Posted by: Observer
on 09, Jul, 2010
Associate education minister and trainee space cadet, Hon Heather Roy, has stumbled on the shambles that passes for an education policy in England and is advocating it here. Now anyone who has had the sad experience of teaching in a state school in England knows that it is not a system to emulate. Basically, the English system runs for the benefit of the elite private schools Eton and Harrow etc (though they call them public) and state schools are treated as either whipping boys or political footballs or both.
Posted by: Cynic
on 11, Jun, 2010
Dr Muriel Newman founding member of the ACT party and one time deputy leader is concerned about the brainwashing of kids in New Zealand schools.
She presented a petition to the Education and Science Select Committee seeking "that New Zealand school children be protected from political indoctrination".
However to Muriel's distress the petition didn't go any further than the select committee recommending "that the House take note of its report".
Posted by: Observer
on 03, Jun, 2010
There is something very distasteful about the Associate Minister of Education Hon Heather Roy commending private schools for offering Cambridge exams. She is after all a New Zealand minister with a salary, generous perks and a gold-plated superannuation scheme funded by the New Zealand taxpayer. Is it too much to ask that she not undermine our national qualifications by constantly promoting a qualification designed for developing countries that don't have the infrastructure to run their own assessment systems? (Which is why, by the way, the news media are being suckered when they quote NZ Cambridge students as having results that put them "first in the world" - first amongst a number of developing countries would be more accurate).
Posted by: Observer
on 17, Feb, 2010
What’s the real story on this crazy report from the from the rogues gallery that calls itself the inter-party working group.
From the look of the report (available here http://nationalmps.co.nz) not a lot of working went on and almost zero thinking.
That wouldn’t normally matter because usually MPs on working parties can mitigate their ignorance by drawing on the full resources of the State to provide information.
In this case though, the Ministry of Education wasn’t asked to provide any information to the group – probably because it would have raised some awkward questions about the huge cost of setting up a school anywhere that a parent wants, the expense involved in creating an unqualified bureaucracy to mediate between schools and parents, the difficulties of simply closing a school when there is a whole cohort of students still in it, the cost and traffic problems created by transporting kids all across town and the cost and difficulty of developing a “weighted funding formula based on student need”.
Cost neutral? Hardly.
The report avoids words we all know and understand replacing them with politically correct econospeak. Schools become “providers” or occasionally “institutions”; students are “learners” or “clients”; assessment is “context value added measure” and teachers are “learning brokers”. That’s what we need in the New Zealand education system – more jargon.
