A Principal’s Lament

Of Stanford’s many and multifaceted attacks on New Zealand education, her attitudes towards, and treatment of, the principals and teachers entrusted with the education of our children are possibly the most concerning.

Her take over of the New Zealand Teachers Council, including the removal of the rights of teachers to vote for representatives on this, is part of her agenda. By doing this, she is now free to set the criteria for teacher registration in New Zealand, and thereby enabling her, via the Council, to take action against principals and teachers who speak out. This agenda is not new, as the John Key led governments of the last decade also were very uncomfortable about education professionals speaking out against their national standards programme. 

However interfering with the Teachers Councils was a step too far for them, even if they resorted to less scrupulous ways of silencing dissent, as I and many others found out. Note that this was during the height of the dirty politics period when unsavoury characters like Jason Ede were employed to feed information to their attack bloggers such as Cameron Slater who had no hesitation in walking around the edge of libel to attack me and the others who put their careers on the line to defend their educational beliefs.

Stanford (and those behind her) have obviously learned from 2011 and the months of active protests by many schools, principals, and teachers against the national standards agenda, hence her take-over of the Teachers Council. Her power to set the criteria for registration makes it possible for clauses to be included that silence teachers from speaking out. 

On top of this, the de-professionalising of the teaching profession, through the very structured demands of the various new curriculum documents is reducing principals and teachers to merely implementing programmes set out in supporting documents. Gone are the days when teachers used their professional knowledge, skills, and creativity to plan interesting and stimulating learning experiences for their classes. Once the focus was on individualising the learning, helping each child learn at the level which best suited them. Now the rigid criteria for ‘assessing learning’ makes this impossible. 

Having observed English teachers trying to follow prescriptive teaching plans, this fills me with fear for the New Zealand teaching profession. Once New Zealand teachers had an international reputation. I remember the head teacher of a school in North London remarking to me that during his years of experience, he generally found that New Zealand teachers were his best teachers. Those were the days.

I have a particular concern for school principals, and am so glad that I’m not faced with having to swallow all my educational values in order to fulfil Stanford’s demands. I struggled to do this with national standards in 2011, which led to fraught times, but the current situation is in a different league altogether. I know of other retired principals who feel likewise. The job of today’s principals must be near impossible.

Recently a principal published her thoughts on the situation, wisely keeping her identity anonymous to avoid being hit by Stanford’s clobbering machine (in hindsight I should have done the same in 2011).

We were once trusted to lead schools. Increasingly, we are simply expected to implement directives.

 

Ponder on her opening paragraph.

‘For the first time in 28 years, I found myself wondering whether to open the help wanted pages. Do newspapers even still have those? I honestly don’t know. I’ve spent my entire working life in education – from the classroom through to principalship – and until recently, I never imagined wanting to leave it.’

 

Surprised? I’m not. I’m also sure she isn’t alone in feeling this.

‘I began teaching a decade into the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms, when schools were trusted to make decisions for the students and communities they served. Principals, leadership teams and boards were seen as professionals with the knowledge and experience to determine what would work best in their own contexts.

That autonomy came with enormous responsibility. Schools managed everything – staffing, property, finance, health and safety, and learning. The workload was significant, but the trade-off was the freedom to build school communities that reflected the needs and aspirations of their people. We could design learning that engaged students, responded to our communities, and created opportunities for young people to succeed in many different ways.’

 

Oldies like me who remember the years before Tomorrow’s Schools would beg to differ, as it was our experience that New Zealand education started the downward slide at that time. A decade into Tomorrows Schools meant that most principals and teachers of that time had learned their craft prior to Tomorrow’s Schools, and so were able to bring their professional expertise to making the most of the pig’s ear that was Tomorrow’s Schools.

‘Now it often feels like all risk and very little reward. When things go wrong, schools – and particularly principals – are expected to carry the responsibility, even for issues beyond our control. At the same time, the professional autonomy that once made the pressure worthwhile is steadily evaporating. Schools are now told what to teach, how to teach it, and how much time to spend teaching it – as though the profession is no longer trusted to exercise judgement.’

 

It has been a right wing dream for years to disempower teachers, to replace them by some kind of machine learning. Once the dream was for computer instruction, children sitting in front of computers working through computerised worksheets. Would it surprise you to know that Bill Gates was a vigorous proponent of this?

Then the idea of teaching via instructional videos was raised, the idea being that instead of a class teacher leading the learning, she would be replaced by an on screen teacher doing an online version of chalk and talk. Look up Kahn Academy for an example of this.

Now the technology world has turned again and the right wing dream is that teachers can be replaced by AI instruction – you will be aware of course that this government sees AI as a solution to  reduce expenditure on actual people, in spite of any evidence that this will work.

Quite obviously the biggest cost in the education budget is that of paying teachers, just imagine how much money could be saved and diverted to landlords and the well off, if the teacher budget could be substantially reduced by replacing them with AI.

Back in the early days of computers in schools (the absolute value of which has never been proven), there was a saying that any teacher who could be replaced by a computer should be replaced, as they’re obviously incompetent. Nothing has changed. A teacher who can be replaced by AI should be replaced. 

‘A one-size-fits-all approach may look tidy on paper, but schools are not identical, and neither are the children who walk through our gates each morning. The students most likely to be failed by rigid systems are the very students who most need responsive teaching: our neurodiverse learners, students living with trauma, and many of our Māori and Pasifika ākonga.

Education works best when teachers can respond to the students in front of them. That means connecting learning to students’ lives, interests and experiences. It means having the flexibility to seize opportunities that ignite curiosity and expand horizons’.

Stanford’s prescriptive curriculum flies in the face of this obvious statement.

‘At the same time, schools are being asked to absorb constant change at extraordinary speed. New initiatives, reversals, rewrites and shifting expectations arrive before the last changes have even settled. Teachers and leaders are reassured that the hard work has already been done for them – unit plans prepared, lesson sequences written, content mapped out.

But one lesson plan cannot possibly meet the needs of tens of thousands of different children in different schools, communities and circumstances.

Nor is that what inspires great teaching.’

 

Exactly. But Stanford’s agenda doesn’t allow for great teaching, just people who will follow prescribed programmes, which, incidentally is common in the USA where prescribed text books are provided and teachers just have to work through them. No wonder US teachers, in general, are poorly paid.

‘And what happens to teacher motivation when professional agency disappears? Great teaching has never been about simply delivering content. It is about taking what needs to be taught and using years of professional knowledge, experience and relationships to make that learning work for the 20 or 30 individual children sitting in front of you. Reducing teachers to deliverers of pre-packaged content risks stripping away not only creativity, but the very professionalism that attracts people to teaching in the first place.’

Indeed. Thirty-six years of neoliberal philosophy has destroyed New Zealand education, schools and teaching as a profession. 

Stanford is hammering the nails into the coffin of public education. Seymour and his charter schools are waiting in the wings ready to take over.

Is that the real agenda?