Steven Joyce: School shake-up needed for the sake of our kids

The problems in school education run much deeper than the pandemic, says Steven Joyce. Photo / NZME

OPINION:

Amidst all the political dramas of the last couple of weeks, one of the most consequential announcements has not garnered the level of public attention it deserves. This was the government's decision to lower the bar for NCEA achievement in our schools for the third year running.

Blaming low school attendance, and not just as a result of Covid, government agencies have decided to make NCEA easier to achieve once again. So much easier that, as one senior principal has already pointed out, many 16- and 17-year-old students will have already achieved the new low requirements for this year's NCEA pass. Students who have attended most of the first half of the year are effectively being incentivised to take the rest of the year off.

Lowering the bar is a natural response if you want to paper over the cracks rather than fix the actual problem, a combination of low school attendance and acres of missed learning as a result of Covid lockdowns. Rather than the inconvenience of mobilising a full-court press to help those who have been missing out, we are to maintain a façade that these students have been as well-educated as those from pre-Covid years. This is a short-term decision which will have lifelong impacts.

In many countries the government has spent big money on catch-up learning. They have arranged extra days of schooling, or vouchers for private tuition to help students learn what they need to learn before they leave school. But not here and certainly not at the scale that will make a difference. Our solution is to accept a lower standard of education for another cohort of school leavers without firing a shot, while wasting bucketloads of money on frankly less important issues than our children's education.

Our kids have had a raw deal from this pandemic. Many have given up their start in life to protect their elders from this pernicious disease. While some of that was unavoidable, especially early on, the lockdown that really sucked the life and happiness out of Auckland teenagers was the one that started this time last year and ran for five months. That lockdown was caused by the governments "world-leading" vaccine rollout and it should never have happened.

Someone needs to research how much the vaccine lockdown of 2021 scarred this generation. I suspect the low levels of school attendance this year and the current wave of youth violence can be directly traced to that period.

The problems in school education of course run much deeper than the pandemic. We have been witnessing a steady decline in literacy and numeracy amongst our young people for many years, and nothing tried so far has managed to halt it. Our relative performance on international tests in language, maths and science is turning from a steady decline into a nosedive, and the number of young people not regularly attending school is becoming a sad national joke.

When you lay the current issues over the top of a general decline in performance and school attendance, you have to ask whether our school system is completely broken? I fear it is.

We have a very top-down school sector largely created to serve the people that operate within it. An overbearing Ministry of Education offers detailed guidelines on everything from how you teach to how schools should refer to "people who have periods". The education unions have a tight grip on anything which happens in the government-operated part of the system which is most of it, and in their collective mind should be all of it. The vindictive, nasty approach the unions took to killing off partnership schools was a sight to behold.

The unions hate independent testing of students lest poor (or indeed excellent) teaching be exposed, and are allergic to principal's paying individual teachers what they are worth. Woe betide an education minister who doesn't genuflect before the twin powers of the NZEI and the PPTA.

Centralisation and control is the solution to everything. The education bureaucracy hates competition between schools, hates parental choice, and hates innovation, unless it's being driven by the centre and pre-ordained by the mandarins as the solution to all our problems.

This week the president of the tertiary education union lauded the government's mega-polytechnic reforms because there was previously "too much competition" in the vocational education sector. It's true. Skills training was one of the few parts of our system where genuine contestability, innovation, and a customer focus was officially encouraged. It had to be snuffed out.

Philosophical debates must only be had by appropriately credentialed insiders, and then everyone must march together towards the latest silver bullet, be it modern learning environments, the fad for junior and senior high schools, or the latest prescription for the history syllabus.

I sighed this week when reading about yet another debate between advocates of 'phonics', "phonemic awareness" and "balanced literacy". What happened to the idea of letting good teachers teach the approach that works for each student, and measure that with independent testing of the outcomes. It works in every aspect of life, but not in education apparently.

This cult of standardisation, commoditisation and monopoly provision of education services must end. If it was going to achieve great results for our kids it would have done so by now.

We need to encourage competition, choice, and innovation in our school system, not snuff it out. We need to celebrate excellent teaching and encourage it with better pay. We need to give lower-income parents similar choices for their kid's education that wealthy parents get. We need to experiment with new models, give schools more autonomy, and re-orient the bureaucracy to focus on results and outcomes rather than prescriptive minutiae. And yes, we need to invest more.

Taking on the challenge of genuine improvement in our school system is not for the faint-hearted. It will be a bumpy ride and the public will need to be prepared, as the vested interests so feather-bedded by our current system will feel very threatened.

It's not something this current government will achieve. Long ago captured by the teacher unions, they have been exposed in recent days as nothing more than a political machine motivated solely by self-preservation.

But it needs to be done. We need new ideas and new ways of doing things. The future of our kids and our country is way too important to accept the steady decline in our education performance. We can't keep lowering the bar and pretending everything is okay.

- Steven Joyce is a former National Minister of Finance. He is director at Joyce Advisory.