Preventing an Educational Train Wreck: Part One

Lewis Andrew
sojournal.co.nz

We’ve all heard the definition of insanity: doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. That’s where we are at with education in New Zealand right now. The latest TIMSS (Trends In International Mathematics And Science Study) results are in, and once again, Kiwi kids are tracking downwards.

Look at the list of countries and read them to yourself. Look at where New Zealand sits in this list for fourth graders. We are fortieth behind countries like Kazakhstan, Croatia, Serbia, Armenia and Albania. So enough with the “NZ has the best education system in the world” nonsense. We don’t. Our children are being deprived of a decent education because of the hubris and stupidity of successive governments, our ideologically driven and self-interested teacher unions, and a much-vaunted but vacuous national curriculum.

What do you do with this impending train-wreck? For a start, you stop listening to the ‘experts’ who have been encouraging the driver to speed up! The leftist teacher unions have had a stranglehold on education for years, and what do they have to show for it? Continued and accelerating decline. Few governments have had the balls to stand up to them and do anything truly transformational. And when we see a glimmer of hope like Partnership Schools which were doing so much good for our Pacific and Maori students, they fight tooth and nail to shut them down.

A year or so back, I became acquainted with a TIMMS field trial in NZ in a small independent school. The school entered all its Year 10 students into the trial, and I happen to know that this particular cohort was not the most mathematically capable cohort the school had produced. Of great interest to me were the results that came back. The students were split into five small groups which sat slightly different tests. Despite this particular cohort struggling at times with the Mathematics that they were learning in the Cambridge curriculum, they aced these tests. The mean (of 2-3 students) from each of the five different test versions was significantly above the upper quartile (75th percentile) of the NZ wide results.

What is special about this school? Are the fees ridiculously high? No. Do they draw from an affluent neighbourhood? No, in fact they are in South Auckland. Do they have modern technology and all the bells and whistles in all their classes? No, they are very traditional in their approach to education, and some visitors have commented that they have the look of a deprived school. A more charitable observation would be that the facilities are basic but functional. Nevertheless, they have high expectations in terms of academic success and moral character, teachers who teach rather than ‘facilitate’, and a knowledge-rich curriculum. The results speak for themselves.

So what needs to happen in education in NZ for improvement to be made? How can we get more schools performing like this little independent school? What is the solution? Here are seven things I think could help our education system.

To be continued…