It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better.
I’m sorry if I keep harping on about education, but it’s difficult not to when you consider that an entire generation, at least, of kids in this country is being robbed of opportunities their parents and grandparents took for granted.
And when politicians come up with risible “solutions” such as the one announced on Monday.
Apparently, Education Minister Jan Tinetti, herself once a teacher, shares our concern at falling standards of achievement in the three Rs. Nice to know she’s caught up with those of us who have been ringing the alarm bell for years, but better late than never. Mind you, this is the same Jan Tinetti who defends students’ right to have cell phones with them while in class, describing that technology as a very powerful educational tool.
Here’s a trivial pursuit question for you: When did we last have a decent Minister of Education?
Anyway, the news is that the Government is going to cut Year 4-8 teacher/student ratios, from 1:29 to 1:28. Yep, you read that correctly. This, we are told, will take some pressure off teachers, and allow them to spend more one-on-one time with students, focusing on what they do best, namely teaching young people the basics well. This is something that they are demonstrably not doing now.
The Prime Minister, meanwhile, seems to be pinning his hopes on a declining birth rate to reduce teacher/pupil ratios. Neither he nor Tinetti made any attempt to explain why the teacher/pupil ratio in kura kaupapa Mā ori years 2-8 is 1:18.
Frankly, I don’t believe class sizes have much to do with the reported fact that kids in Year 4 do better in three Rs testing than those in Year 8. In other words, achievement rates fall away as the kids get older.
Apparently, Education Minister Jan Tinetti, herself once a teacher, shares our concern at falling standards of achievement in the three Rs. Nice to know she’s caught up with those of us who have been ringing the alarm bell for years, but better late than never. Mind you, this is the same Jan Tinetti who defends students’ right to have cell phones with them while in class, describing that technology as a very powerful educational tool.
Here’s a trivial pursuit question for you: When did we last have a decent Minister of Education?
Anyway, the news is that the Government is going to cut Year 4-8 teacher/student ratios, from 1:29 to 1:28. Yep, you read that correctly. This, we are told, will take some pressure off teachers, and allow them to spend more one-on-one time with students, focusing on what they do best, namely teaching young people the basics well. This is something that they are demonstrably not doing now.
The Prime Minister, meanwhile, seems to be pinning his hopes on a declining birth rate to reduce teacher/pupil ratios. Neither he nor Tinetti made any attempt to explain why the teacher/pupil ratio in kura kaupapa Mā ori years 2-8 is 1:18.
Frankly, I don’t believe class sizes have much to do with the reported fact that kids in Year 4 do better in three Rs testing than those in Year 8. In other words, achievement rates fall away as the kids get older.
Maybe Ms Tinetti could explain that to us.
And how many of these kids are actually fronting? If 60 per cent of children are attending school regularly, as we are told they are,
1:29 actually equates to 1:17.4. A reduction of one equates to 1:16.8. And what happens if the Government’s puerile efforts to get more kids in schools actually work? Thankfully, they won’t, but what if they did? Perhaps we can reassure ourselves that the Government is apparently doing nothing at all to make room for these missing thousands, as it obviously isn’t expecting them to start turning up any time soon.
It will not surprise you to learn that when I was at school I wasn’t especially fixated on teacher/pupil ratios, but I suspect that at primary and intermediate they were higher than they are now. That never seemed to prevent the teacher from turning his/her steely gaze in my direction on an uncomfortably regular basis.
That changed in my last year at Kaitaia College. My sixth form was the biggest ever; something had changed, and while masses of kids still called it a day when they turned 15, or completed the fifth form, many more than usual carried on, but numbers thinned dramatically in the Upper Sixth (Form 7, Year 13). This meant that subject choices were limited, but we had very little competition when it came to getting the teacher’s attention.
There were four of us in 7th form German, not a lot more in history, and probably less than a dozen in English. It was like being privately tutored. Which was good, in a subject in which one excelled, not so good (from a comfort zone perspective) if one was struggling. There is nowhere to hide in a class of four.
Worse was to come. Having agreed, in writing, to train as a teacher once I had a BA, I was told what subjects I would be studying at university, including German. Not my strongest suit, and not something I had ever contemplated mastering to the point of being able to teach it.
And once a week I found myself in a language laboratory, where my lack of talent was cruelly exposed.
Each of us, probably 40 or more, sat in little booths with headphones, conversing (in what I understood was high German, totally different to what we had encountered at college) with someone who asked all manner of unintelligible questions in the expectation of getting intelligent answers.
The tutor sat at the front of the room, listening in to individual conversations as she chose.
She listened to mine a lot. I knew she was there because of the tiny click that announced her arrival, followed by increasingly terse interjections, which I assumed were meant to encourage me. Noch einmal is one phrase with which I became very familiar.
Failing German, I did not blight my life to quite the extent that it might have, but I’ve never forgotten the ignominy of being in the spotlight and failing to perform to the required standard.
And how many of these kids are actually fronting? If 60 per cent of children are attending school regularly, as we are told they are,
1:29 actually equates to 1:17.4. A reduction of one equates to 1:16.8. And what happens if the Government’s puerile efforts to get more kids in schools actually work? Thankfully, they won’t, but what if they did? Perhaps we can reassure ourselves that the Government is apparently doing nothing at all to make room for these missing thousands, as it obviously isn’t expecting them to start turning up any time soon.
It will not surprise you to learn that when I was at school I wasn’t especially fixated on teacher/pupil ratios, but I suspect that at primary and intermediate they were higher than they are now. That never seemed to prevent the teacher from turning his/her steely gaze in my direction on an uncomfortably regular basis.
That changed in my last year at Kaitaia College. My sixth form was the biggest ever; something had changed, and while masses of kids still called it a day when they turned 15, or completed the fifth form, many more than usual carried on, but numbers thinned dramatically in the Upper Sixth (Form 7, Year 13). This meant that subject choices were limited, but we had very little competition when it came to getting the teacher’s attention.
There were four of us in 7th form German, not a lot more in history, and probably less than a dozen in English. It was like being privately tutored. Which was good, in a subject in which one excelled, not so good (from a comfort zone perspective) if one was struggling. There is nowhere to hide in a class of four.
Worse was to come. Having agreed, in writing, to train as a teacher once I had a BA, I was told what subjects I would be studying at university, including German. Not my strongest suit, and not something I had ever contemplated mastering to the point of being able to teach it.
And once a week I found myself in a language laboratory, where my lack of talent was cruelly exposed.
Each of us, probably 40 or more, sat in little booths with headphones, conversing (in what I understood was high German, totally different to what we had encountered at college) with someone who asked all manner of unintelligible questions in the expectation of getting intelligent answers.
The tutor sat at the front of the room, listening in to individual conversations as she chose.
She listened to mine a lot. I knew she was there because of the tiny click that announced her arrival, followed by increasingly terse interjections, which I assumed were meant to encourage me. Noch einmal is one phrase with which I became very familiar.
Failing German, I did not blight my life to quite the extent that it might have, but I’ve never forgotten the ignominy of being in the spotlight and failing to perform to the required standard.
I have no idea how many kids of my generation had literacy or numeracy issues, but there were probably plenty. These days I suppose a lot of them would have been labelled ADHD or dyslexic, or suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome; in my day they just weren’t academic. And it might be far from irrelevant that I have no recollection of the behavioural issues that seem to plague many teachers these days. Children simply did not run amok.
Whatever the reason, they tended to depart from the compulsory education system at the earliest opportunity, and found paid employment, of which there was no shortage whatsoever.
It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better. The curriculum has expanded enormously, a fact that some in Parliament finally seem to have wised up to, and what was once a world-leading education system isn’t any more. Class sizes might be a factor in that, but I would bet it’s a small one. If it is a factor, and Ms Tinetti wants to fix it, she will have to do a great deal more than reduce class sizes by one. In fact I suspect she has about as much of an idea about the correct answer as I did in that language lab in 1971.
Peter Jackson MNZM, former editor of the Northland Age newspaper, 38 years at the helm of this popular paper, now happily retired. This article was first published in the Northland Age 20/4/23.
Whatever the reason, they tended to depart from the compulsory education system at the earliest opportunity, and found paid employment, of which there was no shortage whatsoever.
It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better. The curriculum has expanded enormously, a fact that some in Parliament finally seem to have wised up to, and what was once a world-leading education system isn’t any more. Class sizes might be a factor in that, but I would bet it’s a small one. If it is a factor, and Ms Tinetti wants to fix it, she will have to do a great deal more than reduce class sizes by one. In fact I suspect she has about as much of an idea about the correct answer as I did in that language lab in 1971.
Peter Jackson MNZM, former editor of the Northland Age newspaper, 38 years at the helm of this popular paper, now happily retired. This article was first published in the Northland Age 20/4/23.
3 comments:
The key words here are "of which there was no shortage whatsoever" in relation to employment. When almost all school leavers get jobs, there is no education problem. It doesn't matter what is in the curriculum; teach 'em to read and write and they get work and everyone is happy. Then the economy loses its appetite for unskilled youth and everyone starts talking about things like the curriculum and class sizes.
large classes are not a problem if all are at similar level. This was the case pre war when for classes of 40 plus teachers obtained results amazing by current standards. (Someone here claimed the qualification at 12 for secondary school matched later School cert in some aspects; vastly beyond the current NCEA tests most are failing. The problem now is any streaming or failing produces predominantly maori/pacifica classes and the WT and everyone else wrings their hands in anguish. But the students may not be so discouraged and actually attend)
The teacher class ratio of teacher: pupil in the 1960s was 1:40.In 1970, NZ achieved the highest score on international tests in reading comprehension and literature. I believe our superannuitants who can accurately recall their school days are valuable since this was really one of the golden eras of NZ educationally.
Today our education system is in crisis with the basics not being taught effectively. Time spent on basics is not the main issue but rather the methods employed. Most astute (sensible) educationalists agree with this.
Over use of D.I.Y. learning called constructivism ,in educabble, is in my view the number one culprit. It is nonsense that came out of academia and originally from the voluminous writings of the patron saint of education, John Dewey, an American. This philosopher had less concern for academic achievement than producing some sort of socialist state. He actually stated that teaching the basics was a 'fetish' of elementary schooling.
Hence the main NZ reading method is ineffective and a Clatyon's affair whereby
new entrant children appear to be reading those predictable readers but since very frequently they simply guess words mainly from pictures or context with a token amount of word attack using sounds, it is not real reading. When they reach advanced texts with no pictures and more complex sentences they become struggling readers. Without an intensive programme of structured literacy which they should have received from the beginning they will not improve and at 14 years one third fail the UNESCO literacy tests. Meanwhile children from high decile families may receive very expensive remediation but lower decile children are denied this.The SES gap gets wider and many ordinary and normal kids will be forever semi-literate.
Similarly NZ maths teaching has methodologies and ideas which defy common sense.
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