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
6 comments:
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!
"Andersen’s push to get politics out of education sounds reasonable." Until you realize that it's only the wrong kind of politics they want evicted from the classroom.
Teachers of correct-think will determine what children are taught.
This Section "" Public schools do not belong to experts , nor teachers nor to principals . "SCHOOLS ' ( schooling) BELONG to THE FAMILIES OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE THEY EDUCATE .
This should be blazon on billboards all over the country .
This is what my mother Doris Ferry , during the reading wars was proclaiming in having parents teach their own children phonics cheaply and being highly successful at it .
The parents wanted most of all for their children to be literate . But the school system was failing to do this on a massive scale. The Ministry of Education was responsible for the appalling persecution of Doris' students . Politicians who wished to resolve the situation hit a brick wall because Whole Language experts had installed themselves in key positions of power like Prof. . Stuart McNaughton , chief science advisor to the government and Marie Clay's closest buddy.
The Whole Language nonsense should have ended in about 2000 since the evidence against it was more than overwhelming, but it didn't change because of 'experts '.The Ministry had no staff with expertise in phonics because Balanced Literacy was their answer to the conflict . some AEC members now still want a return to this.
My answer to all this is to hand ownership of basic literacy instruction over to parents. It is too important to be at the whim of any so called educational power group . This was how it was in the 1930s and 40s in NZ when all the infant reading material was home based and parent owned , bought cheaply from a shop. It was accessible to anyone and had no technical jargon.Teaching reading was a cooperative effort between parents/ extended family and teacher .If the child was failing either or both could step in and do remedial work .
Now the 'structured literacy 'is not parent friendly .although there is an apparent veneer of this . After having assisted my mother teach reading students , I am shocked at the incompetence of the reading instruction being done by many schools. They don't seem to have a clue .
This is an enormous power struggle over ownership of the most basic and crucial . skill . Gaynor
The best security against indoctrination of children is the children themselves. If they are indoctrinated with methods like those used on Pavlov's dogs it might work for a time, but children grow up and develop their own ideas. In spite of daily karakia and waiata some will get bored with it and question it in their search for truth to satisfy their own needs. Teachers are individuals too and many will help children by developing questioning and analysis skills to be applied to any overbearing curriculum. Timid children are most at risk so a major task of teachers is to give them confidence in learning how to think, not what to think.
What a far left radical stupid idea. Education is run by far left ideological dei race based clowns. I'm guessing rose hipkins would be leading these farleft dangerous idiots...yes?..
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