Without delay the government initiated programmes and policies ...
... to improve school attendance
... lift achievement in literacy and mathematics
... to ensure educational achievement was the highest priority in schools
... to provide learning support where needed
... to ensure early interventions were in place
While still a work in progress, there have already been verifiable gains, including, but not exclusive to ...
Positive results in English and maths: Phonics checks showed a significant improvement, with the percentage of students achieving at or above the curriculum expectation rising from 36% in Term 1 to 58% in Term 3.
Teacher and parent perceptions: Roughly half of teachers reported improved achievement in English and maths compared to the previous year, and over three-quarters of parents reported their child's progress had improved in English (77%) and maths (75%) since the "one hour a day" policy was implemented.
The reasons for educational underachievement are always complex, and multivariate, and macro data is always hard to shift.
The current data is authentic. These results are a credit to the Minister, and those she engaged to enact necessary systems and, I suspect, attitudinal reform.
Things look promising.
Why then has the response of education unions and the political left been less than lukewarm and, often, feral?
I believe the reason is primarily an ideological one, and that the motivations are political.
While there is never a single cause of anything, motivations are complex, and causality is never singular, I believe there is one overarching idea that has dominated the education sphere in New Zealand for over forty years. This idea had its origins in our universities in the nineteen sixties, and grew incrementally in influence, gaining momentum in the nineteen eighties and nineties, achieving dominance from the early two thousands. It was promoted in our universities, embedded in teacher education institutions, embraced by the Education Review Office, and became, by degree, a primary policy assumption for political parties of both left and right.
It became what education was to be about, no ifs nor buts.
Education was to be firstly (and by a country mile) about equalizing educational outcomes. It wasn't always presented this way, but this was the goal.
It was only secondarily, and a very distant second at that, about academic excellence. It was not about aiming high. It was not about aspirational benchmarking. It was not about putting in the hard graft.
The underlying assumption was that the system was systemically, and even deliberately, devised to advantage some and not others.
In other words, it was rigged.
Simplistic explanations for educational underachievement, including the denial of personal responsibility, intergenerational welfare dependency, and an expanding menu of "pass the buck" excuses held sway.
For years our education system had struck a reasonable balance between effort and reward, there were incentives to do well, and opportunities to select non-academic pathways were there for those who, ultimately, did just as well.
Previous political administrations can claim few trophies in the educational domain. We have seen the outworking of simplistic, self interested, and avoidant explanations for inequality, and underachievement, for many years, and will bear the consequences of this for many years to come.
While the education unions, education academics, and the parties of the political left, can largely bear responsibility for the current state of our education system, it is doubtful they ever will. That would be more than they could bear.
The parties of the right can also bear responsibility for not asking the right questions, and for their absence of due diligence. And I would also add the media to this list ... no better illustrated than in their near silence with regard to this extraordinary turn around.
So, in the meantime, we can expect to hear more and more bogus stories about school lunches, lots of slogans, appeals to sentiment, and half baked academic pronouncements.
Most of all, congratulations to the new Minister for achieving what no education minister in living memory has achieved ... commencing to turn a self-obsessed, although sometimes well-intentioned, bureaucratic monolith. A monolith preoccupied with social engineering, and jerry-mandered, and simplistic, theories on human motivation ... while drunk on the lie that taking everyone down will ultimately lift everyone up.
This is only the start of the Minister's work, the tentacles of mediocrity run deep, but she undoubtedly deserves the top achiever cup at this year's prize giving. And so do those brave souls who have stood with her.
What a tragedy if she does not get the opportunity to bed in more enduring change.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.
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