Dr Michael Johnston: What to do about teaching?

For two decades, New Zealand’s school education system has been in a death spiral.

In 2007, the Ministry of Education adopted a curriculum bereft of knowledge. A few years earlier it had implemented NCEA, an unorthodox ‘standards-based’ approach to school qualifications. NCEA encourages fragmented teaching and rewards superficial learning.

Michael Johnston: Educating the educators

The parlous state of new Zealand’s school education system is common knowledge, in part thanks to the Herald’s recent Making the Grade series. Our poor results in literacy featured prominently. The shortcomings of the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) were also discussed.

The best way to teach reading and writing has been debated for decades, not only in New Zealand, but internationally. That debate has sometimes been so heated, it has been dubbed ‘the reading wars.’

The current scientific consensus is that teaching literacy in a structured way is the most effective approach. Unfortunately, despite this, the Ministry of Education has not backed structured literacy. Some schools have adopted it independently and are seeing the rewards in their literacy data.

Alexandra Burnett: Teacher Education Must Rise Above Political Correctness

Increasingly, Canadian universities seem to be more concerned about political correctness than educating students. A prominent illustration of this is University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson’s public battle with university administrators, professors and some students over his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns when referring to students with varying sexual orientations.

A less well known but arguably much more serious example is the increasing tendency for Canadian faculties of education to use admissions criteria that are unrelated to the characteristics and skills needed by effective classroom teachers. At the University of Windsor, for example, special consideration is being given to candidates who reflect “the ethno-cultural and social diversity of Ontario’s schools”. And, last September, the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba went even further by aiming to admit 45 per cent of incoming teacher candidates on the basis of their self-identification as members of marginalised groups, such as indigenous, disabled, LGBTQ, minority ethnic or socially disadvantaged.