Kate Shuttleworth

Chippie is just doing what happened at the end of the last National Government when Labour smashed up National for golden handshakes. A simple and effective play from the best Labour Opposition MP.

From an article by Paul Harper and embedded journalist Kate Shuttleworth:

Labour’s Education spokesperson Chris Hipkins says Longstone’s golden handshake is “outrageous”.

“The Government claims the relationship between Lesley Longstone and Hekia Parata had broken down. Well, $425,000 dollars would have paid for a hell of a lot of relationship counselling.”  Read more »

Yesterday I blogged about Kate Shuttleworth’s penchant for always regurgitating NZEI and PPTA press releases.

Then I got an email via the tipline that explained it all about why a “decent journalist, trained and skilled” seems to only run the union lines instead of doing additional research.

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Why do Herald reports like Kate Shuttleworth just repeat PPTA/NZEI nonsense without questioning anything?

First she quotes at length a Nelson teacher who claims to have managed Charter Schools in many places around the world like Jordan, UAE and Pakistan and spent 10 years “repairing the damage”.

Right – sure he did. And how relevant are those countries and how important are anecdotes like that to a country like New Zealand trying to improve the lot of those kids the NZEI/PPTA system is failing?

Then clearly without having read the latest Credo report or the Swedish data released at the end of 2012 Shuttleworth does no background research into the New Orleans Charters School situation but quotes at length a mother from New Orleans who appears to have taken personal offence.

Maybe Kate could have found a few articles on google from credible journalists that say things like:

“The reforms had begun before Katrina, but the pace was accelerated after the disaster. It is now the only US city where a majority of public school pupils – around eight in ten – attend charter schools, which are non-unionised and enjoy a rare degree of operational independence from government. (no wonder the unions here are worried)  Read more »