The ICCA would oversee future development of school curricula and national assessment systems. Labour’s education spokesperson Ginny Andersen said, “educational professionals should be determining what children learn and how they learn, not the minister of education.”
Andersen’s push to get politics out of education sounds reasonable. Teachers and principals are exhausted by what must feel like constant change in lockstep with political tides.
No sooner have schools adapted to a new initiative, it would seem, than it is abolished or replaced. New Zealand’s three-year electoral cycle does not help.
If it is not the curriculum that is changing, it is the qualifications system, or initiatives like National Standards. That scheme was introduced by the Key government, poorly implemented, and then terminated by the Ardern government.
The proposed ICCA might seem a sensible way to bring the cycle of change to an end. It would comprise experts and make decisions based on evidence. Some questions about curriculum design can be addressed with evidence. Others have more to do with values.
That makes a curriculum an inherently political document. Setting up the ICCA would not change that.
How localised should the New Zealand curriculum be? How deeply should mātauranga Māori be embedded? What balance should be struck between New Zealand history and world history?
Voters should have a say on questions like these. New Zealand’s public schools do not belong to experts, nor to teachers or principals. They belong to the families of the young people they educate.
Elected ministers, not experts or education practitioners, represent families. If ministers cannot influence curriculum content, voters cannot either.
Then there is the question of how experts would be appointed to the Council. If ministers were responsible for appointments, the group would itself be political. Even if appointments were made by the Ministry of Education, ministers would exert substantial influence.
Labour would face temptation to stack the Council with its ideological fellow travellers from the teachers’ unions and the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective. If it succumbed to that temptation, the political wheel would roll on.
Then, an early casualty of the next National-led government would be the ICCA itself.
Dr Michael Johnston is a Senior Fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. This article was first published HERE
No sooner have schools adapted to a new initiative, it would seem, than it is abolished or replaced. New Zealand’s three-year electoral cycle does not help.
If it is not the curriculum that is changing, it is the qualifications system, or initiatives like National Standards. That scheme was introduced by the Key government, poorly implemented, and then terminated by the Ardern government.
The proposed ICCA might seem a sensible way to bring the cycle of change to an end. It would comprise experts and make decisions based on evidence. Some questions about curriculum design can be addressed with evidence. Others have more to do with values.
That makes a curriculum an inherently political document. Setting up the ICCA would not change that.
How localised should the New Zealand curriculum be? How deeply should mātauranga Māori be embedded? What balance should be struck between New Zealand history and world history?
Voters should have a say on questions like these. New Zealand’s public schools do not belong to experts, nor to teachers or principals. They belong to the families of the young people they educate.
Elected ministers, not experts or education practitioners, represent families. If ministers cannot influence curriculum content, voters cannot either.
Then there is the question of how experts would be appointed to the Council. If ministers were responsible for appointments, the group would itself be political. Even if appointments were made by the Ministry of Education, ministers would exert substantial influence.
Labour would face temptation to stack the Council with its ideological fellow travellers from the teachers’ unions and the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective. If it succumbed to that temptation, the political wheel would roll on.
Then, an early casualty of the next National-led government would be the ICCA itself.
Dr Michael Johnston is a Senior Fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. This article was first published HERE
1 comment:
What's the bet half (or more) of this new body would consist of DEI political appointees who have been ideologically vetted for making all the right noises about a certain treaty and most of whom wouldn't know how to conduct the simplest inferential stats test on a batch of quantitative data. 'Experts'? Yeah, sure!
Post a Comment
Thank you for joining the discussion. Breaking Views welcomes respectful contributions that enrich the debate. Please ensure your comments are not defamatory, derogatory or disruptive. We appreciate your cooperation.