In an utopian world it would be nice to think that all our politicians are elected with the desire to do their best to work for the people of the country, setting aside personal ideological and financial agendas in the process. Sadly our country is far from utopian and too many of our politicians have other often hidden agendas in mind when seeking our votes.
Some, like David Seymour, make no effort to hide their agendas, but others, like Erica Stanford, obscure them by various means, and it takes some digging to reveal these.
The damage to our country being done by many in our present government is obvious, either by their sheer incompetence (e.g., Willis, Luxon, Brown) or through the blatant promotion of their programmes (e.g., Seymour, Jones, Peters).
Flying beneath the radar is Erica Stanford, whose programme to change education is far more serious than it appears. Auckland University Professor of Education Peter O’Connor recently commented to me that Stanford’s attack on our education system is far worse than those of her National Party predecessors Hekia Parata,and Anne Tolley, and I agree with that.
At least Parata and Tolley had an understanding of education and while their government’s policy of National Standards was damaging to our children, they otherwise did not interfere in overall curriculum delivery.
Stanford, on the other hand, has clear links to overseas influencers, as has been discussed by a number of people such as Even Holloway and Brie Elliot, and that the long term effects of her programme will be disastrous.
Unlike some of her colleagues, Stanford is skilled at using PR to obscure her programme (I guess her experience in media helps) and so the main stream media are falling for her spin – the uncritical acceptance of her smoke and mirrors exercise over the supposed improvement in reading being an example.
It’s timely, therefore, to dig deeper into who Stanford is really working for, and this article by Rebecca Thomas is a good place to start:
‘From Classrooms to Boardrooms: Who Erica Really Serves‘.
“This year, in the Mood of the Boardroom survey, CEOs crowned Education Minister Erica Stanford their number one Cabinet performer. Higher than the Prime Minister. Higher than the Finance Minister.
A strange accolade when you think about it — for a Minister of Education at a CEO business showdown.
So why does the boardroom love Erica?”
Good question.
“It’s not that CEOs care deeply about curriculum detail. They aren’t losing sleep over whether Shakespeare is compulsory, or whether a maths workbook sits unopened on a child’s desk.
They care because Stanford has made education legible to business.
Furthermore:
“Standardisation, offshore contracts, ribbon-cutting property spends — these are neat wins she can package for CEOs and investors, the very people whose applause fuels her rise. They give her headlines, survey rankings, and the image of “decisive reform.” But every step up her ladder has come at the cost of teachers, tamariki, and whānau who were never consulted, never funded, never heard.
- Positioning for clout: topping the Mood of the Boardroom survey puts her above the Prime Minister and Finance Minister in business eyes — political capital she can spend in Cabinet.
- Building her launchpad: education becomes her stage to audition for higher office, even hinting at her own Prime Ministerial ambitions.
- Choosing showmanship over need: she invests in contracts and buildings that look good on balance sheets, instead of classrooms that desperately need people.
- Silencing consultation: she cuts through teachers’, principals’, and Māori voices, because listening would slow her climb — and compassion doesn’t earn her points in a boardroom where CEOs value efficiency over humanity.”
Image over substance, photo ops over genuine data, and repeated use of catch phrases, such as structured reading, science of learning, and knowledge based curriculum (all derived from her influencers) – that’s her game plan, and the media and general public are falling for it.
‘Erica’s reforms fit perfectly with a worldview where education is economic capital.
- A skilled, compliant workforce pipeline.
- A curriculum legible to international comparators.
- A system that reassures investors New Zealand is “lifting standards.”’
Note the key word in the last sentence – ‘investors.’ It is clear that one policy agenda of this government is privatisation of public resources, be it in health, other areas, or in this case, education.
I’ve previously written about the right wing view of education as a means to train workers rather than to educate enlightened people, and Rebecca reinforces that.
“That’s what CEOs see — a minister who speaks their language, who makes schools look like spreadsheets, who turns children into data on a growth chart.”
Hence Stanford’s drive for standardisation, for schools to be required to run programmes such as structured reading, and use testing systems to provide ‘data’. It is also explains why Stanford is importing overseas curricula and teaching programmes into New Zealand – standardisation of teaching followed by standardisation of testing, to meet International norms.
So much for an education system that is unique to our country’s needs. So much for New Zealand’s rich history of education innovation that used to bring overseas educators here to learn from us.
“Her plan has always been egocentric — to craft an education portfolio that serves her ambitions, not the needs of tamariki.
Being crowned number one by CEOs is more important to her than sitting down with teachers who are striking, principals who are desperate, or support staff who can’t survive on their wages. She claims to care deeply about educators, but when the applause comes, she saves her biggest smile for the people she considers truly matter: investors, employers, and business leaders.”
There’s much more in the article so I recommend you read it for yourself.
“And it tells you something else too: Stanford’s history in comms and media strategy has always been her secret weapon. She knows how to spin a headline, how to ride out outrage, how to glow under the spotlight. She’s spent her career mastering how to play the message.”
To reiterate what I wrote above – Stanford represents a huge threat to education in this country, and I’ll go further – it is very possible that our relaxed Prime Minister has no idea what Stanford and Seymour are implementing.
Brie Elliot has also published her very perceptive observations about the current situation.
“I’ve been looking into who’s really shaping education in Aotearoa right now – and the picture is wild.
The new charter school ‘Aotearoa Infinite Academy’ is being promoted as “innovative” and “flexible,” – but it’s literally a rebrand of Mt Hobson Academy, a private school owned by Crimson Education (a company that “helps” students get into Ivy League overseas universities).”
This new charter school was quietly announced the other day. It’s been well established that Crimson Education is a very dubious institution, yet here they are getting involved with charter schools.
“Exact same principle. Same model.
The only difference? It’s now publicly funded by the tax payer.
At the same time, we’ve got homeschool advocates and private tutoring companies leading the “Structured Literacy” movement – people like Sharon Scurr, Carla McNeill, Liz Kane, Bronwyn Baine and others who’ve trained in controversial MSL approaches, positioning themselves as the voice of teachers while potentially pushing private literacy products into schools.
And hovering behind it all? Think tanks like the New Zealand Initiative (linked to the Atlas Network), whose 25% shareholder is literally the CEO of Foodstuffs North Island – Christopher Quin.
It’s all the same story:
> Private interests rebranding as public good.
> Lobby groups shaping policy without accountability.
> And “innovation” that somehow always means taxpayers footing the bill.
Transparency shouldn’t be radical – but apparently, in New Zealand, it is.
I don’t trust this lot as far as I can throw them.
Time for a snap election, Chris Luxon.”
And this brings us back to the points made by Rebecca in her article – just who is Erica Stanford working for?
One thing seems certain – she’s not working for the public good of the country.
Stanford clearly works for John Key and his side boy the CEO of Crimson who want to privatize all of NZ education .Then Key will pup the side boy up to replace Luxon as leader of National .
Business, and the owners of capital more generally, are always looking for free gifts from the State to increase their profitability. That is why right-wing governments exist, to capture the State and make it work in the interests of the owners of capital. In this case, business is looking for two things:
– a docile, narrowly-educated workforce that possesses the utilitarian skills businesses want, that has had no exposure to any subversive or anti-hierarchical ideas, and has internalised a culture of ‘performance’ and ‘targets’
– investment opportunities within the education system itself where public money can be diverted into private profits rather than the paying the salaries of public sector workers.
Stanford is simply obliging them as planned.
Rubbish. Just get kids to read and write and do maths, and they can then go on to self-educate.
If Stanford improves results in this area alone, that will be a massive achievement.
An even more ‘narrowly-educated’ workforce is one that cannot read and write properly. Get these things right and there is a world of knowledge awaiting, obviously much more so than in the past. Kids can go out and discover their own truths. They don’t need the guidance of woke ideologues.
The CEO dudes (let’s call them right-wing ‘woke ideologues’), really like Stanford because they imagine she is going to give them what they want. And what they want is pretty much what I described – school leavers (and university graduates) who will require as little training as possible and so reduce employer costs, who can be paid as little as possible because of plentiful supply, and who fit comfortably into the performance-based, hyper-measurement and surveillance culture of modern business. They’re wrong of course, she won’t give them that and in a few years’ time there will be yet another ‘crisis’ in education.
And if all we wanted to do was to help kids read, write and do maths better, then we would start by eliminating poverty, making sure everyone was securely housed, and allowing a family to live adequately on less than two full-time incomes so there was time for parents to read with kids, guide them with homework, get them off screens, buy and share books, and help them learn to think for themselves. We would do all that, not dick around with whatever the latest infectious pedagogic fad that is sweeping through the education sector happens to be.
And (finally) if we let kids ‘self-educate’ without a foundation of knowing how to evaluate what they are reading or hearing, then we are just creating a bunch of NZF supporters who have gone off into the tangled weeds of irrationality.
“then we would start by eliminating poverty, making sure everyone was securely housed”
And in the meantime we do nothing about improving teaching and learning?
So we wait until all other societal problems are solved before kids can learn to read and write?
New Zealand is still one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. There is no poverty excuse for not learning to read and write. My missus was born and raised in a rural backwater Chinese village and leaving school at 14 and 15 she is perfectly literate and greatly enjoys reading.
Many people brought up through the Great Depression learned to read and write with the most rudimentary type of education – but at least it was structured.
Saying that we should not care about the teaching coalface until all other societal problems are solved, is like a lung cancer specialist saying we should give up on finding the best treatments until all other societal problems are solved. Both can proceed simultaneously.
People in most countries over the world would be envious of the opportunities the poorest in this country have for self-advancement.
Except that when we look at “improving teaching and learning”, a couple of things stand out:
– the best things that we could do to improve learning is exactly what I said. A couple of generations of kids without experience of poverty and with a decent home life would work wonders
– the best things we could do to improve teaching is tell woke right-wing ideologues like Erica Stanford to keep their grubby, self-interested mits off the education system and leave it to people who know something. Now I know teachers can be annoying, they pick up the latest shiny ‘pedadgogies’ with the radiant enthusiasm of evangelical converts and then discard them a bit later when something new comes along, and nothing much changes with either of them. That’s because they are pushing sh*t uphill by having to try to fix kids’ learning problems that originate outside the education system altogether. But they are infinitely better, and their capacity to do harm is infinitely less, than any woke right-wing ideologue.
‘My missus was born and raised in a rural backwater Chinese village and leaving school at 14 and 15.’
So you could not marry a white woman?
Seem to recall you mocked me for having a Chinese wife.
Chinese children have to learn to read and write so they can read how wonderful the Chinese Communist Party is and write essays saying Mao Ze Dong is the most wonderful pedophile that ever lived.
Having worked in the Chinese education system I know that advancement depends on how well connected people are(Guanxi) not how well they do at school.
Chinese education is also deeply racist with Tibetans, Mongols and other minorities discriminated against. It is not a model that we should follow in Aotearoa.
I think Mark he means that to have an education that works for the individual as well as society, first the individual needs to be fed, so the brain can think, also have somewhere to live that is adequate for shelter, warmth-livable temperature, a place to sit and study and reasonable conditions for learning, limited noise and distraction etc. You are simple-minded; if Chinese conditions are so good, how can we incorporate them in this country? This is where we live. We are not a wealthy country, we only look so to people with special lenses in their eyes, perhaps rose-coloured.
People can read & write, yet still not understand what they are reading or take a different view from that intended by the author. I think we agree that learning needs to be a continual process, yet many people get a few fixed ideas, then insist that the rest of the world fits within that worldview, usually causing adverse results.
Agree with one point you haven’t made but probably mean. NZ children take school for granted. Some of them don’t try very hard and if they have some other talent like sport, they can do as they like.
The children who are capable of learning to read, the vast majority, will learn to read. You can’t stop them.
It’s the understanding of what they read that we are talking about. As someone mentioned, the important skill is judging what they read and deciding if it’s correct.
There are also the children who for one reason or another, struggle to learn to read, that we are worried about. It may be poverty, home circumstances, intelligence or some specific learning disability including sight and hearing problems, (not related to intelligence). Luckily your wife didn’t have any of those problems and learnt to read.
I am reading your comments and they are a good example. Your comments make sense but because I learnt to discriminate and judge what I read, I can see that you have a very black and white view of the process of learning to read. You do not allow for any individual differences amongst children or teachers. Everyone should be able to read because your wife did.
It’s a lot more complicated than you think and the question we ask is, will Stanford’s way prepare children to think, judge, evaluate, and discern, all that they need to, from a passage of writing.
And that’s pretending the children with learning difficulties suddenly disappear. That’s another problem. Some of those other problems could be remediated today if Stanford wanted to spend money on them. So far, she doesn’t appear to realise they exist.
My kids primary school sports day this year has the sprint event replaced with a ‘fun race’ and the kids who want to compete in a ‘traditional’ sprint race have to leave the school grounds and do this at a park close to the school on another day entirely – as if they are doing something shameful.
Encapsulates perfectly what is wrong with this country and how this woke shitfest just keeps on getting worse.
Not 100% what Stanford’s position on this shit would be but I have a pretty good idea.
“Not 100% what Stanford’s position on this shit would be but I have a pretty good idea.”
Well apparently she is controlled by the illuminati. I’m waiting to see these skeletons in her closet
Yup also waiting for some clarification on her supposed skeletons but getting nothing . .
That’s a bit silly. Because there’s nothing wrong with the ‘traditional’ sprint race, provided:
– everyone understands that it’s essentially just a meaningless bit of fun
– everyone understand that the result is not a marker of any underlying or inherent classification of kids into superior-inferior or worthy-unworthy
– that everyone (not just the winner) gets to eat afterwards and has a home to go back to
The difficulty is that once those kids get out into the real economy they will find that none of those three essential and humanising caveats apply.
“Who Does Erica Stanford Really Serve?” Like all greedy natzo’s. Her own selfish interests.
I, for one, welcome Overlord Stanford.
Good analysis.
‘I, for one, welcome Overlord Stanford’
Your obeisance pleases us. You may approach and apply lips to the Royal Rectum.
I’ve got serious reservations about NCEA.
But whom does Erica serve? https://media1.tenor.com/m/OZJhTHPxLpAAAAAd/lurtz-saruman.gif
Always.
The Heritage Foundation. Atlas Network.