Which do you think your hard-earned tax dollars would be better spent on? Kids who leave school equipped with world-leading maths skills? Or kids who leave school barely able to count to 10, but able to do so in a language spoken by just 0.0025 per cent of the world?
Clearly, at the moment, New Zealanders can’t have both. While the NZ left-media (a tautology, I apologise) brag about how many people now speak ‘te reo’ (aka ‘university Māori’), the National government is noticing that fewer and fewer of them can grasp even basic maths.
22% of Year 8 students are at the expected standard for maths and 12% of Year 8 Māori students are where they should be.
The best spin Stuff can put on these dire results is this lame excuse:
The Minister was referring to where students currently sit against the new curriculum set to be introduced.
So, they’re not quite as bad, if you measure them against the dumbed-down curriculum from the Ardern years. Which is like saying that a second-rate adult male athlete is suddenly a world champion if you let him compete against teenage girls. Like that would ever happen…
With a limited pool of money to spend on education, the question then becomes one of priorities. The new National government is getting at least some of their priorities right.
$30 million is being stripped from a programme funding teachers learning te reo Māori in order to supercharge the maths curriculum.
Education Minister Erica Stanford said the Te Ahu o te Reo Māori initiative “isn’t accredited” and is more than double the cost of “similar courses” with a price tag of $100 million.
“An evaluation of the programme found no evidence it directly impacted progress and achievement for students.
“The review also couldn’t quantify what impact the programme had on te reo Māori use in the classroom.”
Well, golly, a woke ‘education’ course that’s completely evidence free? That’s never happened before!
Meanwhile, the groomers peddling ‘relationships and sexuality education’, should be getting nervous.
Stanford told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking there is plenty of money in education to “reprioritise” […]
The move is a part of the Government’s “make it count” plan unveiled last month which involves the introduction of structural maths for year 0-8 students from term one in 2025 – a year earlier than planned.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he fast-tracked the move after seeing the “appalling” results.
He said it amounted to “a crisis” and the data had prompted him to call in the Secretary of Education and the ministry’s executive team.
“There’s no way to describe those results as anything other than a total system failure.”
Far be it for me to suspect that in fact it’s the system working as intended by the woke elite. If kids can’t think critically or do the basic maths so critical to scientific understanding, then they haven’t the mental toolkit to kick back against the ‘climate change education’ (i.e., indoctrination) drummed into them through their entire school years.
Of course, there’s still the challenge of getting them to even show up for school in the first place.
Education Minister Erica Stanford announced the funding “reprioritisation” on Thursday, as associate minister David Seymour announced his own crack down on truancy.
Seymour called it the “Star system”. That stands for “Stepped Attendance Response”, which would catch truant students and put them back in school, starting in 2026.
Here’s one detail that will set the teacher’s union screaming like stuck pigs – less bludge days.
And he wasn’t just concerned with absent students. Seymour has also called on schools to stop using “teacher only days”.
“Schools will have to play their part in setting a good example as well. This means not taking teacher-only days during term time,” he said.
What? Work on some of their 12 weeks of holidays every year? The horror!
There’s a stick for deadbeat parents, too.
Each school would have its own Star plan, with more intensive responses the longer the child was absent.
It would start with a message to the parents, and could lead to the Ministry of Education being called in to fine the parents […]
Seymour said the issue of absenteeism in schools is serious, with New Zealand’s regular attendance rate only 47.1% in 2023.
“If this issue isn’t addressed there will be an 80-year long shadow of people who missed out on education when they were young, are less able to work, less able to participate in society, more likely to be on benefits. That’s how serious this is.”
And a government getting serious about education? For all its faults, this can only be a good sign.
