The hidden malice beneath right wing education policy

 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.

They do not ... education is as complex a field as any. The arrogance implicit in these policy positions is gobsmacking. 

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!!!

My new Principalship simile

Sitting in a Secondary Community of learning session today, listening to others tell their inspiring stories, this simile popped in to my head.

Principalship is like being a gardener.

We have to till the soil, plant the seeds, fertilise and water, and provide the trellis up which plants can climb. During the process we are continually weeding and pruning.

There is of course the decision about what sort of garden we are trying to create, and who decides.

Is it this?

Or this?

That's a decision to be taken by the community.

The qualities of leadership

Reading this week's 'Your Weekend' supplement in the Christchurch Press, a number of comments in the article 'Women who rule the roost' really struck a chord. The article records interviews with a number of women who hold leadership positions in business and the community, and their wisdom on the question of leadership resonates.

Raelene Castle, CEO of Sydney's Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs (NRL) team is quoted as saying:

"You need respect to succeed in leadership, It does not come with  title, it comes with your actions and how you do the things you said you would."

And:

She believes resilience if fundamental to good leadership. "What doesn't kill your career, makes you stronger". 

Naomi Fergusson, who heads the NZ Inland Revenue Department observes:

 "I learned to value my strengths and have the confidence to trust my own abilities to get things done."

And:

"None of us are perfect. We have our strengths but we also need to understand how to build a team. ...... I give clarity to the organisation and allow the people who work here to fulfill their potential. ... I just create the space for them to do it."

Knowing these things is the first step. Doing them is the challenge. As much as we might try, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes along the way. Maybe it's our integrity that determines whether or not our colleagues are forgiving when we do?

 

Student voice and our educational future

Student voice is well recognised as important in the operation of our schools. I am however fascinated by the number of occasions in which it is not used. My intuition suggests that we are not good at collecting student voice.

As I formulate views on school and curriculum development, I have been struck by the need to value student diversity rather than squash it. This was reinforced for me during the recent address from Yong Zhao.

There are a number of students at Hornby High School who clearly value their own difference. They actively try to maintain their individuality, at the personal cost of regular conflict with the school rules, and so they are a target of the school discipline system.

I decided to meet with one of these students (I walked him to a local coffee shop and bought him coffee) and ask him why he does this, and what he would want from a school that would better prepare him for his future.

I interviewed a year 12 boy, asking only these two questions:

1. Why do you choose to dress the way you do, ignoring the uniform rules of the school?
2. What would school look like if it were to meet your own needs?

He made the following comments:

• We don’t acknowledge student differences
• We have too many rules, many of which don’t seem to serve a purpose
• We should be offering more individualised courses that meet student needs/’passions’ (he used that word without prompting
• “More people would attend school if they were doing what they love doing”
• We should have less of a gap between teachers and students, teachers need to “know more about their students”
• He would like more freedom, he acknowledged that we need some rules, but should have fewer, and more choice to specialise in what they love

When you think about it, there is nothing there that should come as a surprise. During a meeting with several staff about integrated curriculum, project based learning, connected curriculum (call it what you will) a colleague made this comment:

"I've taught in Year 7-13 schools for 18 years. As a profession we have been talking about this stuff all that time. It's time we did something about it instead of talking."

Yep. The moral imperative is clear, the mandate is there. Time to act!!!

Producers, not consumers

It’s a funny old world this education thing, isn’t it. It’s easy to dart around chasing fads and trends like a school of fish. The challenges aren’t helped by the fact that as everyone has been to school we all tend to become self professed, albeit well meaning, experts.

The thing that matters most is that we remember the fundamental purpose of schools: to cause learning. Of course THE big question of the moment is to learn what? There seems to be general agreement that everyone needs basic literacy and numeracy. Beyond that, what? If we say science, which particular bit of science? If we say a language, which particular language? Maybe it doesn’t much matter. What we do seem to agree matters is that students develop good character (I’ve written on that before) and that they learn how to learn, unlearn and relearn, to be flexible, to stick with the job ( Art Costa’s Habits of Mind, those dispositions that characterise successful people in all walks of life).

Perhaps flexibility has become the watchword of the moment. I read a couple of weeks ago of the NZIER’s prediction that 46% of NZ jobs may disappear in the next ten to twenty years. Who knew when I was a student that we might not need tax accountants in twenty years time?

Have you looked at ‘Shapeways’ on the web? There on a web site is the future of small scale manufacturing with either small scale 3D printing on demand, or the delivery of 3D print files that allow anyone with a 3D printer to produce their own objects at home.

Who  even three years ago would have predicted the impact of Uber or AirBnB? More than ever before we are all faced with an absolutely fundamental choice about whether to be a consumer or a producer in life? And for this reason shifting school practice to encouraging students to be producers becomes ever more important. Producing that short film, that piece of code or that phone app, that art work or that short story, that 3D printed toy or that community campaign to get books into disadvantaged homes, these are all ‘producing something’.

I once read that the thing we fear more than being powerless is being powerful beyond measure. The ‘producer culture’, the ’maker culture’ is one way in which we can all exercise our power for the benefit of the community. Let’s put our collective effort into encouraging our students to do just that.

New thinking about learning and 'education'

Tonight I spent two and  a half hours with the senior leadership team of Hornby High School. I have been incredibly privileged to have been offered the position as their Principal at the start of term 2.

Now for a start, these are very talented people. The school is to be almost entirely rebuilt over the next two to three years, and so we are digging deeply into pedagogy in order to make sure that the architects give us a built environment that meets the needs of the pedagogy.

Some things that come to mind:

1. The national curriculum may be organised into learning areas, but that doesn't mean that the learning has to be delivered in discreet chunks that map onto those learning areas.
2. NCEA is not a set price meal but a rich smorgasbord, and like a good smorgasbord you don't have to eat everything on the table to satisfy your hunger
3. We all excel at things that excite us. As teachers we need to stop assuming that because we have a degree in a subject our students will be excited by it (when often we may not be either)
4. Young people care about their world (possibly even more than we older folk do). Give them an opportunity to solve real world problems, big problems, problems that matter.
5. Knowledge matters, but knowledge can be gained from anywhere these days. The online revolution has seen to that
6. Soft skills matter. No employer wants an employee who cannot work with others, an employee who cannot think creatively and critically, and NO amount of maths will give you that.
7. As a team we can solve problems that seem insurmountable when we sit alone.

There's a heck of a lot more, but that's enough to be going on with. Whatever we come up with, the community deserves an aspirational school, a school that makes them go wow!! A school that takes their breath away.

School leadership and 'moral purpose'.

I have been interested in the concept of 'moral purpose' in education. This has increasingly been a feature of the leadership literature.

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education has this to say:

Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school. Barber and Fullan (2005) explain that: “The central moral purpose consists of constantly improving student achievement and ensuring that achievement gaps, wherever they exist, are narrowed.” For a school to achieve this, there needs to be a shared commitment to explicit values.

Source http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Attitudes-values-and-ethics/Moral-purpose-and-shared-leadership

Professor David Hopkins, in an article titled 'Leadership for powerful learning' (ACEL Journal Term 2 2015, Vol 37 No 2) states:

Leaders are driven by a moral purpose about enhancing student learning. Moral purpose activates the passion to reach for the goal and prompts leaders to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities"

Now there's a powerful statement.