This is not a previous Government issue, this is not of their making. This has been a long time coming.
Where New Zealanders used to assume a world class education as their birth right, where anybody who was educated in New Zealand could stand amongst the brightest minds in the world, now we've had successive generations of children falling behind in every metric.
The numbers have been there. But instead of using the international results that have consistently put us at the bottom or near the bottom of the class, the educators, the boffins who make decisions about what our kids learn and how they learn and what our teachers teach, have refused to accept that their ideology is flawed, that their experimentation with our children has failed.
Instead, they phaff around and say that testing is outmoded and an old patriarchal colonial construct, and not the best way to assess a child's abilities and the like. Utter, utter nonsense.
In 2021, the Ministry of Education commissioned a report on our math syllabus, in the face of two decades of slipping maths results, and that's by both international and national measures. So it asked a panel of independent experts convened by the Royal Society to look at the New Zealand Curriculum, which outlines what kids need to know and when, to see if it was fit for purpose.
The conclusion? Massey University distinguished Professor of Maths Gaven Martin, who was chair of the panel that wrote the report told the New Zealand Herald our maths education was a 'goddamn mess'. Pretty unequivocal. The system was widening the gap between rich and poor children and left Māori and Pasifika children falling behind at school and ultimately falling behind in life.
And you know it, and I know it. You'll have heard the calls from so many parents and grandparents who are paying through the nose to send children to private tuition companies, to either get their kids the education in maths that they're not getting at school, or to give them the extra stimulus because they're good at maths and want to be better, that overworked and underprepared teachers simply cannot give them.
So Labour knew there was something wrong under Helen Clark, and National knew under John Key, and Labour knew under Jacinda Ardern, and now this coalition Government knows that there is something terribly wrong with how we're teaching our kids.
Christopher Luxon has moved to introduce structural maths for students 0-8 a year earlier than intended, after new data showed just 22 percent of Year 8 students in New Zealand reached the benchmark for maths. That's the bare minimum. And only 22 percent of them reached that benchmark. He said it amounts to a crisis - and Minister for Education Erica Stanford told Mike Hosking she agrees.
"We've compared ourselves to other countries who are doing a much better job than us, who have been actually climbing the ranks in the OECD, whereas we've been dropping for many, many years and I don't believe for a second that there are some people who just can't do math. That is completely untrue."
"Everybody can do maths. It's just the confidence and having wonderful teachers and great curriculum and great resources. And we've seen other countries like Singapore and Australia and the UK surge ahead because they have those things right and we don't and we are going to get them right under this Government."
"And I tell you what, I have been around the country for the last couple of years talking with principals of high schools and primary schools, and they all agree that we have a massive problem in maths. Nobody agrees with the Union apart from the Union, and I don't think we should be listening to them. High school principals tell me when I walk in the door, Erica, the first thing we have to do with our year nines or our third formers is teach them their timetables because they don't know them. Without fail, every high school I go in to. So there is a problem and the unions can have their heads in the sand but I'm going to move on despite that and implement our plan because it has to happen."
It really, really does. We've talked about it for far too long. The leader of the Academy report back in 2021 said the real issues went beyond the curriculum to the heart of how New Zealand educates its students, which ranged from insufficient teacher knowledge to a system that labels kids too early in life and doesn't give them the same chance to succeed.
It said there needs to be a real shake-up, but there's doubts that there is the political will. Currently teachers and schools have to pick and choose from a myriad of options for both professional development and curriculum resources, and that is true across many, many lessons, many subjects.
So if you want to learn history, you make up your own lesson plan, basically, based on the resource material that's there, it's a lucky dip, a pick and mix. And that's for all the lessons.
The report calls for the Ministry of Education to show more leadership in many areas, including giving all schools access to the right resources, upskilling teachers and attracting maths specialists to the profession. All of that would be fantastic.
And yet, the Education Ministry employed 1704 more staff in 2023 than it did in 2016. So the addition of 1704 more staff did exactly what for our kids?
It is so, so hard. If you struggled at school yourself, you were one of the first generation to be failed by New Zealand's education system, you have children yourself. You see that they're struggling.
How frustrating to feel powerless to be able to help them, to see them following in your footsteps and be denied opportunities that you were denied because the education system failed first them and now you. And that is just heartbreaking. And you can't afford it.
Your cousin might be married to an incredibly successful chap or woman, who have their own incredibly successful company, and all three of their children go to a private tuition company which costs them thousands of dollars a year.
And that's okay, they can shore up the gaps in their knowledge because they can afford it. But you can't. You simply can't.
So your kids continue to fall behind while the kids who can afford the tuition get the gaps in their knowledge shored up, and that is damn wrong. So wrong. It goes against everything I believe about this country and everything I believe about education.
Kerre McIvor, is a journalist, radio presenter, author and columnist. Currently hosts the Kerre Woodham mornings show on Newstalk ZB - where this article was sourced.
Instead, they phaff around and say that testing is outmoded and an old patriarchal colonial construct, and not the best way to assess a child's abilities and the like. Utter, utter nonsense.
In 2021, the Ministry of Education commissioned a report on our math syllabus, in the face of two decades of slipping maths results, and that's by both international and national measures. So it asked a panel of independent experts convened by the Royal Society to look at the New Zealand Curriculum, which outlines what kids need to know and when, to see if it was fit for purpose.
The conclusion? Massey University distinguished Professor of Maths Gaven Martin, who was chair of the panel that wrote the report told the New Zealand Herald our maths education was a 'goddamn mess'. Pretty unequivocal. The system was widening the gap between rich and poor children and left Māori and Pasifika children falling behind at school and ultimately falling behind in life.
And you know it, and I know it. You'll have heard the calls from so many parents and grandparents who are paying through the nose to send children to private tuition companies, to either get their kids the education in maths that they're not getting at school, or to give them the extra stimulus because they're good at maths and want to be better, that overworked and underprepared teachers simply cannot give them.
So Labour knew there was something wrong under Helen Clark, and National knew under John Key, and Labour knew under Jacinda Ardern, and now this coalition Government knows that there is something terribly wrong with how we're teaching our kids.
Christopher Luxon has moved to introduce structural maths for students 0-8 a year earlier than intended, after new data showed just 22 percent of Year 8 students in New Zealand reached the benchmark for maths. That's the bare minimum. And only 22 percent of them reached that benchmark. He said it amounts to a crisis - and Minister for Education Erica Stanford told Mike Hosking she agrees.
"We've compared ourselves to other countries who are doing a much better job than us, who have been actually climbing the ranks in the OECD, whereas we've been dropping for many, many years and I don't believe for a second that there are some people who just can't do math. That is completely untrue."
"Everybody can do maths. It's just the confidence and having wonderful teachers and great curriculum and great resources. And we've seen other countries like Singapore and Australia and the UK surge ahead because they have those things right and we don't and we are going to get them right under this Government."
"And I tell you what, I have been around the country for the last couple of years talking with principals of high schools and primary schools, and they all agree that we have a massive problem in maths. Nobody agrees with the Union apart from the Union, and I don't think we should be listening to them. High school principals tell me when I walk in the door, Erica, the first thing we have to do with our year nines or our third formers is teach them their timetables because they don't know them. Without fail, every high school I go in to. So there is a problem and the unions can have their heads in the sand but I'm going to move on despite that and implement our plan because it has to happen."
It really, really does. We've talked about it for far too long. The leader of the Academy report back in 2021 said the real issues went beyond the curriculum to the heart of how New Zealand educates its students, which ranged from insufficient teacher knowledge to a system that labels kids too early in life and doesn't give them the same chance to succeed.
It said there needs to be a real shake-up, but there's doubts that there is the political will. Currently teachers and schools have to pick and choose from a myriad of options for both professional development and curriculum resources, and that is true across many, many lessons, many subjects.
So if you want to learn history, you make up your own lesson plan, basically, based on the resource material that's there, it's a lucky dip, a pick and mix. And that's for all the lessons.
The report calls for the Ministry of Education to show more leadership in many areas, including giving all schools access to the right resources, upskilling teachers and attracting maths specialists to the profession. All of that would be fantastic.
And yet, the Education Ministry employed 1704 more staff in 2023 than it did in 2016. So the addition of 1704 more staff did exactly what for our kids?
It is so, so hard. If you struggled at school yourself, you were one of the first generation to be failed by New Zealand's education system, you have children yourself. You see that they're struggling.
How frustrating to feel powerless to be able to help them, to see them following in your footsteps and be denied opportunities that you were denied because the education system failed first them and now you. And that is just heartbreaking. And you can't afford it.
Your cousin might be married to an incredibly successful chap or woman, who have their own incredibly successful company, and all three of their children go to a private tuition company which costs them thousands of dollars a year.
And that's okay, they can shore up the gaps in their knowledge because they can afford it. But you can't. You simply can't.
So your kids continue to fall behind while the kids who can afford the tuition get the gaps in their knowledge shored up, and that is damn wrong. So wrong. It goes against everything I believe about this country and everything I believe about education.
Kerre McIvor, is a journalist, radio presenter, author and columnist. Currently hosts the Kerre Woodham mornings show on Newstalk ZB - where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
It may be true that the downturn in education predates the last Labour government, but Hipkins and Jacinda certainly turbocharged the decline, with the majority of students failing to attend school regularly and replacing the essential subjects with propaganda. It doesn't matter what you do to the cirruculum if kids don't want to learn, and they won't want to learn if they are told that maths and science is colonial oppression and they know they can have a comfortable life on welfare, playing the victim.
High school entrants not knowing their times tables? Yikes!
In Standard 4 in 1965 I recall being set a problem on building a round swimming pool and having to calculate how much it would cost in materials given the price of cement per cubic measure - all in pre-metric units of course (and involving pi). Admittedly Mr Short liked setting us hard ones and then relaxing with a newspaper while we sweated away, but some of us did get there.
Not that it was 'mathematics' - no, this was 'arithmetic'; mathematics commenced in Form 1.
Were we so much smarter than today's youngsters? No, but we had more number sense because we had to use various conversions for units and we practised something called 'mental arithmetic' in class rather than those stupid little plastic and silicon boxes called calculators.
I am a private maths tutor of 40 plus years and I charged the minimum wage per hour for tuition. I had family sponsors who subsidized children of solo parents and the unemployed. Consequently I had a cross -section of society.
It was extremely frustrating to see the gross incompetence, outrageous neglect of schools, ministry and teachers in all areas of learning but especially primary maths. Every year it seemed yet another destructive maths idea or strategy was shoved onto teachers to use in schools which caused further decline and confusion to students achieving.
I liked your article because it emphasized the iniquitous ideology which is behind all this nonsense called constructivism a product of Progressive Education's (PE) philosophy. The tenets of PE need to be widely known and called out. They are specifically anti- intellectual with little concern for the basics.
I have written about the dastardly lack of rote learning times tables on this site but there is also the issue of multiple strategies in doing basic arithmetic like two figure multiplying. One method is sanity more are not for primary students.
If you can't afford a tutor buy elementary arithmetic work books from Asian budget shops and then the very good Australian Excel maths workbooks which have answers. Singapore Maths work sheets are free online. Make your own flash cards for adding and times tables. One card one fact. Workbooks are better than computerized learning . However, there are rather good activities online for times tables like TUX MATHS. All children can achieve at maths given the correct explicit instruction and materials with heaps of revision, consolidation and reinforcement.
Teachers need to be selected for their dynamic objective approach, likely to make them proficent at teaching arithmetic (and maths). Instead we select for stone age te reo skills and associated easy going inclination.
Our youngest kids are just starting high school. Their journey through primary school was a complete shock for us as parents. No times tables, no spelling words, no vertical addition, subtraction, multiplication right up to the end of intermediate. Just wall to wall “strategies” all apparently done in their heads. They also had no idea of what a long division was. They got to hear lots of raving from me about all of this though:). Timetables were recited as we drove down the motorway, and vertical sums or algorithms they are now called apparently, were taught in the weekends only for the kids to then be told in no uncertain terms at school that they weren’t to use them in class. As parents who loved maths, this was all a shock, but perhaps the greatest shock was the calibre of the young teachers often put in front of them. Spelling and grammar in communications home seriously lacking. Any semblance of general knowledge also completely lacking apart from the diatribes they were parroting to our children. Teachers telling us directly in parent teacher interviews that they had had difficulties themselves with primary school maths and then telling one of our kids in year one she was not good at maths. For the record, this proved not to be the truth but she her first three or four years wrote we caught up with what was going on and taught her ourselves, believing it and not trying. Coming out of primary, we felt oue our kids had never been challenged whatsoever and had spent a lot of their time in class being asked to explain things to others for the teacher, and ending up completely bored and frustrated. While there were copious awards for everything else, there never appeared to be any positive feedback, marks or any concept of academic achievement whatsoever, as the whole system appeared to be rigged up to slow down the fast workers so they wouldn’t make others feel bad about themselves. We can only assume that many of the teachers’ own achievement levels had been so low that they themselves had never known the feeling of achievement either, the confidence and motivation it gives those who achieve, or how to identify nascent potential in their own students. Having had to observe a of this, I really, really hope this government can actually turn things around - because we need it.
ADVERT FOR PRIMARY TEACHER RECRUITMENT
Are you functionally illiterate and innumerate but would like to earn a good salary and have 3 months holiday a year? Apply for a place in a primary teacher training programme! (Tip: Make sure you throw plenty of Maori phrases into your speech at the interview - they couldn't write either so your inability in this area doesn't matter.)
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