An Educational Expert We Should All Be Listening To
I’ve written a number of articles where I have bemoaned the current situation in education where the National led government has been driven by ideology and has not taken any regard of evidence from educational experts.
First let’s look how we got here.
Being ideologically driven is not new or exclusive to this government. The rot really started in the last term of of the 4th Labour government, when then prime minister David Lange appointed himself Minister of Education, and set up a task force led by a supermarket entrepreneur (true). This taskforce was charged with reviewing the provision of education in New Zealand, and the outcome was the still ongoing disaster which was then euphemistically named ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’.
To be fair, the implementation of the taskforce’s recommendations wasn’t quite what they had envisaged. It could be said that these recommendations fitted the definition of a camel – a horse designed by experts who couldn’t agree – and a number of parts were not practical. It took quite some effort by the new Ministry of Education to produce a more workable plan.
It didn’t help that shortly after the new regime was established, Labour was deservedly kicked out in the 1990 election; however voters either hadn’t looked carefully enough, or didn’t bother looking, at the education policies of the incoming National government.
Finance Minister Ruth Richardson was very much in favour of funding schools through a voucher system, as has been tried in some USA states with predictable consequences. Fortunately wiser heads prevailed and this never happened, however I suggest to you that David Seymour’s crusade to establish charter schools is a descendent of the voucher system policy. I notice that this time around he’s dispensed with the ‘Partnership Schools’ label as no one bought that bit of spin.
One unfortunate outcome of the era was that the New Zealand Curriculum received the first of its overhauls, with introduction of achievement objectives in EVERY subject area, including Art – no one ever successfully explained to me how Art could be broken down into measurable objectives. Nonsensical.
Schools were required to assess every child against the appropriate achievement objectives for their year level – someone estimated that there were over 1200 of these – and every three years the government’s education ‘thought police’, other known as the the Educational Review Office (ERO) would descend on schools to check whether this was being done. (I got myself in a fair bit of strife back in 2011 when I used a second world war German based label for ERO, possibly not wise when I was still working as a principal…).
Under the Achievement Objectives Curricula, teachers were in danger of spending more time on testing and ticking boxes than on actually teaching.
The election of a Labour led government in 1999 eased the neoliberal demands on schools, including a complete refocus of ERO, but still left them a long way from real and authentic education. There were two brief flashes of light, the first was when Steve Maharey was appointed Minister of Education; unfortunately for unknown reasons he was removed from this in a cabinet reshuffle. The second was the introduction in 2007 of the Revised New Zealand Curriculum. Unlike previous and subsequent fiddling with the curriculum, this one was developed in full consultation with the sector, including teachers and academics. The curriculum was world leading, and would have led to great things, however it was kneecapped by the incoming National led government. Such a tragedy.
National’s return in 2008 led to yet another effort to restrict education through their disastrous National Standards in Primary Schools policy. Many of us fought this to the end, and were able to limit the damage, although the international (and very educationally suspect) PISA tests, carried out some years later, of high school school students who had gone through the national standards showed the damage to their learning in Reading and Mathematics that we predicted.
The next Labour led government, under Minister of Education Chris Hipkins, killed national standards, but from the outside it appeared to me that apart from that nothing much really changed. I’m happy to be proven wrong here.
And then this current lot were elected and here we are.
A very authoritative voice back in 2011 in the fight against National Standards was Professor Welby Ings of Auckland University of Technology. His biography on their webpage starts off with a bang:
Professor Ings is a disobedient thinker. An internationally renowned speaker and educational reformer, he sees productive disobedience as behaviour that pushes our thinking and action into new and unconsidered realms. Specifically, he questions our anxious micromanaging of thought and our preoccupation with tick box assessment. In 2017, his best-selling book Disobedient Teaching became influential in the reconceptualisation of New Zealand education.
Professor Ings is a great example of an education expert that should be having a major role in the development of child centred education in New Zealand, rather than the ideology that drives current policies.
Recently he was interviewed on the Bradbury Group.
If you’ve not seen this, then it is a must watch. He explains the situation very eloquently and very clearly and there’s nothing more I can add.
Excellent review of how things happened Alan. When the 1990’s curriculum came on the school schemes faded away as the focus went on all of those stupid objectives. This was the beginning of the “technocratic-isation” of education and the downward trend of education achievement nationwide. Amongst many of the negatives was the fading away of school schemes and programmes replaced by those curriculum documents as a de facto school programme. The rot was set in!! They were a close copy of the English curriculum documents.
I liked what I heard of Welby Ings on Q+A a few weeks back. It made perfect sense. I was surprised to see that his academic career is framed by art and design but sometimes you need to step out of the confines of ‘education’ per se to appreciate the nuances of what it means to learn. Creativity should be a key goal in any education system, not only the acquisition of skills and knowledge, important as they are. Imv what undermines most public education is approach to assessment…not limited to this government, indeed NZ. There is too much focus on assessment and not enough on learning – and on setting up an environment conducive for learning. Behind this view is a belief in educational circles that what can be counted is what counts. So we get assessment regimes that focus far too much on numerical counting, the statistical measuring of achievement, as if these measurable outcomes are what matters most. You can see why. Accountability, comparison, easy to get past Treasury, easy for the electorate to grasp. Do we need assessment? Of course. But what should it look like? That’s the crux of the matter.
From his AUT blurb online Ings says: “We don’t seek the truth when we design; we seek to find elegant and appropriate answers.” He makes it clear he does not see teaching as dissemination of knowledge, rather, it is creating an environment for learning. Effective learning, he says, involves ongoing, intelligent, disobedient acts that help to move knowledge beyond the constraints of formula.
Pretty bold. A disobedient view in itself! But what would assessment look like here? It would need to mirror the learning environment. Nothing short of a paradigm shift.
I see Prof Ings takes seriously the academic role as critic and conscience of society. I feel far too many academics who are sought after as consultants forget this pledge, conveniently or otherwise.
Not keen on the NCEA – but the CoC are clearly playing ‘Devil takes the hindmost’. The comedy lies in these half-formed commerce students imagining they are NZs best & brightest – not even close.