Joining the Dots

"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think." - Adolf Hitler

Let us look to the UK and Sweden as examples of treasury driven education reform. Figures from the international PISA study show that no other country's standards are sliding faster than Sweden's. And in the UK, just this week:

- Discovery New School, a brand new and very expensive charter school in West Sussex is being closed for failing it's students
- several other charter schools are in 'special measures'
- three arrests have been made for a kohanga reo-esque fraud at a 'flagship academy'
- 90% of the country's teachers have been on strike
- 2 school playing fields have been sold off
- The UK's education secretary has spent $90 million on one 'free school' for 500 pupils
- Leaked documents reveal that the Education Minister is making plans for special fast-track support from highly paid private consultants for failing free schools to avoid further embarrassment.  Yet more tax payers' dollars at work. (Observer front page) Gove is quoted as stating his (failing) reforms are driven by a "moral purpose" (Oh the irony!)
- Upon recognising that many students arrive at primary school ill-equipped to learn, OfSTED (ERO) suggest standardised tests are required for the nation's two year olds....(See the pattern?)
- Teacher recruitment figures continue to dwindle

This video goes some way towards explaining the invidious and undemocratic way our government is ramming through its own agenda for similar treasury driven reforms.





Either our NZ government fails to understand the harm that identical policies have inflicted in Britain and Sweden. Or, it absolutely does understand the harm inflicted in Britain and Sweden and is continuing regardless. Either scenario suggests that our elected officials are dangerously incompetent, blinded by ideological sympathies and unfit to govern.

Even if you did support a vision for privatised education, could you condone the process thus far?

The general public is being kept in the dark because, in an election year, these policies would prove to be deeply unpopular if more people understood the ramifications.

Join the dots.

Think, lest our government be unjustly fortunate.