATELY.
One of the biggest problem in NZ is the mass delusion concerning the value of housing – a consumer good that actually falls apart over time. Mass delusions isn’t as uncommon a phenomena as people may think.
The monopolist teaching sector is outdated and teachers have become more akin to paper pushing babysitter. Go on strike permanently and let parents take care of their own children. It would certainly save the taxpayer money!
I believe children should have the right to work and if they pay taxes, vote! Yes, I sound a bit nutty, but that’s how I roll~!! lol
Unfortunately I have to pretty much agree with you on your sentiments. The entire sector urgently needs a complete reboot – into something along the lines of the Scandinavian education model, but maybe even more radical. Maths, for example, needs to be pretty much completely scrapped and integrated as a core part of practical applications (i.e. wood/metal work, computer programming, physics, engineering etc). English/geography/history needs to be career focused, e.g. writing original scripts for YouTube videos, video game/movie/TV reviews and news blog entries which the student then makes, for example. Science needs a much larger emphasis on critical and original thought – allow the students to test their own hypotheses to teach them the scientific method.
Yep
Unfortunately I have to pretty much agree with you on your sentiments. The entire sector urgently needs a complete reboot – into something along the lines of the Scandinavian education model, but maybe even more radical. Maths, for example, needs to be pretty much completely scrapped and integrated as a core part of practical applications (i.e. wood/metal work, computer programming, physics, engineering etc). English/geography/history needs to be career focused, e.g. writing original scripts for YouTube videos, video game/movie/TV reviews and news blog entries which the student then makes, for example. Science needs a much larger emphasis on critical and original thought – allow the students to test their own hypotheses to teach them the scientific method.
it is good to see workers in action, “on strike” is where people quickly learn about the class nature of society, and that organisation and unity are the only way to win, inclusive of trying to win the support of the wider community
the teachers obviously have a number of members that vote National, some of whom probably enjoy making life difficult for a Labour Govt., and also are hampered by union leaders prone to vacillation, but nonetheless the Teachers did hold the line against bulk funding, national standards and Charter Schools so deserve praise for that
Labour needs to drop its miserly fiscal responsibility cap and start paying groups like the Teachers at least enough to afford to be able to rent or buy a house in the locality they teach in!
Nitrium a lot of those ideas you mention do happen in schools but only because there are teachers who see these as ways to show students practical ways to apply learning, not because it’s part of a curriculum. There’s a ton of misinformation about what happens in schools, the reality is many teachers are creating curriculum every day while being social worker, nurse and parent to students. There are huge problems with the entire system and I suspect these won’t be fixed until education as a whole is taken away from being a political football, that’s why Scandinavia is so successful. No unions, politicians, boards, principals, parents and other groups involved, just teachers being professionals without fear and stress and students being allowed to learn without social pressure.
And you’re right Bomber the teacher unions aren’t great, but they’re what’s left. Time for a new way of deciding on teachers wages and I’m not talking performance pay. How about a fair pay commission similar to how MPs wages are decided?
Sorry, Nitrium, but anyone who says that Humanities such as English, History and Geography must be career- focused either muffed their sentence or has no idea of what education is about.
While I support the teachers and other professionals with essential skills and qualifications, we have a far greater challenge to deal with. Not only do teachers, nurses, police officers and so suffer difficulties in places like Auckland, where most housing is nowt un-affordable, many low wage workers in supermarkets, warehouses, restaurants, and so forth are struggling to make ends meet.
Are we going to continue focusing on the better educated middle class and reward them, or are we going to help ALL that need improvements in income and conditions?
I sense some form of betrayal again, to the truly poor and powerless in society, it continues on and on. It is a disgrace to favour some professionals over others.
Spot On Marc, whilst teachers nurses, police and other middle class professions are striking for better wages and conditions, I don’t remember them going out in support of the working poor who are struggling to make ends meet by taking on 2 or 3 jobs and still barely managing to survive.
Everyone of the teachers at our school are national supporters, and when election time comes around I can see them again supporting the political party that created their poor working conditions.
This situation will continue until they change their name to Teachers Union, only then will they show the rest of the community that they are workers like the rest of us.
Unity is strength, all workers need to stand together.
The national government spent 9 years undermining our teachers, nurses and many other public servants and now we are paying the price we have sat back and yet we know our mainstream education systems has not delivered for all but we now have a shortage of teachers. The national government brought in thousand of workers to drive down our wages and standard of living impacting on housing, roads , hospitals (infrastructure) etc this means they the national government did not plan nor did they care who their laissez faire policies hurt it was all about keeping the business sector happy but at a costs to the average kiwi and their whanau standard of living slipping away.
Teachers should of gone on strike the day after National got into government. Things might be different now, but most likely not. National only listened to money talking.
Never could figure out why NZ just doesn’t copy the things in other countries ‘that work’ instead of bumbling along continuously wasting tax payers money and time.
I have had to deal with various government departments lately, but NOTHING has improved since this government took over, there is ignorance and incompetence all over the show.
WINZ do not even send forms or letters asked for, other services do not even respond to serious reports of issues.
We are totally screwed in NZ Inc, but so is the world, as we have now mega digitised systems, where we are at best a mere crap number, who is anonymous but not important to the processor of client numbers.
George Orwell was right, we have the age of total control and total marginalisation and stigmatisation and worse all over.
You have to come begging for any support, screw the PSA and other unions, they are our enemies, the servants of an inhumane mega system now in place, a modern day dictatorship. Teachers may think they are different, but play on being important players in the game.
Only a total collapse or overthrow of the status quo will offer any chance of a return to some natural normality.
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