Education

Many people hold up Finland as the idea schooling system. They don’t have standardised testing, charter schools and a whole bunch of other things that allows the vested interests of the NZEI and PPTA to hold up as an example of a proper functioning education system. The one part the unions won’t tell you about though is the drive for excellence amongst teachers:

Finland’s highly developed teacher preparation program is the centerpiece of its school reform strategy. Only eight universities are permitted to prepare teachers, and admission to these elite teacher education programs is highly competitive: only one of every ten applicants is accepted. There are no alternative ways to earn a teaching license. Those who are accepted have already taken required high school courses in physics, chemistry, philosophy, music, and at least two foreign languages. Future teachers have a strong academic education for three years, then enter a two-year master’s degree program. Subject-matter teachers earn their master’s degree from the university’s academic departments, not—in contrast to the US—the department of teacher education, or in special schools for teacher education. Every candidate prepares to teach all kinds of students, including students with disabilities and other special needs. Every teacher must complete an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in education.

Because entry into teaching is difficult and the training is rigorous, teaching is a respected and prestigious profession in Finland. So selective and demanding is the process that virtually every teacher is well prepared.

Imagine of our teacher training were so rigorous. A great many of the problems in our schools would dissipate almost instantly. Here, instead, teachers demand respect they do not deserve nor that they have earned.

The teacher unions aren’t letting up on trying to undermine National Standards. Here is a missive from Ian Leckie, Perry Rush and  Peter Simpson where in paragraph 3 he is clearly trying to incite the undermining of National Standards.

Full document (pdf 768k)

The government and Hekia Parata needs to stipulate precisely how they want National Standards data presented. If they don’t these self centred union bully boys will undermine the whole process.

Earlier I suggested that de-registration could be a tempting way to sort out the teacher unions. I’ve thought about this and that may be a step too far.

I think I have come up with a more elegant solution.

the government could use anti-monopoly provisions in the law  to break up the unions from their monopoly position of representing education workers.

At present there is a single union for principals, a single union for secondary school teachers and a single union for primary school teachers.

I would think that teacher representation could be better achieved with a little bit of competition in the market place.

Hekia Parata should bring in this development to the education sector:

UNDERPERFORMING teachers will be sacked in a landmark education reform that will be rolled out nationally.

In return for signing the federal government’s teacher hiring policy, aimed at improving standards, the O’Farrell government will be offered a handout of more than $12 million.

In a move that will break the long-standing deadlock about whether principals can hire and fire, school management will be given free rein on recruitment and management of teachers and support staff.

School boards and councils will also take over budget control and strategic planning, giving parents a greater role in school operations. They will also be given the right to set salaries for teachers and contracts for school maintenance.

“To get the best results we need principals to have the powers to get and keep the best teachers,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.

I wonder if David Shearer will adopt this Labor party policy.

Imagine what they could do in South Auckland if the teachers union and their political wing, the Labour party, don’t get in the way.

DANIEL RILEY, a young trainee teacher from west London, attended a school so bad that it was shut down while he was there. It was, he recalls with commendable understatement, an “unstructured” place. Fewer than 20% of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including mathematics and English (the main benchmark for secondary students, involving exams commonly taken at 16). There were fights. Some, involving knives, ended with arrests. There were drugs—the school drew its pupils from tough housing estates, and gangs prowled at the gates. The teaching was “not inspired,” Mr Riley says, sticking with the understatement. He recalls lessons spent copying texts from books.

As happened to a few dozen failing institutions under the previous Labour government, Mr Riley’s school was turned into an academy—a state school removed from local council control and given new freedoms over staffing and teaching methods. Six years on, Paddington Academy draws its pupils from the same estates. But the school is unrecognisable.

Last summer 69% of pupils met the benchmark for good GCSEs, easily beating the national average. More than half come from homes poor enough to earn free school meals and more than three-quarters do not speak English as a first language, making its intake exceptionally “challenging”, in Whitehall jargon.

Now when Mr Riley meets teenage students they seek advice about university. His dream is to return to Paddington Academy to teach full-time. It is easy to see why. The school is a success, recently earning an “Outstanding” grade from Ofsted school inspectors. It is, more subjectively, an impressive place. It feels calm and academically ambitious. It hums with optimism.

We actually have nothing to lose in trialling Charter Schools…it is apparent as the nose on your face that the current system is failing those in lower decile schools.

Read the rest of the article and learn what makes a great school.

As we have seen there has been attacks in the media on Catherine Isaac and her supposed lack of qualifications in the Education sector. This somehow is supposed to discount her from participating in or chairing the committee responsible for overseeing the implementation of Charter Schools.

This is really the elitism of tenured education staff and their fervant belief that only the teacher unions are allowed a say about eduction. It is typical socialist we-know-best attitudes.

Nanaia Mahuta jumped right in:

Labour’s education spokeswoman Nanaia Mahuta said Ms Isaac’s appointment was political opportunism from the Act Party.

“I see it as no surprise. She has strong linked to the Act Party and they’re putting in one of their mates to push along their ideology.

But if you look at her lifetime at the public trough you can see she is actually far less qualified to talk on anything, let alone education, yet for some reason the union dominated Labour party has seen fit to appoint her as Education spokesperson. I think that everytime Ms Mahuta opens her gob to talk about Education she is told to sit back down until she has done her time in the education sector.

Then there is Catherine Delahunty:

Green education spokeswoman Catherine Delahunty today described Isaac’s pending appointment as ”disturbing”.

”The trial now looks like a joke.

”It shows this is nothing to do with education, it’s to do with the Government’s agenda to turn the education system into a business opportunity.”

Isaac’s three terms as a school trustee did not qualify her for the role, said Delahunty, who has also been a school trustee.

”This is a major political platform for education. It is a change in direction. It is not something for amateurs.”

Catherine Delahunty should take her own advice and STFU about education as well. She isn’t even remotely qualified to even issue press releases on the subject. I find it highly ironic that her favourite recipe is for a fruitcake.

It was nice of the opposition to focus on qualifications for speaking about education. Now they can just shut up.

We are well used to unionists telling us one thing and doing another. Robin Duff, head of the PPTA is no different. The PPTA and NZEI have fought the government to a stand still over National Standards.

Just yesterday they were calling for the data to be kept secret. Trevor Mallard even, bizarrely, tried to have National Standards data made more secret than SIS briefing papers.

Then Robin Duff in an opinion piece has this to say in opposition to Charter Schools:

Charter schools don’t have to follow the New Zealand curriculum or use the New Zealand qualification system and even though politicians mandate attendance at school for all children between the ages of 5 and 16, parliament will have no right or duty to scrutinise the activities of these schools.

The Official Information Act won’t apply, so it will be difficult for the media to enforce transparency. The other moderating influence on corrupt management practices in schools – unions – will be kept well clear.

The teachers union have opposed transparency every step of the way in education and now they are moaning that private training institutions should somehow be subject to the Official Information Act. They make out like this is a revelation and somehow evil ignoring the fact that every integrated and private school already enjoys freedom from busy bodies like him.

They don’t need the scrutiny of the OIA because their results speak for themselves.

To cap off his hypocrisy he then carps about an Act official being appointed to chair the committee to oversea implementation of Charter Schools.

Not mention the fact this educational experiment will be monitored by a committee led by a woman whose sole qualifications appear to be that she “loves education” and has served on a school board. The appointment of former ACT president Catherine Isaac is clearly politically motivated and shows that the implementation of charter schools is not evidence-based, but ideologically driven.

Of course it is politically motivated, it is Act policy, why wouldn’t they want someone in tune with the policy overseeing the implementation. If the situation was reveres you don;t think Labour would be appointing a neutral person to oversee their key policies do you? Mike Williams when president of Labour had 6 government appointed directorships after all.

The teacher unions are now set to go to war over the possibility of League Tables. They lost the war over National Standards and so their solution is to now try and prevent the data being analysed:

NZEI president Ian Leckie said this week that schools were deeply concerned that information could be made public – it will be subject to Official Information Act requests – and aggregated into crude league tables that would unfairly label students, schools and their communities.

He said they were not moderated and there was huge variation in the ways schools were implementing them. “It would be a case of junk information in and junk information out,” Mr Leckie said.

Any national standards-based league table would simply reflect the school decile and serve to name and shame some of the very schools that were working hardest to raise student achievement.

He wanted an assurance that the date would be “protected” from publication.

“Otherwise the Government will find that come May 31, schools will be reluctant to hand their student achievement data over.”

I think Mr Leckie will find that the public embarrassment of a poor rating compared with schools that did hand over data will ensure that Boards of Trusttee will comply with their legal requirement to submit data.

Regular readers will be aware of a nasty little Wairarapa principal called Kevin Jephson.

His style is to slag off the Government, National Standards and Anne Tolley to his local papers – which dutifully print every word, without wondering why he would be so critical.

Well, now we know.

Yet again, brave, plucky little Kevin is getting in the first blow against the big bad Government by going public with his school’s National Standards results – apparently instead of him and his teachers being responsible for poor standards at his school it is the government’s fault because they measured him and found him wanting.

But this usual smokescreen won’t hide the tragic facts for kids and parents at his school.

These results are shocking. That’s why the MoE wants to give them help.

Jephson has been caught out – which is exactly why we need National Standards.

And no amount of whining or complaining is going to cut it with parents, while a principal just down the road is singing the praises of Natonal Standards and making a real difference for kids.

Parents will vote with their feet. And soon Kevin will be left ranting in an empty classroom, waiting for the removal van to arrive. I suspect even then the sad little loser will still be blaming the government for his now empty school.

But by then Anne Tolley’s revenge will be complete.

Great progress and initiatives are being made in the UK in education. Perhaps Hekia Parata might like to get cracking on the same thing here.

Secondary schools that fail to stretch the brightest children are to be named and shamed as part of a drive to stop comprehensives playing the league table system, the schools minister warns.

For the first time next week, parents will be able to compare schools based on the amount of progress made by the top pupils between the age of 11 and 16.

New league tables will also show improvements registered by the bottom third of pupils throughout their secondary education.

Figures are expected to show that up to a third of pupils in state schools — almost 190,000 — are gaining worse results in English and mathematics exams at 16 than in comparable tests taken at the age of 11.

The move comes amid fears that too many schools prioritise “borderline” pupils on the cusp of scoring a C grade — a good pass — to inflate their headline results at the expense of the brightest or those struggling the most.

Today, Nick Gibb, the schools minister, warns that league tables have evolved over the past 20 years to “encourage a degree of ‘gaming’ by some weaker schools, desperate to keep their school above the standard that would trigger intervention by Ofsted [the regulator] or the Department for Education”.

He also claims that some teachers are entering pupils for qualifications “that are more in the interests of a school’s league table position than the child’s own prospects”.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he says: “If you look at the GCSE results since 1997 you see a dramatic increase in the proportion of C grades being awarded.

“Weaker secondary schools have been given an incentive to focus only on these pupils. But what about the B students who might, with better teaching, achieve an A? Or the E students who could get a D?”

He adds: “It is to iron out these idiosyncrasies that led us to reform the school performance tables.

“We are determined to stamp out any incentives to game the system whereby some schools focus just on those pupils who will affect their league table position.”