education

Categories under education

Doubling down on Parata disaster

Written By: - Date published: 7:14 am, January 18th, 2013 - 42 comments

Protecting the incompetent Parata is a further sign that Key’s government is well in to sclerotic middle age.

Climate Change & Poverty

Written By: - Date published: 8:04 am, January 9th, 2013 - 54 comments

The wildfires in Australia are an immediate cause for concern.  Such events will be more common as average temperatures rise.  Joseph Stigliz warns of an urgent need for structural change to respond to economic decline, climate change, poverty and inequality.

John Key’s Summer

Written By: - Date published: 8:53 am, December 22nd, 2012 - 131 comments

While John Key spends the summer in Hawaii, he will need to make some decisions about the future of his cabinet.  Parata’s future is poised in the balance, and he is looking to move Tim Groser on later next year.

NZ falling in education under Nats

Written By: - Date published: 9:20 am, December 21st, 2012 - 21 comments

The other day, David Farrar helpfully linked to an international report (here, here, and here) into achievement in education. Somehow though, he missed the part where educational achievement rose in all but one measure under Labour and then fell in each measure under National.

Parata won’t quit, Key won’t sack her

Written By: - Date published: 9:52 pm, December 19th, 2012 - 59 comments

Parata isn’t the most corrupt minister Key has but she’s definitely the most incompetent. Now, the Secretary of Education has been paid out to take the fall for Hekia’s incompetence and that of her sister, Apryll, Deputy Secretary Performance and Change. Parata has maintained her reputation for nepotism being an appalling people manager. But she won’t go, and Key won’t make her.

Longstone resignation

Written By: - Date published: 12:18 pm, December 19th, 2012 - 56 comments

Can’t say that I blame Longstone for bailing, she was working for a Minister who is clearly well out of her depth.  Another fail for Hekia Parata,  she’s the one that should be going.

 

Another Parata f*ck-up

Written By: - Date published: 7:38 am, December 12th, 2012 - 53 comments

What I like about Hekia Parata is that’s she’s proof that image doesn’t always triumph over substance. The Nats thought that as a good-looking Maori woman she ticked all their PR boxes. But, she’s been a PR disaster because she’s arrogant and ignorant. She keeps on making bad, poorly worked-through calls. And the whole government gets dragged through the muck with her.

Our polytechnics are under threat

Written By: - Date published: 11:25 am, December 5th, 2012 - 20 comments

This year the government departed with a tradition of working closely with polytechnics to establish how best to spend taxpayers’ money and instead made our public institutions compete for taxpayers’ dollars to provide foundation courses. Institutions won money if they were the most competitive in terms of price, though all successful competitors had to meet minimum quality requirements – a true market approach to pricing. So, why is this problematic?

A solution to the Novopay fiasco

Written By: - Date published: 7:44 am, November 30th, 2012 - 33 comments

I have a suggestion.

One step too far

Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, November 20th, 2012 - 20 comments

The minister for tertiary education, Stephen  Joyce, may think he’s above the law but we don’t. He has told the New Zealand Herald “he would step in to force change at Auckland University” if necessary. What change does he want to force?  He wants to determine what the university teaches. This threat shows the minister has little regard for New Zealand’s Education Act.

Too much stupid; too little time

Written By: - Date published: 8:37 am, November 15th, 2012 - 38 comments

I don’t really have time to write something, but there’s just too much stupid this morning to let it pass. Nathan Guy heads today’s list, but Craig Foss, Tariana Turia, Bill English and Hekia Parata also need mention.

Which Parata to believe?

Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, November 12th, 2012 - 15 comments

Hekia Parata September dressed up plans for school closured and mergers in high-sounding language and pushed them hard. Hekia Parata November says that some of those plans were crazy. Which Hekia Parata should we believe?

Opposition Party statements; what the MSM doesn’t report

Written By: - Date published: 8:10 am, November 10th, 2012 - 39 comments

The MSM quickly picked up a press release on the failure of the Southern Cross Cable. Others that are ignored:  Bennett has either lied or is incompetent;  Nat-linked appointment to TVNZ board; Hone’s ‘feed the kids’ Bill; Joyce’s education agenda; John Key as a “bumbling Marxist”.

A lesson for the Secretary of Education

Written By: - Date published: 11:27 am, November 2nd, 2012 - 50 comments

Buried in Audrey Young’s puff piece on Secretary of Education Lesley Longstone is an interesting insight into Longstone’s thinking on poverty and education. Longstone tries to downplay the link. Ignorance, or overt right-wing agenda?

World class education

Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, October 31st, 2012 - 34 comments

The Secretary for Education has drawn the wrong conclusions from data on educational performance, and a bunch of commentators (including a particularly egregious anonymous editorial in The Herald) have been quick to follow. We certainly have a world class education system. The fact that not every child can take advantage of it is our real failing and our shame.

Government failing on jobs, education

Written By: - Date published: 7:29 am, October 25th, 2012 - 46 comments

A TV3 poll shows that 49% to 46% of people believe National is failing to build its promised “brighter future”. The two big weaknesses: jobs and education. By nearly 2 to 1 margins, people believe that National is failing to provide full employment (it says something that this isn’t actually a National Party goal) and failing to provide the best education system possible.

Charter schools shoot themselves in both feet

Written By: - Date published: 2:03 pm, October 23rd, 2012 - 16 comments

Evidence of the supposed success of charter schools in New York is doing the rounds. Unfortunately for the right-wing ideologues, charter schools shoot themselves in both feet when they use “relaxed” assessment standards and other methods of artificially “boosting” their results.

Children of Men: money or our lives

Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, October 18th, 2012 - 28 comments

Paid Parental Leave, Charter schools, compulsory early childhood education for beneficiaries: for NAct it’s all about money, and they use ‘shonky’ figures to justify their ‘shonkey’ policies and vetos.  This is ostrich and patriarchal behaviour, ignoring the evidence of the wider benefits to communities and society of good quality child care, education and Paid Parental Leave.

Inflexible national standards labels kids failures

Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, October 16th, 2012 - 51 comments

Did you know that national standards must be completed in written form and there is no provision for extra time or oral answers from students (oops, sorry, ‘learners’ in Parata-speak) with disabilities? At high school and uni, if you have the need, you get these things. National’s stupid national standards have no such flexibility. Instead, they label you a failure.

97% of teachers are useless – right?

Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, October 6th, 2012 - 13 comments

Teachers are terrible at national standards. Almost half of them get them wrong, on one standard 97% of teachers were wrong. This is an outrage! Teachers are terrible!! Right? Am I right? Or is there an alternative hypothesis…

Parata must be giving thanks for Dotcom

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, October 4th, 2012 - 30 comments

If it weren’t for the fact that the Prime Minister is a) covering up for a corrupt, lying minister because he heads a support party and is, therefore, above accountability on Planet Key and b) being exposed as an inept and asleep at the wheel in his oversight of the nation’s spies, then Hekia Parata would be clinging on to her political career by her fingernails right now. Still, plenty of time for that.

Parata bungling inexcusable

Written By: - Date published: 9:36 am, October 3rd, 2012 - 74 comments

Parata is trying to close schools based on data that is (as even the Ministry now admits) massively incorrect. The attack on the social fabric of Christchurch was already inexcusable. This latest fiasco makes it even worse.

The Press on Standards

Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, September 26th, 2012 - 34 comments

The Christchurch Press as part of Fairfax released National Standards data, but had a number of articles with a curiously sensible line on it: “…the standards’ main effects will be to impose on schools a crude, misleading and unhelpful form of accountability and to focus attention on learning targets that are inappropriate for many children.”

National Standards Solve Nothing

Written By: - Date published: 10:42 am, September 24th, 2012 - 85 comments

Reprinted with permission from Dave Kennedy (bsprout) at Local Bodies. “While National Standards has cost around $60 million to force onto schools many programmes designed to address the causes of underachievement have been under resourced or cut altogether.”

The Right tilts at class-size windmills

Written By: - Date published: 8:48 am, September 24th, 2012 - 10 comments

The Righties are wetting themselves because the national standards supposedly show higher results in larger classes. But the data is unmoderated – you can’t compare schools to get national data. And the apparent link is down to special schools and deciles. So, what have we learned? Nothing. Certainly nothing about the impact of class sizes, anyway. But maybe a little more about the Rights’ willful blindness.

Standards slipping

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, September 22nd, 2012 - 135 comments

So the first ‘ropey’ National Standards data is slipping out. It may not bear comparison, and not be moderated or indeed standardised, but Hekia Parata can now divulge the great wisdom that National’s StandardsTM provides.

NRT: Charter schools in the UK

Written By: - Date published: 10:21 am, September 21st, 2012 - 19 comments

No Right Turn on the waste and divisiveness of charter schools in the UK.

Poverty Watch 3

Written By: - Date published: 8:55 am, September 15th, 2012 - 36 comments

Welcome to Poverty Watch, a weekly update on National’s lack of response to the urgent and growing issue of poverty in NZ.  This week: Shearer’s education speech stirs up the debate, the Greens start Champions for Children, and the Nats are in denial…

Latest education stuffup quickest U-turn ever

Written By: - Date published: 10:12 pm, September 13th, 2012 - 38 comments

Brownlee and Parata announced school closures and explained the rationale. Now they’ve backed down and they’re trying to blame a Ministry mistake. This was the quickest U-turn in the history of politics.  Update:  And this morning it seems that closures and mergers are back on again – does anyone know what is going on?

ImperatorFish: He Who Consults Wins

Written By: - Date published: 2:18 pm, September 13th, 2012 - 12 comments

Nats in denial about education and poverty

Written By: - Date published: 8:06 am, September 11th, 2012 - 57 comments

Shearer’s speech on Sunday has sparked the discussions that this country needed to have about education, about poverty, and about the sad link between them. With every statement the Nats show how deeply in denial they are about these issues.

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