I watched Erica Stanford do a press conference yesterday at a school in Wellington while launching the writing action plan.
While I was watching that I was reading a story about Nicola Willis, who it was suggested by people in London might be the next Prime Minister.
She had gone to the New Zealand Society on her trip last week. She stood there in a tangerine suit and there had been a buzz about the room as they wondered whether this was New Zealand's next Prime Minister.
It was a weird story, and it means nothing, but if it ever came down to it, I would take Stanford over Willis all day long.
She is a force of nature and if you ever want to see a minister in charge of detail, watch her in a classroom in front of cameras. You won't fail to be impressed.
The bad news though is part of the day involved the release of yet more data showing our kids in Year 3, 6, and 8 are in real trouble when it comes to maths and reading.
Only a small minority are where they should be. A small minority.
The claim at this stage by Stanford is what they have introduced, and are introducing, is the turnaround plan. It's the magic, the cure, and the panacea.
Not that it makes it better, but the numbers out yesterday were marked against some of the new standards, hence the massive failure rate.
This stuff is benchmarked internationally. Once, not long ago (maybe when I was at school), in a lot of stuff we led the world. Today we are so far from leading the world it makes you want to cry.
Stanford isn't crying. She speaks in a way that suggests she knows something the rest of us don’t, like she has seen the future and it is bright.
Or could it be she just hopes it is and is faking it till she makes it, because the gap between where our kids are and where they need to be is gargantuan?
So, back to the parents. Where are they?
Maths can be sort of tricky, if you want to find an excuse, but reading and writing isn't. A kid who can't read or write properly by high school is a reflection of their home life, as much as the school.
Schools take too much heat. Governments take too much heat.
If your kid can't write or read and your kid is 12 or 13, where have you been?
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
It was a weird story, and it means nothing, but if it ever came down to it, I would take Stanford over Willis all day long.
She is a force of nature and if you ever want to see a minister in charge of detail, watch her in a classroom in front of cameras. You won't fail to be impressed.
The bad news though is part of the day involved the release of yet more data showing our kids in Year 3, 6, and 8 are in real trouble when it comes to maths and reading.
Only a small minority are where they should be. A small minority.
The claim at this stage by Stanford is what they have introduced, and are introducing, is the turnaround plan. It's the magic, the cure, and the panacea.
Not that it makes it better, but the numbers out yesterday were marked against some of the new standards, hence the massive failure rate.
This stuff is benchmarked internationally. Once, not long ago (maybe when I was at school), in a lot of stuff we led the world. Today we are so far from leading the world it makes you want to cry.
Stanford isn't crying. She speaks in a way that suggests she knows something the rest of us don’t, like she has seen the future and it is bright.
Or could it be she just hopes it is and is faking it till she makes it, because the gap between where our kids are and where they need to be is gargantuan?
So, back to the parents. Where are they?
Maths can be sort of tricky, if you want to find an excuse, but reading and writing isn't. A kid who can't read or write properly by high school is a reflection of their home life, as much as the school.
Schools take too much heat. Governments take too much heat.
If your kid can't write or read and your kid is 12 or 13, where have you been?
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
9 comments:
Dear Mike, couldnt agree more with you, bang on.
Somehow we need to educate a section of the population that when you have children you have the sole responsibility to look after them, ensure they get nutritious meals, a warm bed, an education, not to mention the love and time they need and deserve. how do you do that???? Some seem to not understand the children always should come first in every decision you make.
n very many cases both parents have been at work all day and after getting meals are too whacked to fritter an hour with the kids. And at the junior levels the Clay method of learning to read is too obscure for parents, and ditto the new maths. Decades ago parents could remember the basic methods programmed into them and were able to pass on years later..Pupils have been progressed irrespective of what learned or not so many emerge without even the most basic ability. They are in no position to assist their children, even if home on Benefit all day. Education was well advanced, even for maori in the bacjblocks, 100 years ago when all were failed to their level, making teaching and learning much more simple for both teacher and pupil.
I often wonder if this drastic downgrade is by design. Activists like the maori party say that english is a colonist language that has no benefit to nz children. They have a policy that all schooling must be 50% Te Reo by 2030. Ok yes they are a minority party, but they will have influence when labour wins in 2026. They have the greens and the media on their side amd hipkins will do anything to get into power. Otherwise what else accounts for such a drastic decline? In 4th form we studied books like Charles Dickens. I don't recall anyone, even the thick kids not being able to read or write to a certain level. The decline is too steep for it to be natural causes.
Parents are always children’s first teachers; academically struggling kids are symptomatic of absentee parents.
You can argue whether their absence is justified, but let’s be clear - if you prioritise 2 parents in full-time work so you can have the large homes, new cars, trips to Australia or beyond, & the latest tech for your young kids, then you are a failure as a parent.
Kids need your time & even if they don’t realise it, they’d rather share a bedroom with a sibling in a small house with one engaged & fully present parent at home after school than all the riches & childcare or being babysat by tech while you ‘work from home’.
The New Zealand Society should not be taken seriously.
There's usually a crowd of NZ expats living in most countries around the world.
They tend to form this loose collection known as the NZ society because they share the same passport...and nothing else.
I found them to be a tedious collection of interfering and gossiping snobs with too much time on their hands, living in the past with an insidious early colonial mentality about their own self-importance.
I am sorry to offend but those who blame parents for the catastrophic failure of our school kids are very wrong.
As Robert above has stated the Dame Clay Whole Language ( WL) method in our schools is the very worst educational idea this country has had inflicted on it. Yet we have been inflicted with it for over four decades.
WL has , by researchers , now been shown to be be the method poor readers use when they don't know the sounds of the words and start guessing words from pictures or context. Clay , not only destroyed our children's reading , by actually cancelling out phonic instruction, but that of the entire English speaking world as well . We now have the worst scores in literacy out of all English speaking countries. In 1970 we had the highest , which was before Clay foisted her infernal WL method on us.
Reading achievement is the quintessential element of schooling.
Also as Robert mentioned parents used to be able to help their children because kids were given proper homework not those hopelessly- wrong -have -a -guess -little reading books but reading books with phonic lists in the index , from which you could learn the phonic ( sounding out ) method of effective reading , and also use the words for spelling. Parents could easily engage in effectively teaching their children with this material and even remediate failing offspring. But with WL even the school's Reading Recovery programme has now been shown to be detrimental to children . since those who had it were worse off than those who didn't !
WL was the product of crazy educational theory dreamed up by elite
academics in ivory towers . The same is true of the maths ( actually arithmetic ) - The Numeracy Project. More nonsense that guarantees failure based on similar loony theories to WL and quite incomprehensible to parents, disabling them from helping their child..
The main threat to children 's learning is rogue academics , who fuel the rest of our educational institutes , with counter productive teaching methods.
My wife taught Clay tutors and children directly. I sat in on a few sessions and was never impreesed. I was itching to pitch in with the phonics of my youth. I later attended my childs primer "writing" sessions and assisted the laggers. The Clay method is not reversable and does not serve writing. As an engineer it was a total mystery to me how anything so illogical had been accepted.The teacher frowned at the phonics but the kids improved. I did witness one Recovery success. A quick eyed European who had the misfortune to come from South Auckland could not read. A bout of RR transfored him. (He became a nuisance as he could not resist answering for the dullards) His previous teachers should have been shot .But long ago they would have automatically hit the top pay grade. Maybe they were good at te reo. Despite technical maths to degree level I still use the borrow and pay back and other quaint, effective but not easily.explained rituals of eons ago. I can recall when grocers ran their finger continuously up columns adding mentally, carrying beyond 12 etc. .
Parents who don't read, children who don't read. Everybody get off your cell phones!
That would be a very good idea, Anonymous11:59 AM , but all English speaking countries have cell phones and we still have the very worst scores out of them all on international reading scores .
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