If Treasury secretary John Whitehead gets his way it will be a grim Christmas for the education sector
PPTA News December 2009, p. 5
Treasury’s latest document, Challenges and Choices: New Zealand’s Long-term Fiscal Statement, calls for bigger classes, fewer non-contact hours and performance pay – all the while failing to acknowledge Treasury’s own role in pushing for the expensive and disconnected Tomorrow’s Schools system.
Whitehead speaks of “difficult trade-offs” between economic, social and cultural education objectives, and advocates “using limited funding more efficiently to achieve the same or better results.”
PPTA president Kate Gainsford is concerned about the document’s flaws and has written to Whitehead seeking a meeting.
“I am concerned that a government department would release a blueprint for New Zealand schools with so little regard for background and accuracy," she said.
There was however some comfort in assurances made by education minister Anne Tolley, at PPTA's November executive meeting, that she would take Treasury's advice with a grain of salt.
"Treasury offers a lot of advice, but we don't always listen to it. They look at things with a purely fiscal attitude, and that's what we want them to do .. they are constantly looking at making the numbers add up, but have no cognisance of politics – what’s acceptable and what’s reasonable … a major change like that would have to be signalled in an election manifesto, and it wasn’t,” Tolley said. Kate said she would hold Tolley to that promise in the coming year; however she did not think being “purely fiscal” justified Treasury working with flawed information.
The document shows Treasury has teachers' non-contact time firmly in its sights and Kate warned Whitehead about the significant risks in recommending wholesale non-contact cutbacks. Damaging long-term costs could be generated through downstream effects on retention and recruitment, she said. Kate said Treasury did not understand the need for more non-contact time had arisen from external events such as:
- the pressures of NCEA and constantly expanding subject options.
- the need for increased pastoral time to assist schools in dealing with an increasing number of troubled students.
- the expectation that students will be provided with more individualised learning programmes.
- the increased expectations for schools to provide a wider range of sporting and cultural experiences.
The document also speaks of “reducing constraints” on staffing ratios, class size and staff deployment, claiming that “research” shows smaller class sizes are a “relatively expensive and ineffective option.”
Kate described this claim as “intellectually dishonest”. It is based on a single study, by Dr Eric Hanushek, popular in World Bank circles because it can be used to argue against ever spending any money on education. But the statistical basis of its claims have been questioned, she said.
“Studies which show no effect for smaller classes fail to under-stand that schools are inclined to reduce class sizes if students are more challenging, while allowing bigger numbers in classes of more able students. This practice completely confounds simplistic attempts to correlate student results and class size,” she said. “The increased class size policy is one that officials are inclined to recommend for other people’s children rather than their own,” she said.
The document recommends “more flexible remuneration systems that allow providers to reward high-quality teaching…” that Kate describes as a “rigid adherence to an ideology, rather than a rational response to retention, reward and recruitment in the secondary teaching profession. Research shows that teachers are not that motivated by money and seek intrinsic rewards instead,” she said.
“This sort of commitment may not be readily explained by Treasury modelling of ‘homo economicus’ but it is nevertheless a reality in the teaching profession.
“It seems somewhat disingenuous for Treasury to recommend the creation of a bonus culture in the face of public outrage at the practice as it operates in the financial sector,” she said.
The report also completely missed the considerable evidence that “choice” simply empowers schools to cherry pick students, leading to polarisation of the school system along ethnic and socio-economic lines. This is likely to be contributing to what the document refers to as the “long tail of underachievement”, she said.
Kate believes a meeting with PPTA and Treasury officials could help the department to understand some of the complexities of secondary education so that its advice might more usefully contribute to lifting productivity in New Zealand.
 PPTA News December 2009
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