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: Flying Pig
on 11, Jan, 2010
I have a powerful feeling of deja vu right now. Has anyone else noticed the Request for Proposals published by the Ministry of Education in late December? Sneaky time to do things like that, eh? It called for a contractor to “support the development of a range of senior secondary curriculum and assessment resource production projects". In other words, work which in the past would have been done by Ministry staff is now being contracted out to someone who be 'overseen' by a project manager in the MOE. It's the usual right-wing approach - slash the numbers of public servants, then contract work out, often at a higher cost than employing a staff member. What will be contracted out next? Negotiating the STCA? Who will be left in the Ministry of Education by the time a left-wing government takes the reins again? A CEO and a few 'project managers'? Watch this space!
Posted by: blogger
on 09, Dec, 2009
Tagged in:
vouchers ,
Tomorrow's Schools ,
teachers ,
privatisation ,
private schools ,
power ,
politics ,
Performance pay ,
education spending ,
education ,
Don Brash ,
2025 taskforce
Don Brash is famous for two things
By ToilandTrouble
- His willingness to use race in order to advance his campaign for political power in 2005, and:
- His ability to survive for many weeks on a diet of corned beef and frozen peas.
He is also an economist and we know how many of them it takes to change a light bulb (none, the darkness will cause the light bulb to change itself). In sum he is overwhelmingly under-qualified to comment on educational matters. That doesn't matter though because economists are immune to intellectual humility, untroubled by their own ignorance and always ready to draw a crooked line from an unproved assumption to a forgone conclusion.
Posted by: blogger
on 24, Jul, 2009
By Winged Rodent
While perusing today's letters to the Dominion Post we were taken with this particularly astute piece:
NZ often beats Australia
If New Zealand ever had occasion to set up a Truth Ministry, Business Roundtable chief Roger Kerr would surely have to be its first chief executive.
Not content with regularly misrepresenting the operation of education vouchers in Sweden, he has now recast the results of international testing to put Australia typically ahead of New Zealand (Business Forum, July 20).
