"practice of circulating extreme ideas which masquerade as a response to an invented crisis with the aim of justifying less extreme ends"
PPTA News, March 2010 p. 3
Whatever did we call new policy before we had the phrase “step change”?
It seems as if every quango that comes up with a completely undemocratic idea that flies in the face of experience, research or commonsense is able to explain away these difficulties with the phrase “step change”.
I have since discovered that the phrase comes from business, from one John Kotter, who used it to describe his eight stage model of “change management.”
A new CEO comes into a company, creates a sense of panic and crisis to justify sacking half the staff (aka “obstacles”), uses the money saved to pay management bonuses and to increase directors’ fees and shareholder returns, then sits back and enjoys the plaudits.
The most recent document to invoke the step change incantation was the report of the Inter-Party Working Group – a group of MPs from ACT, National and the Māori Party. Their report Step Change: success the only option deserves to be widely read because it is rare to come across a formal document that is so blatant in its selective and dishonest use of research.
As PPTA has pointed out to the group, it uses data as a drunk uses a lamp-post – that is for support rather than illumination. It would be reassuring to think that such a tendentious piece of work would be consigned to the recycling bin. On the other hand, politicians have a practice of circulating extreme ideas which masquerade as a response to an invented crisis with the aim of justifying less extreme ends.
The national standards debate provides good example of the deliberate manufacturing of a sense of crisis around the New Zealand education system. This has not been easy because New Zealand has a very successful record in international tests backed up by comments from Professor Terry Crooks coordinator of the National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) who has assured New Zealand parents that there is simply no evidence of any decline in achievement over recent years.
Not what the politicians want to hear! Instead they have begun wringing their hands about the 20% of students who do not achieve at school.
The government is under the illusion that schools have some problem identifying these students. While that may well be true in a small number of cases, that’s not the issue. The real scandal – if we have to have one – is how little consistent help there is for these kids who are identifiable well before they start school. Secondary teachers certainly don’t need help identifying them. By year 9, the record will show that their lives have been peppered by numerous interventions from multiple agencies but nothing consistent or coordinated or successful. The government’s response is to bolt on yet another disconnected initiative in the form of remedial assistance for a half day a year.
While money is wasted on the national standards chimera, the Behaviour Action Plan, which offers a multi-systemic, long-term, thoroughly-researched approach to addressing under-achievement is being starved of funds.
As there are no sound educational arguments for national standards, the government is now shifting the argument to new ground. The debate is no longer about the best interests of children. It is now about making “those uppity teachers and principals do as they are told – just as we had to when we were at school”.
Ugly and irrational as that is, Alfie Kohn*, an American educationalist, has identified even more unsavoury reasons to explain why affluent American parents appear so keen on national testing. In a country where top schools produce bumper stickers for parents that say, “My child is an honours student at …” he observes that for many parents it is not enough that their own children are succeeding, they need to know other children are failing and failing conspicuously.
He also discerns amongst these parents “…selfishness, which sometimes accounts for both the callous disregard for other people’s children and, in the final analysis, what many affluent parents are doing to their own. Social psychologists call it BIRG: basking in refl ected glory. ‘We didn’t realise they had so much emotionally invested in the concept that they were the parents of the good students’”.
Maybe this doesn’t apply in New Zealand yet, but if we continue to promote policies that cynically feed off the natural anxiety parents have about their own children, we should not be surprised by the anti-social tendencies that may be unleashed. ▪
*Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform, Phi Delta Kappan April 1998. The whole article may be read here: http://www.alfiekohn.org/ articles.htm.
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