More breathless reporting from the MSM

Hard not to despair at the breathless reporting by the MSM of the govt’s education reforms.

John Armstrong in the NZ Herald was at it yesterday, repeating the spin that charter schools will increase competition between schools and lift student achievement.

Let's be clear: no education system in the world has lifted student achievement by way of charter schools. All systems that have them perform worse than ours and are flat-lining or in decline. Charter schools are about the privatisation of public education - that is the main driver.

New Zealand's success is due in large part to the system’s “learning how to learn” focus. We don’t rote learn, and until last year we didn’t rote test.

That’s all changed now, and league tables of primary schools are likely to appear this year based on National Standards.

These standards will become ever more high-stakes, given National’s election promises to “incentivise” schools and teachers accordingly. Charter schools will increase the emphasis on the spurious results of high-stakes testing.

Yet there’s scarcely a journalist in the mainstream media who gets the radical change that’s occurred, or its implications.

Take for example the DomPost, which a couple fo weeks ago recorded verbatim the comments of a New Zealand family who’d emigrated to Australia. The education system over there was so much better than ours, raved the mum. Their 12 year-old-son, who’d struggled at school in New Zealand, had really thrived in Australia, and after a year had been offered an academic scholarship.

Yeah right.

The problem is that good teaching and learning is about a little bit of struggle. Being groomed to pass standardized, national tests – as they now do in Australia – is actually not a good education. It might make the parents feel good (and it might fool reporters – look at all those numbers!) but it only gives a very superficial idea of how well a child is actually doing.

Back on planet earth, there’s enough good research to show that doing well on standardized tests is not a good indicator of success in later life (think Daniel Pink). High-stakes testing tends to produce “fragile” learners who stumble at the first hurdle.

Self-management, creativity, co-operation, enthusiasm, learning-how-to-learn – are all much more solid skills for a child to acquire. It’s not the outcome, it’s the process – it’s how Finland, which leads the world in education, runs its education system, and it’s what we have been doing so well.

My pick would be that the 12-year-old boy discussed in the DomPost took a year to work out the Australian system, and then aced it – using the skills he’d learnt in New Zealand. The academic scholarship has no doubt come from some sort of private school that is cherry-picking students to boost its own rankings.

We’ll see this happening too in New Zealand, when charter schools become established here. John Key tried to play down the significance of the charter school announcement before Christmas – it’ll only be one or two, don’t worry about it – but that was the tone he took with National Standards.
New Zealanders deserve better from their politicians – and from their journalists. It’s called democracy.