There is another in the arrangement, so it is a bit crowded

Does the panel for Tomorrow’s Schools remain our only hope?

In the absence of providing his own sense of principled direction Chris Hipkins is acting through a disparate assembly of adult organisational educational needs and ideologies. Unable to see straight through to the needs of children and, of course, lacking clarity of advice, within the ministry, he is going about assembling it from his own piecemeal ideas and illogical forms of consultation.

The particular another I refer to in the heading is the weird priority Chris Hipkins is giving to making an education entente cordiale with the National Party in the form of Lockwood Smith and Nikki Kaye. Lockwood Smith, while being one of the best Parliamentary Speakers, was one of the worst ministers of education, and Nikki Kaye, while being a warm and likeable person, promised to be one of the harshest and most mean-spirited of ministers of education. An unrelenting neoliberalism drives National Party education policy and has done so ever since Merv Wellington – its leaders haven’t and never will give an inch. 

They are laughing at you Chris. 

Meeting the needs of children is being hopelessly compromised by your decision to try to  strike an education deal with National on the nature and purposes of school education. It is hard enough getting the needs of children attended to through the machinations of the various teacher organisations whose prime concern is always to meet the demands of teachers and principals without bringing Nikki Kaye on board. If children were the main concern, teacher organisations would have pressed for more teacher aide hours ahead of more pay for teacher aides, or more teacher aide hours ahead of setting up local bureaucracies to improve pay scales.

I was the only person who laid bare the reality that the official curriculum has no main for school education and now I am revealing that neither has Chris Hipkins.

Which is why he is wanting to lean to National for theirs.

When Chris Hipkins makes an effort to set out Labour’s purposes in school education he provides a mangled version of Peter Fraser’s dictum (‘… all persons, whatever their level of ability, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers’) and so on. But you see, that main aim for school education no longer cuts it. When Peter Fraser delivered that, school education was generally considered a good thing in itself, not something contestable and riven by ideology. 

Given the context of the times and the ideological state of education and the complexities of its control through academic positivism and political elitism, there can only be one main aim for progressive school education in a democracy and that is education helping children to live in a democracy and to support and protect it. The question then becomes: how can school education do that? the answer a wide democratic, humanistic one, not a narrow increasingly non-democratic, digitally futuristic one.

In seeking a cross-party education policy, Chris Hipkins is further crowding out consideration of children’s needs. National is laughing all the way to the right, displaying a slipperiness that lack of sincerity enables. No-one in National commits to their education policy being neoliberal-based because it lays bare what is truly awful to behold. Politicians of the right don’t even like their monetary policies being considered neoliberal justifying them rather as the only resort, there being no alternative, which in itself is core neoliberal thinking whether for economics or education. If reducing expenditure on public education and preparing children for a narrow capitalist future is seen as the only alternative then National’s education policies are, indeed, the only alternative. But why is Chris Hipkins buying into that? Many of us have spilt our guts out fighting and exposing the iniquities of the neoliberal pattern of education but, instead of pushing on with a progressive and democratic education system, along comes a milksop minister of education bleating about making a deal with the right, handing back what little ground we have made. For the National Party, economics and education are fused in indivisible ideology. Right-wing politicians go straight for it, almost instinctively, buttressed by a collective self-serving elitism. Labour education politicians waffle. For the Labour Party, education should be about preparing children to live in a democracy, to be able to support and protect it, not participating in a game of tiddly-winks. 

The way to make education change stick is to make it work; not to make an accommodation with what is wrong to ensure it won’t.

Chris Hipkins is near hopelessly confused in the education directions he is taking.

So Chris Hipkins gets rid of national standards which is a trend to the left but proceeds with his NCEA panel to make a mess of the education changes to secondary schools and ends up on the right. There is double trouble in that he has a panel studying Tomorrow’s Schools which is everything in education, but before it announces its findings, has a panel studying NCEA which is everything in secondary, so there is considerable overlap. This is compounded by the lack of direction provided by Chris Hipkins.

The NCEA panel comes up with a huge swing to the digital which, in the lack of balance to humanism is to the right; projects which in their general lack of cohesive knowledge and their emphasis on skills is to the right; and civics which is humanism when you are not having it, so to the right; literacy and numeracy given priority which is to the right in the sense of them being sure to be taken in a formal manner; and, to cap it off, referring again to projects, in being marked for NCEA, will not only have any residual value erased by that characteristic alone, but be both time demanding and wasting (which the panel was put there to reduce).

And, of course, nothing that can be transformational such as drama, art, music, dance, Maori or Samoan language. We can’t have them liking school.

A massive fail.

Much better if the panel for Tomorrow’s Schools, which is the senior panel, had been left to come out with its findings. 

As for the Summit bun fights and eight-person panel chaired by Andrew Becroft, that is just better put behind us. 

What Chris Hipkins should have done was recreated the Conferences held in great excitement around New Zealand in 1937. A panel of speakers should have been assembled representing where Chris Hipkins wanted education to go and, in that way, provided the sense of education direction so desperately wanted. 

The panel for Tomorrow’s Schools remains our hope. Its balance is tight but it might have just enough insight and inspiration to save Labour’s education direction and Chris Hipkins’ ministerial hide: the chair can be impatient but if in the right direction that could be an advantage; one member is switched-on and politically savvy but, nevertheless, could have depths to tap into; another could prove she is more than a one-issue person, even though that issue is a fundamental and must be acted on; another, for me, is terrific and for whom I have huge respect; and the final had an exchange of journal articles with me which were shattering in their naivety, but who, actually, I retain considerable faith in. 

This panel could do it.

Let me tell Chris Hipkins what our education future is if he fails. 

In Australia, national testing like national standards has proved to be a failure, all those years and all that money, and no movement, national standards, however, were actually worse because standards allowed mark adjustment which has left schools room to let that failure pass them by and for us now to have national standards without national standards and thereby little momentum for curriculum change. But for the neoliberal education right there is never a variation from testing children to an education standstill as a justification for even more testing. 

So, in Australia, a Mr David Gonski, an Australian businessman (remind you of anything?), in the light of the failure of national testing, was appointed to review Australian education and, amongst other changes, he has proposed dividing school learning into an enormous numbers of steps matched by an enormous number of measurement procedures – if it moves and is a child, measure it (remind you of anybody?). Yes, the ideas for those steps and measurements came from John Hattie. An academic whose research is demonstrably false but who thrives in the educationally shameful environment that prevails.

Chris Hipkins failed to communicate a sense of direness; to inspire; to give a sense of direction in policy ideals. Given the broken state of New Zealand education it was the most abysmally lacking political election performance possible to imagine. No exaggeration for extra political effect was required, but he failed to get his chin anywhere near the bar because, it seems, his head was awhirl with thoughts of an arrangement with National. He floated in on the momentum of the sustained protest efforts from amongst a smallish number of principals and teachers and the obviousness of the education failure that lay about him, and he failed the children and us. Chris Hipkins, get your ass into gear and, working to the main aim suggested, transform the education system. Though I have described a situation of near education hopelessness, if it was entirely hopeless I wouldn’t have bothered if I didn’t think there a chance you could actually do something, even though only a bolter’s.

Cross your fingers that the panel for Tomorrow’s Schools comes up with a comprehensive and progressive plan starting with teacher training being returned to the profession, and suggesting a permanent advisory committee housed between your office and the secretary’s.

We need someone to beat the drum for children. 

Perhaps, reading Gunter Grass could become a compulsory text at the new teachers colleges.