The mad scientist and the frog

The Education Amendment Bill No. 2 establishing EDUCANZ to replace the Teachers Council is currently before parliament. It is a neat microcosm of our government's flawed thinking on education, where political ideology is rammed through irrespective of the best interests of children, learners and teachers. For example:

1. The new Council's governing body are to be political cronies - directly appointed by the Minister of Education. There is no democratic process for representation, even when teachers fund more than 90% of the operations of the Council through their registration fees. Furthermore, since the bill stipulates a maximum number of teachers for the council and crucially, no minimum, there could conceivably be no teachers or people with a teaching background on the Teachers Council at all. The Bill, therefore, undermines quality teaching by giving teachers substantially less control over their own profession (Section 380 and Schedule 22). Instead, control will be exerted by a politically sympathetic group of individuals, who may have little or no understanding of the complexities of education.

2. The Bill makes it easier for non-qualified and non-registered people to work as teachers, perpetuating the 2013 amendments resulting in charter school staff being exempt altogether from the requirement to be registered or qualified (New Part 31.) The new "limited authority to teach" (LAT) provisions mean that someone "with specialist skills but not a teaching qualification" can be authorised to 'act' as a teacher for three years - even with criminal convictions.  

3. The Bill aims to gag the freedom of teachers and principals to advocate for children by not allowing them to criticise Government policy: the new code of conduct must “take account” of the State Services Code, which prevents public servants in core state services from publicly criticising Government policy. This provision might have been used, for example, to prevent principals and teachers voicing their concerns about National Standards or the $360M 'Investing in Success' debacle. 

Contrary to Education Amendment Bill No. 2, I believe that:

• All teachers deserve the right to have a voice in choosing who represents them professionally and who sits on the council that will shape the future of the sector.

• All children - in schools and early childhood education - deserve fully qualified and fully registered teachers.

• All NZers deserve a government who is prepared to listen to the free exchange of ideas, not just the ideologically agreeable ones.

These examples illustrate a government that puts their political ideology before the needs of our children. They still refuse to accept internationally regarded research, they still refuse to listen to the profession and they still refuse to even contemplate the notion that their economic policies might impact on student achievement - such notions would not be ideologically agreeable.

There is a classic confusion between correlation and causality. Because underachievement is more pronounced in poorer areas and in Maori and Pacific learners, our government have conveniently concluded that this must be because teachers don't want to teach these groups. It couldn't possibly be because some of these learners might be hungry or cold or scared or lacked the interactions in the first three years of life to ensure the formation of the neural pathways required to learn. Instead, our ministers accuse all teachers of being elitist and racist.

It's like the mad scientist who chopped off the frog's legs and told it to jump. When the frog didn't jump, the mad scientist concluded that the frog might be deaf.