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: blogger
on 25, Mar, 2009
On top of the $30 million already given to private schools, the Government is providing a further $10,000,000 for scholarships. By the sound of it this is a return to the limited voucher scheme National introduced in 1995, the Targeted Individual Entitlement (TIE). The intention of the funding is to enable students who would otherwise not be able to afford private schools to do so.
And they would want to do this because? According to Associate Education Minister, Heather Roy, it would be because private schools "set a benchmark for quality, efficiency and cost effectiveness".
There is virtually no way of measuring the truth of this statement. While private schools continue to select their students from the well-heeled culturally-endowed middle class and the state schools they are being compared with have to take all comers, there's no contest.
