Paul Henderson: We don't need no thought control in the classroom

COMMENT

The Labour Party's eyes are on the next election. With a fourth week of annual leave for employees and promises on housing, health and welfare, it has signalled that it wants not three, but four, terms in power.

Labour claims that it is helping middle and lower-income families and that National, under Don Brash, will slash public-sector funding and focus on privatisation. Presenting itself as the party that cares, Labour offers a partnership between government and business in a new social contract. National, it argues, is all business and no care.

One issue that Labour is silent on is education. And it gives the lie to its mantras on partnership and care. Education is a huge issue and Labour knows it. It should be central to an election campaign. If Labour really wants the electorate to see clear differences between the centre left and the centre right, education paints the picture.

Centre-left education is state-dominated education. It has one ideological agenda. Ironically, while Labour is always harping on about diversity, it will not allow it when it comes to education.

Look at the manipulation of New Zealand schools. Ask the parents in South Canterbury or Lower Hutt how they feel about school closures. The network review being carried out by the Ministry of Education is a euphemism for shunting children out of their communities and ignoring parents. It is about demolition, redundancy and central, as opposed to local, control.

Where is the partnership and care in that? Current policy actually draws power and responsibility away from parents and communities and focuses it into the ministry.

Parents cannot close a school by voting with their feet, but on various grounds the ministry has taken on the role of executioner.

Its next target will be New Zealand's 320 integrated schools, judging by the tone of a quietly released ministry "consultative" document. It will also target independent schools.

In this, New Zealand would be mirroring Jenny Macklin, Labor's education spokeswoman in Australia. With her single-minded view on what public education should look like, she has vowed to strip such schools of funding. It is a direct assault on parents' wishes for their children. Not only that, but the money she plans to reallocate has come from parents through taxes in the first place.

What matters is the quality of education our children receive, not where they get it. But this does not figure in Labour's thinking. It is wedded to a philosophy of single provision, even if this costs a child a good education. Better an education through a local state school than a local Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist or Montessori school.

Network reviews and the redirection of funds are variations on a theme, and the theme is control.

Both take responsibility away from those at the coal-face and those who know best.

The recent submissions on Labour's plans to get hold of our integrated schools make this point. The Minister of Education wants power to close or reorganise integrated schools. Currently, he does not have it. The Private Schools Conditional Integration Act bars him from it. So the minister proposes that a sunset clause be written into the act to see its demise. Parents and principals will be ill-advised to accept this sort of partnership.

The same sort of control is evident in the curriculum and examination system. Despite the stupidity of investing in one area, we have been committed to the NCEA. Principals and schools which doubt its depth, consistency and international credibility have to run the gauntlet with the ministry and find funds from elsewhere if they want to try other curriculums and exams, such as the Baccalaureate or Cambridge.

There are also moves to make New Zealand's heavily ideological curriculums more binding on schools.

But controlling the number of schools and limiting school autonomy in funding, curriculums, exams and student numbers has not had any effect on the performance of New Zealand children. In fact, our literacy and numeracy has declined.

According to the most recent Unicef report, low-achieving pupils in Finland or Spain are about 3 years behind the average Finnish or Spanish year nine pupils. By contrast, New Zealand low achievers are about five years behind.

The gap between average and poor performance in mathematics, reading and science among New Zealand 13 to 15-year-olds is the second-worst among 20 recorded nations. It has worsened over the past 25 years.

More than one in eight of 59,000 year 10 pupils are failing to meet basic literacy and numeracy targets deemed necessary for day-to-day living. Participants were asked to subtract 4078 from 7003. Twelve per cent of Koreans got the wrong answer, compared with 42 per cent of New Zealand pupils. Only four out of 38 countries did worse.

Nor has a single-focus education system stemmed the tide of teachers leaving.

The Labour Government in Britain has just tried to bury its very own research on the subject. A report out last week shows that half of that nation's 420,000 teachers wanted to quit during the past year. They cited heavy workload (74 per cent), too much paperwork (68 per cent), the stress of teaching (66 per cent) and long working hours (60 per cent) as the main reasons.

In New Zealand, a third of the 1999 teaching graduates had left the profession within two years. It is the same the world over where Governments control everything that is going on in schooling.

Centre-left education is statist. Like the communists did with agriculture, in a collectivist approach it rationalises schools and organises the curriculum, teachers' salaries and the exam system. It will not open itself up to parents' wants for their children. It will not admit that different children have different needs - that one type of schooling is right for one child but archaic and wrong for another.

There is a chasm between centre-left and centre-right education. It is the gap between control, and freedom with responsibility.

* Paul Henderson is the senior education analyst for the Maxim Institute, a social research and policy organisation.