Sometimes this country feels allergic to good news, especially when that good news comes from a government our media class has decided must never be allowed a win. This week, Education Minister Erica Stanford released some of the most extraordinary education data New Zealand has seen in decades…students are making between one and two years of maths progress in just twelve weeks. It should have led every bulletin. It should have been the headline splashed across every front page. Erica Stanford should be being hoisted above shoulders and paraded through the streets as a heroine. Chris Hipkins would have thrown himself a parade if he had done anything except drive our education system into decline when he was in charge. What Stanford’s reforms are achieving is nothing short of extraordinary.
Education Minister Erica Stanford. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
But instead of covering the biggest step forward for student achievement in a generation, the media is devoting its energy to breathless reporting on activist principals and boards issuing dramatic proclamations about “giving effect to the Treaty,” as though the Government had announced some kind of education coup. Instead of being celebrated for lifting Māori education results, she is basically being called a racist.
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The contrast is surreal. On one side, a data-driven success story proving that the Government’s reforms are working for all students, including Māori. On the other, political theatre from schools and equally theatrical amplification from journalists who seemed determined to turn it into the story of the day, zero f***s given about accuracy. Please note that Newstalk ZB have be the lone platform discussing this in depth and deserve to be applauded for doing their job because apparently that is a big ask.
What has made the media’s fixation even more absurd is the fact that these schools, and the journalists cheerleading them, appear to have fundamentally misunderstood, or perhaps wilfully misrepresented, the Minister’s actual position on the Treaty. Erica Stanford has been remarkably consistent and clear that the most meaningful way schools can meet the Crown’s Treaty obligations is by ensuring Māori children’s education results improve. What Stanford is doing is more than a slogan; it is the most practical, measurable, and genuinely transformative approach any Minister of Education has taken in years. If you care about Māori success, then you should care about literacy, numeracy, and structured teaching, not performative declarations that do nothing for the actual children sitting in actual classrooms right now.
Yet the media ignore that clarity entirely. They prefer the drama. They prefer to cast Stanford as somehow anti-Treaty because it fits their pre-loaded narrative. And they are only too eager to platform principals making political statements as though they were civil rights heroes instead of bureaucrats misrepresenting the truth. It is astonishing that journalists who never tire of lecturing the public about “misinformation” couldn’t muster the curiosity to read, or watch, what the Minister has actually said. The truth, inconveniently for them, is that her reforms are delivering precisely the equity gains the system has failed to produce for Māori students for years.
What Stanford is doing is of so much note that Estonia’s Education Minister Kristina Kallas is here in New Zealand looking at our reforms. She explained to Mike Hosking that what we are doing is of huge interest to education leaders in Europe and we are being watched with great interest. She also said our reforms are moving us in the right direction. By the way, Estonia is top in Europe when it comes to maths.
And it is no wonder we are the talk of the town, the results of the Government’s maths acceleration trial for year 7 and 8 students needing extra support were nothing short of exceptional. Students who were already a year behind made extraordinary progress, up to two full years in twelve weeks for those in in-person tutoring, and a full year for those simply experiencing the new structured curriculum and hour-a-day maths. Even the control groups, with no extra intervention beyond the reformed curriculum and workbooks, made a year’s progress in the same time.
Let that sink in, the baseline reforms alone are lifting achievement at a rate this country has not seen in decades. This is the kind of rapid turnaround that educators around the world dream of. It is proof that structured teaching, quality materials, and clear expectations work and that years of ideological experimentation and educational drift have cost students dearly.
Yet where was the coverage (bar good ol’ Newstalk ZB)? Where were the longform features on the teachers delivering these results? Where were the op-eds celebrating the first real reversal of education decline in a generation? Where were the political commentators acknowledging that the Government’s reforms are not only working but working spectacularly? Instead, the media spent the day elevating schools staging symbolic protests over a Treaty issue that doesn’t even exist.
This is not just a failure of editorial judgement. It is an indictment of an ideological media ecosystem that cares more about narrative than outcomes. It is easier for journalists to amplify a political tantrum than to report on something that challenges their assumptions about this Government. It is far more comfortable to cover performative activism than to admit that structured, rigorous education, the very thing they once sneered at as “old-fashioned,”is delivering extraordinary gains for the children they claim to champion.
The behaviour of the teachers’ unions and much of the education establishment has made it very clear that they are no longer defenders of children’s learning either. They are defenders of their own comfort, ideology, and power. The moment Erica Stanford started delivering results they sulked and complained. They suddenly discovered a dozen reasons why the reforms should “slow down,” be “consulted on more,” or be “refocused around the Treaty.” Anything, absolutely anything, except acknowledging that structured teaching and clear expectations are finally lifting student achievement after years of drift.
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Today on Ryan Bridge’s Newstalk ZB show, the PPTA’s Chris Abercrombie tried to downplay the maths results this week. Rather than welcoming the dramatic gains students have made, he sniffed that “we had different ways of doing it and this is another way of doing it,” before warning that an “intense focus is… resource heavy, a very resource heavy way of doing it.” It was the perfect encapsulation of a sector so wedded to its own failed methods that even unprecedented progress is treated as a threat. Never mind that the reforms are clearly working and that thousands of students, including Māori and Pasifika kids who were failed for decades, are finally catching up at lightning speed.
The unionist instinct to protect the comfortable consensus was on full display when in discussing curriculum priorities Ryan Bridge joked “you can do art at home,” and Abercrombie instantly replied, “you can do maths at home.” A breathtakingly out-of-touch comment and an extraordinary admission that the unions no longer see it as schools’ job to deliver numeracy and literacy basics. It is a crystal-clear illustration of why Erica Stanford’s reforms are needed. The sector has forgotten what school is for.
Before concluding the interview, Bridge asked whether Stanford might in fact be the best Education Minister in decades, to which Abercrombie scoffed, called it “silly,” and refused to answer. Plainly, acknowledging the truth would blow up years of union scaremongering and force him to admit that a minister outside their ideological tribe is achieving what they could not.
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The education establishment don’t like the pace of change. They don’t like being asked to adopt evidence-based practice. They don’t like the focus on basics because it undermines the ideological fads they’ve spent years promoting. And most of all, they don’t like a Minister who refuses to bow to their political theatrics. The moment Stanford stepped into the portfolio with a clear agenda and the courage to push for real change, the sector reacted like a threatened cartel. Their public statements since have been little more than coded protests that they should still be running the system, despite the fact they presided over its decline.
The obsession with the Treaty is the most telling example of this ideological capture. Instead of welcoming reforms that are demonstrably improving outcomes for Māori students, the unions insist on dragging every debate back to symbolic politics. They accuse the Minister of undermining the Treaty while ignoring the obvious truth that nothing has undermined Māori educational success more than the low expectations and incoherent teaching methods they have defended for years. Their fixation on performative Treaty rhetoric has become a convenient shield, a way to dodge accountability and avoid confronting their own role in entrenching an inequitable system.
And now, faced with reforms that are finally working, they have exposed themselves as the greatest barrier to children’s success. They are not fighting for students. They are fighting to preserve a failed status quo. Only a sector terrified of losing ideological control would respond to massive academic gains by demanding that the Minister slow down.
Erica Stanford. Photo: National Party website.
What Erica Stanford’s success has revealed is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The unions and much of the education bureaucracy have been gatekeepers, not guardians. The system has not been failing despite them, it has been failing because of them. And now that a Minister has arrived with the determination and clarity to put children, not ideology, at the centre of schooling, they are resisting with every tool they have. Their complaints are not a sign that Stanford is going too fast. They’re proof that, for the first time in years, she has the ship going in the right direction.
These results matter and will change lives. This Government’s reforms are practical, measurable, and transformative, and they deserve far more than a passing mention while the media chases politically convenient distractions.
New Zealand should be celebrating. Parents should feel hope. Teachers should feel proud. The entire country should recognise that we are finally pulling out of the nosedive.
If the media won’t tell the story, then others must. Because the truth is simple: for the first time in a long time, our education system is moving in the right direction. And that is worth more than all the activist press releases in the world.
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
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