Which do you think your hard-earned tax dollars would be better spent on? Kids who leave school equipped with world-leading maths skills? Or kids who leave school barely able to count to 10, but able to do so in a language spoken by just 0.0025 per cent of the world?
Clearly, at the moment, New Zealanders can’t have both. While the NZ left-media (a tautology, I apologise) brag about how many people now speak ‘te reo’ (aka ‘university Māori’), the National government is noticing that fewer and fewer of them can grasp even basic maths.
22% of Year 8 students are at the expected standard for maths and 12% of Year 8 Māori students are where they should be.
The best spin Stuff can put on these dire results is this lame excuse:
The Minister was referring to where students currently sit against the new curriculum set to be introduced.
So, they’re not quite as bad, if you measure them against the dumbed-down curriculum from the Ardern years. Which is like saying that a second-rate adult male athlete is suddenly a world champion if you let him compete against teenage girls. Like that would ever happen…
With a limited pool of money to spend on education, the question then becomes one of priorities. The new National government is getting at least some of their priorities right.
$30 million is being stripped from a programme funding teachers learning te reo Māori in order to supercharge the maths curriculum.
Education Minister Erica Stanford said the Te Ahu o te Reo Māori initiative “isn’t accredited” and is more than double the cost of “similar courses” with a price tag of $100 million.
“An evaluation of the programme found no evidence it directly impacted progress and achievement for students.
“The review also couldn’t quantify what impact the programme had on te reo Māori use in the classroom.”
Well, golly, a woke ‘education’ course that’s completely evidence free? That’s never happened before!
Meanwhile, the groomers peddling ‘relationships and sexuality education’, should be getting nervous.
Stanford told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking there is plenty of money in education to “reprioritise” […]
The move is a part of the Government’s “make it count” plan unveiled last month which involves the introduction of structural maths for year 0-8 students from term one in 2025 – a year earlier than planned.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he fast-tracked the move after seeing the “appalling” results.
He said it amounted to “a crisis” and the data had prompted him to call in the Secretary of Education and the ministry’s executive team.
“There’s no way to describe those results as anything other than a total system failure.”
Far be it for me to suspect that in fact it’s the system working as intended by the woke elite. If kids can’t think critically or do the basic maths so critical to scientific understanding, then they haven’t the mental toolkit to kick back against the ‘climate change education’ (i.e., indoctrination) drummed into them through their entire school years.
Of course, there’s still the challenge of getting them to even show up for school in the first place.
Education Minister Erica Stanford announced the funding “reprioritisation” on Thursday, as associate minister David Seymour announced his own crack down on truancy.
Seymour called it the “Star system”. That stands for “Stepped Attendance Response”, which would catch truant students and put them back in school, starting in 2026.
Here’s one detail that will set the teacher’s union screaming like stuck pigs – less bludge days.
And he wasn’t just concerned with absent students. Seymour has also called on schools to stop using “teacher only days”.
“Schools will have to play their part in setting a good example as well. This means not taking teacher-only days during term time,” he said.
What? Work on some of their 12 weeks of holidays every year? The horror!
There’s a stick for deadbeat parents, too.
Each school would have its own Star plan, with more intensive responses the longer the child was absent.
It would start with a message to the parents, and could lead to the Ministry of Education being called in to fine the parents […]
Seymour said the issue of absenteeism in schools is serious, with New Zealand’s regular attendance rate only 47.1% in 2023.
“If this issue isn’t addressed there will be an 80-year long shadow of people who missed out on education when they were young, are less able to work, less able to participate in society, more likely to be on benefits. That’s how serious this is.”
And a government getting serious about education? For all its faults, this can only be a good sign.
Lushington describes himself as Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. This article was first published HERE
9 comments:
Until such time NZ matches other nations in acheivement in core subjects expenditure on now mostly contrived obsolete stone age derived te reo hobby language should be at least poised. To inflict such a contrived burden and disincetive on the great majority of teachers and potential teachers when their very full attention is required in core areas is absurd.
As a maths tutor for 40 years plus my experience has been the appalling ignorance in basic arithmetic of far too many primary teachers . My son in year 8 was asked by his teacher to teach the class fractions , because she wasn't confident in it and anyway her expertise was in teaching art. I taught my son and then he went to school and taught the cl;ass. This is echoes of pupil teachers of early last century in NZ when there was shortage of teachers.
That is actually what we have now which is a great void of teachers who can teach subject matter because of ignorance in not just content but also in methods, In basic arithmetic teachers have been very dependent on computerized learning which did not require much input from the teacher. Arithmetic needs a fair amount of rote learning, (in eg times tables), revision , consolidation with explicit , systematic and cumulative instruction. But the current ideology condemns this sort of instruction in favour of child-centered learning called constructivism the main villain in modern education and cause of our shocking failure rate in all areas.
Programmes can be put in place but it will require removing great mountains of ideological nonsense as well. Te Reo thrown into the mix will be yet another obstruction with which to contend.
My primary school teachers (early to mid-1960s) had mostly not completed high school. They had gone to Teachers College straight from Form 5 or 6, got a 2-year diploma, then spent the next 45 years teaching children to read and write and do sums with a bit of social studies thrown in.
Now they finish high school, go to varsity for at least 3 years culminating in a degree, have their little heads crammed full of specious psychobabble and woke bullshit, and regard themselves as important agents of social change.
Just don't ask them to write a coherent and grammatically correct paragraph or calculate simple stats such as percentages given a pencil and piece of paper.
It's got to be obvious from a pure cost-effectiveness perspective which is the better deal from society's (as the funders of public schooling) point of view.
Gaynor , My mother did the same for us 60 years ago. Please make a You Tube series on teaching old style maths at home so children can learn to count , add, divide etc at home alone or with guidance .
Not quantive statstics , algebra and all the woke stuff , just to get the kids mathematically literate.
I love to tease folks with long division of Pounds shillings and pence. The vacant expressions are astounding .
The older teaching methods and basic common syllabus meant that teachers were teaching what they had been taught. Their training expanded their abiity. Parents coud assist at home by repeating what they had learned. But now the syllabus and techniques are so obscure most teachers are befuddled and parents at sea.In the 50s there was a campaign of recruitment from other work; ;tradesmann etc. Most succeeded whereas today any such woud be lost in jargon. And all their free time spent grappling with stone age te reo, esential for career.
Basil , the Khan Academy has free instruction on performing basic arithmetic like two figure multiplying as we used to do with possibly slightly different terminology like regrouping when doing subtraction
that requires 'borrowing'. Another site has a teacher writing steps on a blackboard and referring to 'the method as ' the quick method ' that was done back in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth !
That says it the way it is . All these new fangled methods are confusing and long winded to students and to make matters even worse there are several methods given,. Consequently, even bright children are befuddled by them all and can't automatically work through even one. This suggests to me there has been a determined effort to destroy children's arithmetic ability and hence cancel their chances to advance and succeed in maths at secondary school. I don't believe any true classroom teacher, concerned about his/her students would produce such stupidity .
Barend is very accurate in describing "(teachers '.)........heads crammed full with specious psychobabble and woke bullshit and regard themselves as important agents of social change'. Into some sort of dystopia full of innumerates?
Children and most adults today woud be mesmerised by the shopkeepersof the 1950s who used to run their finger down each column of 20 or so prices, adding mentally and converting pence to shillings etc.Despite maths to about degree level.I stil "borrow and pay bacK' . I have to stop and think to explain but it works .Also occasionaly resort to a short mental chant of tables to recall some combination. My wife was a teacher and although specialising in infants, later relieved. Her arithmetic ability was dire.. Seems to me teachers should be subject to priodic tsts (except of frivolous te reo)
Teacher teaching Maori maths asks the class: 'What do 1 + 2 =?
Hone says: 'One you you and two for me is free.'
No point in mentioned the Trachtenberg speed system of basic mathematics to our present day teachers then! Without using Trachtenberg, my wife has the grocery bill added up in her head before she gets to the checkout. We feel for the kids of today - the World has simply been dumbed down and NZ is proving the absolute master of that process.
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