National’s Anne Tolley, our education minister who thought that taking a ‘helicopter view’ of something meant taking a ride in a chopper, is cutting education resources so we can have an additional measure of how well kids are learning.
$10 million is being taken out of extra support for Science, PE, and art teaching in primary schools to fund National’s gimmicky National Standards.
So, National is going to take away funding for education of children in science, a vital area for our economic development, to pay for another layer of assessment.
It’s not that the educators are automatically against this, if Tolley could show evidence that spending this money on National Standards rather than on teaching kids was going to lead to better educational outcomes, they would be all for it. But she can’t:
“[At the New Zealand Principals’ Conference] she was asked to provide the research and she hasn’t fronted up yet”
Ridiculously, Tolley suggests that these cuts may be substituted for other cuts next year. Is she actually this stupid? Does she think that thousands of experts funded by this money to will just sit around, waiting and hoping that the money to employ them will reappear next year? What idiocy.
As the the Primary Principal Association reps explain, you can’t go chopping and changing every year. You’ve got to actually plan.
This is just another example of how this government’s gimmicky, headline-grabbing policies turn out to be wasteful and useless in practice.
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