Have the education unions ever not asked for more money, more resources or more non-contact time, while at the same time telling you everything in the classroom is crap?
The NCEA changes confirmed over the weekend, to most parent's eyes, will make perfect sense.
Anyone who has had kids through these past few calamitous years knows full well the old NCEA has been an abject failure.
The indisputable outworkings are;
Anyone who has had kids through these past few calamitous years knows full well the old NCEA has been an abject failure.
The indisputable outworkings are;
1) We have a swath of kids leaving school too early without any real qualifications to their name. We then wonder why their unemployment rate is so high.
2) Of those who do leave, too many have a potpourri of random eclectic passes that may or may not mean anything in the real world.
On paper having hundreds of choices and vague terms like 'merit' or 'achieved' probably looked like it could make sense.
But it relied on parents and kids having the wherewithal and interest to navigate their way through a system that in reality allowed you to take the piss for an easy pass.
With 'A' to 'E' you know where you're at.
Being able to actually read and write remains as important today as it ever has and a few basics like science and maths are critical for life, as well as job prospects.
But no, this won't suit students according to the unions. Is it the students they are worried about, or themselves?
The more accountable you make the system the more questions that get asked about the quality of the teaching and what's unfolding in the classrooms.
Unions hate that. All that accountability is deeply unsettling and of course only ever cured by wanting more money.
Between the old NCEA and Covid there is a generation of our kids that have been robbed and, quite possibly, detrimentally affected for life. They have been let down shockingly.
If the unions wanted to make up for any of that, some enthusiasm and a vastly more productive approach to change and improvement would go a long way to restoring their increasingly tattered reputations.
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.
8 comments:
Kids these days are morons!
Zero useful skills- unable to concentrate on anything remotely difficult or adult, and completely unable to think critically.
Well done teachers education union you’ve served your own goal.
My own kids meanwhile are going private as soon as yr7 & they will run rings around the kids you produce in your ideological state system.
The huge change I've seen the past generation is that so many kids have lost the love of learning. Once that is lost, hard to bring it back. Who to blame? Parents, teachers, social media? Every day I see loads of early teens at bus stops after school and hear them chat. I always think, yikes, none of these kids (and disproportionately from certain groups) will pass any course at a uni or polytechnic... No love of learning, no interest in studying.
Maybe the question should be "Do Unions have anything positve to contribute to education?" I am aware of just two unions that are useful contributors to NZ, the Taxpayer Union and the Free Speech Union.
Mike the unions are communist. I saw their protest march down queen street last year. I watched it from the street All of them had maori activist flags, free palestine or socialists for nz flags. I could not see any nz flags or any banners saying anything about children or education at all. It was a huge protest. There was this mad looking older teacher trying to hand people on the footpath photos of gazan kids. I think their agenda is to dumb kids down and divide them. Have you seen the secondary school speech competition? It is on fb, the nz education watch. All of the speeches were basically poor me, I'm a victim of colonisation.
The media should be saying more about what is going on in schools.
Do the coal miners really have nothing positive to say about the mine owners? Black lung notwithstanding, they need to be a bit more positive. Fully agree with Mike.
>"With 'A' to 'E' you know where you're at."
Only if it's a criterion-referenced assessment system. Under the old norm-referenced one, grades told you nothing about competencies, only about a student's rank (from which the score and subsequently grade was derived).
More importantly, external examinations, whether CR or NR, enable us to hold schools and teachers to account - see my comments under Bridges' and Raine's articles. I can understand how threatening that must seem for teachers who are subject-incompetent.
Anon 5.35 unfortunately private schools are fully into " te tiriri" as well. And the private religious schools. But don't take my word for it. Look up the website of the school you want your kids to go to and look for their school curriculum te tiriti policy. It will say something like " here at such-in-such school.we embrace te tiriti and te ao maori through all our subjects" etc etc
Anon 908am and about time! I wish we’d had that growing up, I’d be a better person, not so hateful
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