PPTA

It was widely agreed that Parata had a rough year in 2012 and was lucky to keep her portfolio – albeit now saddled with a mini-van load of associate ministers who are doing most of the work.

Despite supposedly being the Ronald Reagan of the National Party she alienated the sector, baffled the public, struggled in the House and burned through her staff.

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So the billionaire worshippers at Forbes Magazine * have got their eyes on the massive opportunities for profit promised by the privatisation of public education.

Naveen Jain’s article is so full of absurd assertions, greed- masquerading as idealism and fundamental misunderstandings that it is hard to know where to begin.

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So a day after announcing the closure of two residential special schools, Parata announces the government is going to be giving $3 million a year to Wanganui Collegiate.

Collegiate is a decile 10 school, which according to the 2011 ERO report had no Pasifika students and 11% Maori.

The same ERO report praised its ‘relatively small class sizes’ which enabled teachers to know their students well, and commented on the ‘success rates considerably above national comparison levels.’ Yep, well that’s what a top private school is supposed to do, right?

Parata and Longstone have been berating schools and teachers to raise the achievement of Maori, Pasifika, special needs and students from low-socio-economic status families  - these are supposed to be the priority learners that are the Minister’s ‘unrelenting’ focus.

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Reading the start of Hard Times in the library last weekend, I had to stop myself accosting the nearest person with how strikingly relevant it is to the educational debate today.

In a miserable class room in a northern English industrial town a school inspector and a new teacher drill a class of youngsters with facts in the modern, 1850s, method.  Exaggerated as they are in Dickens’ inimitable style, Misters Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild are recognisable still as archetypes of the ‘filling a bucket’ style of educator.  Dickens describes the teacher “…looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another… from thy boiling store that shalt fill each jar brim full [and] kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within…” and so on.

So, what’s so exciting about this?

First, it’s that, even in 1854, this style of education was quite obviously mocked and criticised by Dickens, and presumably other people too. There’s  this mythologising that goes on, from educational consultants and people on TED talks in particular, that the twentieth century industrial model of education was about pumping kids through schools and filling their heads in a regimented manner and rhythm, and that we have to change this because of the ‘new economy’ or ‘new forms of knowledge’ or whatever. What nonsense. The tension between education as a personal, holistic, creative endeavour versus the acquisition of knowledge, at least reaches back to the mid nineteenth century, and I suspect much earlier indeed.

And the relation of this to charter schools is simply that Mr Gradgrind sounds like a perfect candidate to run a KIPP school.  “A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket... ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature…” this sounds like a man ideally fitted for the ‘no excuses’ extreme-accountability regime of the (commonly known as) Kids in Prison Programme.

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I was reading Hargreaves and Fullan’s latest book, Professional Capital, and came across this hypothetical question to teacher unions:

“When will you ever support a change that’s not just about more jobs, more money or easier work?”

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