Ministry turns to corporate agenda

A new report by US management consultants McKinsey and Co is being cherry-picked by the Ministry of Education to promote a corporate agenda for New Zealand’s public education system. Jane Blaikie reports

Everyone’s talking about it on the education beltway – this slick report entitled How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better. And there’s no doubt it is information rich.
Based on the experiences of 20 school systems that have experienced “significant” gains, and interviews with 200 system leaders and their staff, McKinsey and Co describe an evolutionary path that it says school systems typically follow from “poor” to “excellent”.
It then names six drivers of improvement that can crank a system through the stages. These are:
-    revising curriculums and standards
-    ensuring an appropriate reward and remunerations structure for teachers and principals
-    building the technical skills of teachers and principals
-    assessing students
-    establishing data systems
-    facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws.
And what’s wrong with these you might ask, given that the New Zealand system currently has used variations of these for years.
Well, here’s the rub – McKinsey and Co use their own scale, “The Universal Scale”, to rank school systems and the New Zealand system doesn’t come out of it too well. We rate at the top end of ‘fair’, a long way from Finland – the only country to make it to “excellent” – although like Finland, New Zealand ranks at the very top on the OECD’s PISA tables of educational achievement.
“McKinsey’s scale overlooks the unique characteristics of the New Zealand system,” says Fairburn Primary principal and NZEI past president Frances Nelson.
“We are a high performing system but at primary level in New Zealand we don’t go for pen-and-paper rote learning and testing, because our students are learning how to think, not to regurgitate – and that’s why we do so well in PISA.
“With Te Whariki and the New Zealand Curriculum, we teach in ways that are developmentally and educationally right for students.”
But in many ways the problem with McKinsey’s scale is a red herring. The report also highlights three things that are crucial to education reform:
-    that regardless of who is driving reform (a new government or an inspirational educational leader), they must take stakeholders with them
-    -the reforms must be contextualized to the local setting
-    there must be “central buffer”, such as education departments, that mediates between schools and the entity driving the reforms.
“Unfortunately the government has overlooked these basic steps,” says Frances.
What’s more, Education Minister Anne Tolley and ministry officials are being reported by educators as espousing the details in the report that favour testing regimes and performance pay – at the same time as overlooking other details which emphasize greater respect for teaching professionals and more individualized learning, which the report acknowledges is hampered by testing regimes.
“McKinsey’s report advocates an off-the-shelf supermarket fix for 86 percent of the New Zealand sector that doesn’t need fixing,” says Frances.
“The ministry is saying there’s a crisis around the tail of underachievement – and applying that to everyone. They are designing interventions that are potentially destructive to high performing schools.”


What tail was that?
The latest PISA results show that New Zealand students’ tail of underachievement is low by international standards.
14% of New Zealand students are low performers in reading – OECD average 19% (Australia – 14%, Finland – 8%, Canada – 10%).
15% of New Zealand students are low performers in mathematics – OECD average 22% (Australia – 16%, Finland – 8%, Canada – 11%).
13% of New Zealand students are low performers in science– OECD average 18% (Australia – 13%, Finland – 6%, Canada – 10%).
The Education Minister’s much-repeated phrase “one in five students are failing” refers to the number of New Zealand students who do not complete NCEA level 2. A one-in-five fail rate at this level is actually low by international standards, and many developed countries would regard a one-in-five fail rate as something to be pleased about.

Poster girl unmasked
Michelle Rhee, the poster girl of the far right’s education reform movement in the US, has been exposed as having fudged her own results when it comes to reporting the achievement gains of her students.
Based on the astonishing results that she claimed for herself, Michelle was appointed as schools chancellor for Washington DC where she made a great show of sacking “bad” teachers and advocating for charter schools (private schools, run for profit, and funded by public money).
Michelle’s true teaching results – not particularly impressive, as opposed to the claim she moved most of her students from the 13th to 90th percentile on standardized tests – were unearthed by a retired maths teacher, Guy Brandenburg, who dug through old school records to calculate the actual scores. His findings were widely reported in the US media, particularly The Washington Post.
Michelle features in the pro-privatisation documentary, Waiting for Superman, which was shown at film festivals around New Zealand in April. She is also nicknamed the Bee Eater because she once killed and ate a bee while teaching. Oh, and then there’s the incident where she taped shut the mouths of rowdy children with masking tape.
Education Minister Anne Tolley met with Michelle in 2009.


A vision of quality education
Expect to hear more soon on NZEI’s Vision for Quality Public Education. It’s based on every child’s right to:
-    attend a quality local school or early childhood centre
-    quality learning opportunities
-    quality teaching and support
Regardless of their socio-economic circumstances.


The American way
“Value-added modeling” is increasingly being used in the US to rate, rank and even fire teachers – despite the data being flawed and unreliable. For a PowerPoint explanation of VAM by NZEI’s national secretary Paul Goulter, visit www.educationaotearoa.org.nz.


Key points
-    The government has failed on the basics when it comes to introducing education reforms in New Zealand.
-    National Standards and performance pay will not move our system forward.
-    National Standards may prove destructive to high-performing schools.