As we head into the 2023 general election, it is worth paying some attention to the education policies of the political parties. I feel a great deal of concern over the general thrust of the policies of the right: ACT and National. Their free market view of education has a particularly odious flavour to it, one that warrants exposure.
The ACT policy in particular encapsulates the general right wing philosophy that the market knows best. Every child gets an allowance -a 'voucher - (well the parents actually) which they then take to their preferred school. This creates the funding for each school. The philosophy here is that communities will be attracted to the best schools, and those are the schools that will survive while those that do not attract parents and children will fail, and disappear. Social Darwinism applied to education, as 'bad' schools are weeded out, and good schools flourish.
I think that the philosophy is flawed on many levels. Is there really a market? Theoretical markets operate on the basis of a series of assumptions. Here are just three of them:
- Everyone has perfect knowledge (so all parents know exactly what goes on in schools, how they operate, etc)
- There are so many producers (schools, in this case) that adding one more or taking one away will have no noticeable effect on the market.
- All resources are perfectly mobile, so a failed school is closed, and can instantly be shifted to a different location. Similarly whānau and tamariki will shift to wherever they need to to be able to attend school.
Really? Not one of those assumptions holds true in education (or in almost any market in the real world, I suggest). Parents rarely know what goes in any school. They make judgements based on their biases, their preconceptions, about a school, about a neighbourhood, about people. They create' winner' and loser' schools based on those biases, they create a self fulfilling prophecy. I've written my arguments about the myth of equal opportunity here.
But that's not the most odious thing about this model. It assumes that there will be winner and loser schools, and so there must ipso facto be winner and loser akonga, rangatahi, tamariki, whānau. Statistically speaking, in Aotearoa we know that the winners will almost always be those from higher income families, and the losers will mostly be those from lower income families, or from Māori and Pasifika whānau. This means that a significant portion of our population is condemned to educational under achievement by virtue of the proposed nature of the structure of education. That view is morally bankrupt in my opinion. It also lacks all economic sense. At a time when we need every human being to be creative, to be a critical thinker, and a productive member of society, we cause inestimable damage to the economy, and to our material standard of living, by condemning a significant proportion of our young people to educational underachievement.
The policies of the right also miss a fundamental attribute of markets. Buyers and sellers in any market do not, contrary to the theory, have equal market power. Transactions are not a win/win scenario. I wonder if too many of these social transactions are a zero sum game: for every win there is a loss? That would mean that for every child admitted to one of these supposed 'high performing' schools, another child has to attend one of the supposed 'low performing' schools. Why would you thank that is a good thing to do?
These policies also miss what I believe from experience to be an important attribute of education. It is not a competitive activity but a collaborative one. Teachers and schools produce better outcomes when they collaborate. Educational impact is in my opinion a gestalt concept: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I have spent most of my 44 year career working in education, concluding my time as Tumuaki of a successful middle sized urban secondary school. It was a school that I know many in the community might have labelled as a bad school. Yet it wasn't. It was a good school, and during my seven year tenure we proved that. It was a fabulous school, with wonderful young people, and an amazing talented staff. You can read about our journey as a kura here. I'd like to think that I pulled my weight as leader, that I played my part in the success of the kura, its teachers, its rangatahi, its whānau. My point is, maybe I know a thing or two about what makes schools successful.. maybe, as do most Tumuaki and kaiako in fact. And maybe, just maybe, we collectively know a thing or two more than politicians about what makes schools successful.
None of that means that we can't do better. As Maya Angelou said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Politicians need to stop meddling. They act as if they are Captain Kirk on the bridge of the USS Enterprise giving that classic command: "Make it so, Mr Sulu".
(Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/william-shatner-how-star-trek-helped-save-pows-vietnam-1196492/ accessed 11.09.2023)
Some politicians seem to believe that they know more than educators (both practitioners and academics) about education, and that they know how to solve the problems.
BUZZZZZ .... that's the big red 'buzzer of doom right there.
And while the National party policy does not explicitly mention vouchers, the likelihood of a coalition means we are likely to see at the very least the return of charter schools. And the National Party policy does espouse a return to what it calls rigorous standardised testing, a return that will mean that, as my former colleague Henry used to say, 'we spend too much time weighing the pig and not enough time feeding it'. No amount of testing will improve educational outcomes. What will is a reduction in poverty and inequality, the nurturing of school environments and climates that are built on strong positive relationships, and the resourcing of kura and kaiako so that they can continue to improve, and to do their jobs.
Education must not be treated as some sort of political football. The cost is too great. A far better approach is to empower the profession to improve, and to resource it accordingly. LISTEN to what the profession is saying. And beware false prophets (you could be forgiven for spelling that 'profits' in this context). Education must not be abandoned yet again to the neo-liberbal mantra, a mantra that has overseen a dramatic increase in inequality in Aotearoia since the 1980s, and accordingly seen the biggest push ever towards educational inequality.
Yes we can do better in our teaching of reading, and mathematics. But that doesn't mean that the politicians know how best to do that. Resource us, we know how. Give teachers time in their day to upskill, to learn how best to teach reading, for example. In my experience tea hers rarely sit their saying 'why the *** would I change?'. They are normally sitting there saying 'what does that look like, what will. I be doing, and when will I have time to do it?" Stop undermining the teaching profession. Stop blaming teachers, and start resourcing them. These are people who care.. deeply .. about young people. These are people who thrive on the success of those young people. No teacher gets up in the morning saying "well, I think I'll ** over that kid in my year 10 class today".
And HOW DARE YOU condemn young people to educational failure just because they were born on the wrong side of the tracks!!!
