Of wedding speeches and education policy .. huh?

What do a wedding speech and education policy have in common? 

(Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-write-good-wedding-speech)

Not a lot, you'd have thought, and it isn't what I set out to think about. In fact, I was in the garden, breaking up large sods of heavy clay, thinking about something that happened a decade or so ago. I'd been asked to give a wedding address to the bride and groom. I've done that several times, and I love it. The thing that made this one different was that after the address over drinks at the wedding reception, quite a few members of our extended whānau came up to me individually to make comment on my address. That's nice. They were all complementary, but the thing that ended up putting me into something of an internal rage, was the repeated comment that expressed surprise at how good my address was (the bride and groom, I hasten add,  were simply gracious and thankful). I responded politely, but desperately wanted to rage "what the f*** did you expect? Why the surprise? I do this sort of thing every day of my  f**** professional life. Why would you think it would have been anything except 'good' .." You get the idea ....

This experience is typical of something I've experienced on numerous occasions before. Here I am, an educational professional of 41 years experience, a Principal of nearly five years, and I'd like to think in that time I've been successful and impactful (in a positive way) on learners and colleagues. Yet, I continue to find that friends and family continue to argue with me about the direction of education. They argue that they know best about the shape and form of education, having strong views about what they argue to be the cataclysmic decline and fall of our education system and educational standards. I am more than a little amused that they would often readily accept that the system didn't work for them, but then argue that what we used to do is the best option for many of them. "Bring back corporal punishment, bring back rote learning and memorisation, .. hell, it didn't do me any harm'. Except .. it did. 

Where are these opinions derived from? Well, we all went to school, didn't we? So, having experienced it, we must all be experts who are capable of expounding expert opinion. Surely? Then there are those biases from which we all suffer, confirmation bias, cognitive biases.. so the story goes. And of course on the basis of the biases, parents will most often claim that they know their own children, they know what is best for them. Sometimes that's true, but in my experience often it is not. The only frame of reference most have for any conversation on education is personal experience, and that can be exceptionally variable. That variability in itself is an interesting comment on the efficacy of things the way they used to be.

One of the biases that we often confront is opinion based on nothing more than... ideology. No data, just ideology. And here I think we see the root of flawed education policy.. individuals who come together on the basis of ideological commonality to shape and implement political ideology, who then inform their policy on the basis of their uninformed opinion. No data, no research, nothing... in fact, empty minds. Maybe that in itself is an indictment of eduction, for all of us it can be difficult to overcome the 'group think' that is so often at the heart of such political processes. National Standards would have to be the most outrageous example. Who in their right minds would think that conducting more measurement, and pigeon-holing children on the basis of that testing, was going to improve outcomes for those children? As a friend and former colleague used to say, you don't fatten the pig by weighing it more often'.

Back to the extended whānau. Maybe the problem lies in my inability to produce cogent argument to convince these people otherwise. Maybe this is a shortcoming of our profession as a whole, an underlying failure to communicate the value and worth of our profession, maybe that is why our professional advice is so often ignored. Maybe it's the example we set? There are certainly individuals within our profession who do not act professionally, and who do not engage with research data or processes. I quail at the thought of my doctor or my dentist behaving like this.  However in my most recent experience this is NOT the profession of this millennium. I work with colleagues who are inquiring into the practice (it's called 'Teaching as Inquiry') in which they gather data around small incremental changes that improve outcomes for learners. They behave professionally (whatever that means). They have heart for their learners, and are focussed on doing a better job for those learners. They are people with moral purpose and with heart, they are people with an underlying competence and good professional judgement. Most of them, anyway.

Here it is, right out of our National Curriculum:

Maybe the community has been captured by the paradigm that is represented by such 'institutions' as PISA, failing to recognise that PISA may well no longer be measuring what maters in this fast changing world. Or maybe in this current 'post truth' era such mischievousness as that peddle by the NZ Institute captured sufficient addled minds to gain the traction that it does. The neo-liberal right seems set on a path of regression to what we have always done in the past, in the belief that this gives us the best outcomes. After all, why would we want to change what works? Except that it doesn't. It has only ever worked for the privileged few, interestingly mostly for New Zealanders of European extraction. And even then our past practices don't seem to have the success rate that we'd like.

So we end up all too often with education policy that is ill informed, ill considered, or not considered at all. I do feel that in our current New Zealand climate we actually have.a Minister who listens to data-informed advice. As a profession I think we 'have a ways to go'. We need to get better at ensuring our professional credibility in the eyes of the public. Maybe, as we enter the 'post post truth' world we might have a better chance, but only if we are deliberate and intentional in what we say, how we say it, in how we engage with our stakeholders, and how we work to improve educational outcomes for our rangatahi in New Zealand.

In the meantime I need to get over the perceived 'insult' to my professional skills and credibility that was implicit in the 'surprise' expressed by whānau about my ability to speak in front of groups of people. But I am left with that question: what did they think I did with my time, day after day, in front of 50 to 60 staff, and 100 to 140 young people each week, each day? Maybe I don't want an answer to that one.