Phonics knowledge is not itself reading, but it is an important first step. There is every reason to expect improvement to flow through to reading comprehension.
These figures are remarkable. For the first time in decades, New Zealand’s long decline has reversed.
The turnaround follows Education Minister Erica Stanford’s implementation of structured literacy programmes now operating in 98 percent of schools. They produce results. Teachers report improved student engagement. Parents see children making progress. Schools serving the poorest communities have embraced the changes.
Given the years of concern over falling standards and damning international comparisons, the response should have been simple celebration. Instead, Stanford faces fierce resistance from education unions and faculties.
Structured literacy is denounced as a “drill and kill” pedagogy. The new knowledge-rich curriculum is attacked as a return to colonial education models. Evidence-based teaching methods are dismissed as “imported ideology”.
The primary teachers’ union, NZEI Te Riu Roa, rails against the end of so-called ‘child-centred’ learning. Some go further, suggesting Stanford’s reforms represent a reassertion of white, Eurocentric knowledge systems.
Yet crucially, this ideological opposition does not reflect classroom reality. Most teachers, having seen the results firsthand, have embraced the changes. The disconnect between union rhetoric and teacher practice reveals how far the education establishment has drifted from those who actually teach children.
The controversy has become another theatre in a broader ideological struggle. Across each reformed subject area, critics deploy the same rhetoric. When the science curriculum focused on actual science rather than “ways of knowing”, they cry “colonialism.” When the history curriculum proposed focusing on historical knowledge rather than lamenting colonisation and promoting ethnic identity, academics called it “white supremacy on the whiteboard.”
But under the progressive pedagogies these critics defend, 86 percent of Pacific students and 78 percent of Māori students were more than a year behind in mathematics. Nearly two-thirds of Year 8 students were failing basic standards.
The “culturally responsive” methods that promised to close equity gaps made them wider. Child-centred, inquiry-based learning sounds attractive but is empty in practice, leaving many children unable to decode simple sentences. Local curriculum autonomy produced a generation knowing neither their own history nor anyone else’s.
Yet when Stanford introduced teaching methods with decades of scientific evidence, methods proven to work particularly well for disadvantaged students, she was accused of pursuing an ideological agenda.
The critics have it backwards. They call evidence-based teaching “ideology” while pushing their own ideology as proven pedagogy.
The same arguments emerge repeatedly. Systematic teaching is “colonial”. Emphasis on knowledge is “Eurocentric”. Measurable outcomes are “neoliberal”. The language of social justice is deployed against reforms that might deliver actual justice: children who can read, regardless of background.
The critics seem unbothered by contradictions. They champion indigenous knowledge while opposing structured methods that would enable children to access cultural heritage. They speak of decolonisation while defending approaches that demonstrably failed Māori and Pacific students. They invoke equity while defending a system producing vast achievement gaps.
To be fair, implementing sweeping changes in a single year is ambitious. But the loudest opposition is not about transition times. It is about power and protecting ideological territory.
For decades, constructivist, child-centred philosophy has dominated New Zealand’s teacher training institutions. This philosophy, suspicious of explicit teaching, has become so embedded that challenging it threatens the education establishment existentially.
Stanford has largely ignored the noise. While critics wage ideological battles, she has focused on what works. High-quality professional development has given teachers practical tools. Clear curriculum guidelines replaced vague suggestions. Regular assessment replaced wishful thinking.
One South Auckland principal, serving some of the poorest urban communities, told the Education Review Office her Year 2 students were “reading words they couldn’t even look at before”. Teachers, initially sceptical, report that structured approaches transformed classroom behaviour: students are more attentive, engaged and confident.
The numbers demolish ideological objections. Schools in low socio-economic areas have increased mathematics teaching time more than those in wealthy schools. Teachers across the country report using evidence-based strategies regardless of demographic profile. The reforms succeed not because they favour one group but because they work for everyone.
The battle pits two incompatible visions against each other. Critics’ vision privileges ideology over evidence, process over outcomes. Stanford’s approach holds that schools should teach children specific things, that some methods demonstrably work better, and schools should use them.
Stanford is succeeding by producing results. While critics debate identity politics, students are learning to read. While education faculties theorise about different ways of knowing, children are mastering multiplication tables.
A striking aspect is how unremarkable Stanford’s revolution should be. There is nothing revolutionary about structured literacy or explicit teaching. These methods are proven effective, which is why they are being adopted globally. Singapore and England were early adopters, now seeing benefits in their PISA data.
The Education Review Office data reveal something fundamental. When you strip away rhetoric and teach the basics well, children learn.
That this is controversial exposes the state of educational debate in New Zealand.
Stanford has demonstrated that education reform requires standing strong against progressive dogma. Evidence can triumph over ideology. Sometimes the best response to culture warriors is simply teaching children to read.
The struggle is far from over. Education faculties and union leadership will not surrender easily. But for the first time in decades, the momentum lies with those who believe schools should prioritise learning over politics, including, importantly, most teachers themselves.
If these gains hold, New Zealand may have found a model delivering both equity and excellence. The culture warriors will never admit it, but Stanford’s quiet, evidence-based revolution, supported by teachers who see it working daily, might be the best thing to happen to New Zealand education in a generation.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
The turnaround follows Education Minister Erica Stanford’s implementation of structured literacy programmes now operating in 98 percent of schools. They produce results. Teachers report improved student engagement. Parents see children making progress. Schools serving the poorest communities have embraced the changes.
Given the years of concern over falling standards and damning international comparisons, the response should have been simple celebration. Instead, Stanford faces fierce resistance from education unions and faculties.
Structured literacy is denounced as a “drill and kill” pedagogy. The new knowledge-rich curriculum is attacked as a return to colonial education models. Evidence-based teaching methods are dismissed as “imported ideology”.
The primary teachers’ union, NZEI Te Riu Roa, rails against the end of so-called ‘child-centred’ learning. Some go further, suggesting Stanford’s reforms represent a reassertion of white, Eurocentric knowledge systems.
Yet crucially, this ideological opposition does not reflect classroom reality. Most teachers, having seen the results firsthand, have embraced the changes. The disconnect between union rhetoric and teacher practice reveals how far the education establishment has drifted from those who actually teach children.
The controversy has become another theatre in a broader ideological struggle. Across each reformed subject area, critics deploy the same rhetoric. When the science curriculum focused on actual science rather than “ways of knowing”, they cry “colonialism.” When the history curriculum proposed focusing on historical knowledge rather than lamenting colonisation and promoting ethnic identity, academics called it “white supremacy on the whiteboard.”
But under the progressive pedagogies these critics defend, 86 percent of Pacific students and 78 percent of Māori students were more than a year behind in mathematics. Nearly two-thirds of Year 8 students were failing basic standards.
The “culturally responsive” methods that promised to close equity gaps made them wider. Child-centred, inquiry-based learning sounds attractive but is empty in practice, leaving many children unable to decode simple sentences. Local curriculum autonomy produced a generation knowing neither their own history nor anyone else’s.
Yet when Stanford introduced teaching methods with decades of scientific evidence, methods proven to work particularly well for disadvantaged students, she was accused of pursuing an ideological agenda.
The critics have it backwards. They call evidence-based teaching “ideology” while pushing their own ideology as proven pedagogy.
The same arguments emerge repeatedly. Systematic teaching is “colonial”. Emphasis on knowledge is “Eurocentric”. Measurable outcomes are “neoliberal”. The language of social justice is deployed against reforms that might deliver actual justice: children who can read, regardless of background.
The critics seem unbothered by contradictions. They champion indigenous knowledge while opposing structured methods that would enable children to access cultural heritage. They speak of decolonisation while defending approaches that demonstrably failed Māori and Pacific students. They invoke equity while defending a system producing vast achievement gaps.
To be fair, implementing sweeping changes in a single year is ambitious. But the loudest opposition is not about transition times. It is about power and protecting ideological territory.
For decades, constructivist, child-centred philosophy has dominated New Zealand’s teacher training institutions. This philosophy, suspicious of explicit teaching, has become so embedded that challenging it threatens the education establishment existentially.
Stanford has largely ignored the noise. While critics wage ideological battles, she has focused on what works. High-quality professional development has given teachers practical tools. Clear curriculum guidelines replaced vague suggestions. Regular assessment replaced wishful thinking.
One South Auckland principal, serving some of the poorest urban communities, told the Education Review Office her Year 2 students were “reading words they couldn’t even look at before”. Teachers, initially sceptical, report that structured approaches transformed classroom behaviour: students are more attentive, engaged and confident.
The numbers demolish ideological objections. Schools in low socio-economic areas have increased mathematics teaching time more than those in wealthy schools. Teachers across the country report using evidence-based strategies regardless of demographic profile. The reforms succeed not because they favour one group but because they work for everyone.
The battle pits two incompatible visions against each other. Critics’ vision privileges ideology over evidence, process over outcomes. Stanford’s approach holds that schools should teach children specific things, that some methods demonstrably work better, and schools should use them.
Stanford is succeeding by producing results. While critics debate identity politics, students are learning to read. While education faculties theorise about different ways of knowing, children are mastering multiplication tables.
A striking aspect is how unremarkable Stanford’s revolution should be. There is nothing revolutionary about structured literacy or explicit teaching. These methods are proven effective, which is why they are being adopted globally. Singapore and England were early adopters, now seeing benefits in their PISA data.
The Education Review Office data reveal something fundamental. When you strip away rhetoric and teach the basics well, children learn.
That this is controversial exposes the state of educational debate in New Zealand.
Stanford has demonstrated that education reform requires standing strong against progressive dogma. Evidence can triumph over ideology. Sometimes the best response to culture warriors is simply teaching children to read.
The struggle is far from over. Education faculties and union leadership will not surrender easily. But for the first time in decades, the momentum lies with those who believe schools should prioritise learning over politics, including, importantly, most teachers themselves.
If these gains hold, New Zealand may have found a model delivering both equity and excellence. The culture warriors will never admit it, but Stanford’s quiet, evidence-based revolution, supported by teachers who see it working daily, might be the best thing to happen to New Zealand education in a generation.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
12 comments:
Nearly 200 schools have written to Education Minister Erica Stanford pledging to “uphold the Treaty of Waitangi,” after the government removed it as a statutory obligation in the Education and Training Act. RNZ treats these letters as spontaneous moral gestures. In reality, they expose a quiet transformation in New Zealand classrooms that most journalists — barely notice.
The Treaty itself is brief and clear: three articles promising peace, protection, and equal rights under one sovereign law. Yet “upholding” it now means something else entirely. Over decades, the Ministry of Education has replaced factual civics with ideological frameworks — Te Hurihanganui, Tapasā, and the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum. Teachers are urged to view every subject through a lens of “equity,” “inclusion,” and partnership politics.
Board chairs talk of “honouring Te Tiriti” and “cultural responsiveness” — code for accepting a political reinterpretation of the Treaty. Students aren’t learning history; they’re absorbing a worldview. The original 1840 text is largely ignored. The shift from understanding to veneration has gone unchallenged because journalists count emoji reactions as evidence of virtue rather than proof of learning.
The bureaucratic sleight of hand is obvious. The Treaty has become a behavioural rulebook, a filter through which maths, science, even music must pass. Children are being taught to measure value and belonging by ideological compliance, not civic reality.
And it doesn’t stop there. Gender ideology has crept in the same way — curriculum guidance that blurs information with advocacy, prescribing belief rather than conveying knowledge. Parents are sidelined, the state assumes moral authority, and children are caught in the middle.
Have the ministry bureaucrats learned nothing from their past fiascos — Marie Clare’s reading experiment, the Numeracy Development Project, and the rest? Each promised transformation, produced jargon and training modules, and left results stagnant. Yet the same arrogance now drives Treaty and gender frameworks into every classroom. History and mathematics have become theatres for social engineering.
Schools exist to educate, not convert. What’s happening across New Zealand may is a betrayal of trust — an abuse of public authority and a breach of ethical duty.
The contrast with Dr Oliver Hartwich’s analysis of structured literacy could not be starker. Hartwich’s work is evidence-anchored and classroom-focused: the 36 → 58 percent phonics lift, improved engagement, teacher testimonies, ERO data, even PISA context. It’s journalism in the classic sense — facts first, interpretation second.
By comparison, RNZ’s Treaty-in-schools coverage is pure impressionism: emotional reactions (“overwhelmingly positive,” “912 loves”), but no data, no curricular detail, no counter-evidence. It never asks what’s being taught, who wrote it, or whether it works. Sentiment and virtue language — “equity,” “inclusion,” “upholding Te Tiriti” — are treated as self-evident truths.
The difference is night and day. Hartwich shows how structured literacy delivers measurable improvement. RNZ celebrates ideology dressed as education. One approach teaches children to read; the other teaches them what to think.
If the Education Ministry truly wants ‘equity’, it should start by giving every child the tools to master language and facts, not the ideological slogans to parrot it.
—PB
If the teaching systems the anti-colonialist teachers' unions support were any good, maoris would have had a written language, a structured science system, the wheel, pottery and metallurgy. The opposition described here is only for the sake of opposition. and has no rational basis.
PB, to have determined the number, presumably those nearly 200 schools can be identified? That list needs to be published so parents are informed as to the ideology prevailing at what they may be sending their children to. Are you able to advise where that list maybe found?
And, Allen Heath, it's amazing how some think stone age knowledge and belief systems are the 'education' answer in the 21st century. It's so sad that this is where many of our teachers are at. It in only adds weight to the old saying - those that can do, those that can't - teach!
In the reading wars of last century I learned of the cult-like adherence almost all the educational world had to Whole Language. Like any cult there was fanaticism to the extent of schools punishing children, brought by parents , who dared to participate in attending our private school room for intensive phonics instruction.
Socialism is the alternative to structured literacy and that has always been so since the in NZ of progressivism mid last century. Collectivist thought trumps individuality. 'Why on earth is progressivusm so resistant to an effective literacy method ? "I ask .
Is it because Dewy said it was bad because it involved dreaded rote learning of facts and drills ? He actually stated he knew that whole word was less effective. He also stated an individual child who was a bookworm was participating in a 'perversion' . Really !
My conclusion is that high levels of literacy does not add to the ideals of socialism / Marxism which craves conformity of a semi-literate population , who can't think or acquire knowledge from great literature or other great thinkers by reading .
Also , Universal Literacy , an ideal and practice NZ had earlier last century was Traditional Educations means of social justice . A great underclass of semi-literates doomed to be on welfare, in menial and low paid jobs or in prison because of their poor career prospects aids the Marxist world view. Colonisation has always to be the culprit .
What is evident to me is progressive's callous disregard for the educationally failing child .- mostly the product of their blatantly ineffective teaching methods. Marie Clay was a profligate liar and had deceitful research yet structures in much of NZ academia , unions etc still support her failed ideology.
Incidentally Clay's guessing from pictures and context school reading books, a key part of Whole Language are still entrenched in primary reading . From the experience of participating in teaching 1,500 remedial students I state emphatically those books are a a real hazard to particularly lower achieving readers by countering even their well established phonic knowledge which is being so applauded in this article . We need structurally and vocabulary controlled readers . I am not the only literacy expert who warns of this danger. Most of the academics leading in current phonics instruction , know some research but lack experience in actually teaching real structured literacy aka intensive phonics.
Anon @1.25pm:
If you’re looking for which schools have publicly declared themselves in that “200-strong” list, RNZ has already named several. Their own stories cite:
• Newton Central School (Auckland)
• Allandale Primary (Whakatāne)
• Apanui School (Whakatāne)
• Somerfield Te Kura Wairepo (Christchurch)
• Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery (Christchurch)
RNZ also reports the New Zealand Catholic Education Office urging all Catholic schools to keep embedding tikanga, te reo and mātauranga Māori. So if Kevin Shore is correct, every Catholic school is effectively on the list.
Separately, in Joseph Los’e’s NZ Herald piece last week, the only school explicitly named was Rotorua Boys’ High School, whose principal said they would continue to give effect to the Treaty despite the law change.
If an official list ever appears, it will be because RNZ or lawyer Tania Waikato publishes it — but the names above are the ones currently on the public record.
Waikato is described in the RNZ article as a “lawyer and Māori rights advocate” (no surprise) who has been compiling a list of schools that have publicly reaffirmed their commitment to Treaty of Waitangi (“give effect to Te Tiriti, etc.”).
As of 13 November 2025 the RNZ story reports the list had “reached 195 schools.”
Her social‑media pages contain posts where she states phrases like “We just cracked the hundy mark … 122 schools have now confirmed their ongoing tautoko (support) to give effect to Te Tiriti” and “Here’s a list of all the schools that are going to continue to uphold Te Tiriti regardless.” But no actual list is posted.
—PB
Minister Stanford's remarkable Education reform is to be highly commended. But why did she try to maintain the Te Ao world vision in the final text of the ETAB 2 Bill? ( And label those calling for its removal as "racists".) Maintaining this would have politicized her otherwise excellent reform. Finally she bowed to widespread pressure - but this suggests where her own sympathies lie.
We have around 2500 schools in nz, most of them state schools. Only 200 activist schools pledging to “uphold the treaty”. That’s 8%. So, 92% of schools are not complaining. I’d call that promising for ongoing improvement in educational outcomes for kiwi kids.
Catholics should challenge the Catholic Education Office. On what authority is this entity acting?
I note that Dr Hartwich also says, “The struggle is far from over. Education faculties and union leadership will not surrender easily.”
Sure enough, there is an article in The Post this morning (15 Nov) “'Incredibly overwhelming': Primary principals push pause on curriculum changes.”
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360884032/incredibly-overwhelming-primary-principals-push-pause-curriculum-changes
The article is all about why the teachers will not implement Stanford’s changes.
However, it does not mention Hartwich’s results.
An0nymous 1am introduces an alarming trend of so-called Christian churches becoming apostate and being insidiously infiltrated by Marxism. The influential progressive -Marxist educator Paulo Freire claimed he was Catholic his whole life. Just because people claim things doesn't mean they are that. The Democratic Republic of North Korea is not that ! Freire even had a position at 'the World Council of Churches as well as UNESCO . I know of several highly educated Catholics who have left the church because of the Marxist influences. Christianity is for most people at complete odds with Marxist utopian ideas, that involves a commitment to overcome the ' forces of oppression' by reconstructing society with violence. Radicalizing students to become protestors instead of educating them thoroughly and effectively in the basics to become strong independent , free thinking individuals building up society, is unethical behaviour. Some Protestant churches are also guilty of supporting this. Many , I believe out of ignorance, progressivism has been so pervasive.
Can we please stop using the term "mathematics" when we mean "arithmetic". I simply want my grandchildren to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Today few can, nor can their teachers.
One thing that I find annoying is the way equality of outcomes is talked about regularly, including by Minister Stanford. Surely they mean equality of opportunity. No-one can guarantee outcomes being equal. We need to get real in this country and call things what they are. Outcome equality is the unicorn that socialists strive for, never learning that it doesn't and can't exist in the real world.
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