Dialogue: Oh, please keep these teachers out of schools

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Read the following and tell me this country doesn't need a Language Review Office: "Staff have considerably improved their understanding of the links between curriculum objectives and expected learning outcomes. This has been accompanied by comprehensive evaluations of how well planning intentions are being achieved in teaching programmes. In some classrooms, achievement information provides a base for future programme planning. This practice could be adopted by all staff to ensure that all teaching programmes meet student's identified needs in each essential learning area at all levels."

This is from a 15-page Education Review Office report on a predominantly Maori country school. It is a vague, rambling, jargon-ridden and consequently meaningless document.

Take the paragraph that follows the one above: "Where appropriate, staff could consider differentiating curriculum objectives and learning outcomes over more than one curriculum level. Given the wide range of ability and needs of students within each class, it is important to recognise that not all students will necessarily be working at the same curriculum level in each essential leaning area. More consistent differentiation of learning objectives would help teachers to refine their teaching programmes to meet the diverse needs of students in each class."

And then: "Curriculum leaders are developing achievement criteria to monitor student progress. The sharing of perspectives by teachers at each level of the school is resulting in much more thoughtful and better coordinated progressions of learning for students. This should ultimately culminate in more detailed and accurate reporting to parents."

Apostrophes are misused, and the writing is riddled with unexplained "outcomes," "curriculum objectives," "barriers to learning," "achievement benchmarks," "academic pathways" and other jargon. Imagine you are the board chairman or the head teacher of a country school and you receive a report written in this style to help you to help your students do better.

Some brief sections are brisk and coherent, which suggests more than one author, so it should be possible to weed out the staff with language problems and give them jobs for which they are better suited, preferably outside education.

An intelligent head teacher would get little guidance from reading this document and would have nothing but contempt for the intellect of those who wrote and distributed it. Yet it is produced by people who have enormous power over the careers of those teachers.

This document is a disgrace. A language commissioner would hopefully be empowered to call a meeting of the ERO staff, weed out the culprits, help them with their literacy problems and ban them from going within a 10km radius of any school or talking to any pupils at primary or secondary level until they have been retrained.

Something seems as wrong with the school system as with the health system, except that people don't die they just fade away. Drop out. Does the devolution of the control of schools into separate units under the brooding, occluded eye of the ERO make sense in a country with a population smaller than many cities in other countries? I suppose there's no fuss because schools in the middle-class areas are probably doing okay, so who cares about the rest.

Are there educational wastelands out there as bleak as the health desert in Gisborne? Because only hope dies in inadequate schools, we'll probably never know. But this ERO report suggests education in New Zealand needs a serious appraisal by people not locked into the present system.

The Government's move towards publicly elected health boards is the result of such a rethink, even though it drew the hilarious comment from Wyatt Screech that it was an ideological shift. It seems to have escaped him that the changes are a bid to escape from the failure of a health system that is the pure ideological construct of economic rationalists.

Last week, making a plea for the development of our heritage sites for both cultural and economic reasons, I said trenches and dugouts at Kawiti's Ruapekapeka Pa were the first known to be used in warfare. After a number of letters and telephone calls, I stand corrected. This, of course, doesn't demean the extraordinary ingenuity and energy of Kawiti and his warriors, nor diminish the case for a heritage commission to develop cultural sites.

I acknowledge the error because I know from historical research I've done over the years how often incorrect information gets a respected life of its own through people who work only from secondary sources.

Interesting, though, is how people react when you make a mistake. Some take the "Gotcha!" approach, delighting in their possession of a piece of knowledge and revelling in your discomfort. I can happily say that most of those who have contacted me have been motivated by a desire to politely discuss and inform. I thank them.