Trevett on Tolley
November 4th, 2009 at 7:39 am by David FarrarIn their third feature in a series, Claire Trevett rates Anne Tolley’s first year in the job:
Anne Tolley was reportedly given the job of National’s education spokeswoman because of her reputation as the party’s whip of having an iron hand in a velvet glove.
Party leaders John Key and Bill English believed her tough approach would serve her well against the infamously lippy and powerful teacher unions.
Personally I would recommend deploying 245-T against the teacher unions 
Her decision to target adult night courses as one area for cuts is understandable and should have been easier to “sell” – deeper cuts to education for young people would be even more unpalatable.
But it attracted far more opprobrium than it should have. It drew a petition with more than 50,000 signatures, and National sources say backbench electorate MPs were besieged to such an extent that a caucus revolt was narrowly averted.
She underestimated the public reaction to it and erred in understating the impact by saying it would affect only “hobby” courses such as Moroccan cooking and belly dancing.
My view remains that the true scandal is that we were subsidising so many of these courses at all. I think National could have been ore aggressive on this issue, and painted Labour’s defence of them as a case of being out of touch.
Labour MPs have gained a grudging respect for other ministers they initially targeted, such as Paula Bennett. They remain disparaging about Mrs Tolley. Former education minister Trevor Mallard is now the Opposition’s education spokesman.
Although he can be merciless, his attacks have made little impact as yet partly because he is distracted by his other duties.
If he put the unremitting focus on education that Bill English did when he was made education spokesman after being ousted as National’s leader in 2003, Mallard could make mincemeat of Tolley.
There is a difference. Mallard’s attacks on Tolley are quite personal. English’s blitz on Education was focused on standards and outcomes.
As it is, Mrs Tolley is showing signs of improvement. Until recently, she was reluctant to return media calls on even uncontroversial matters. This was astonishing for a front bench minister in charge of such a fundamental portfolio.
I find if you don’t call the media back, it rarely helps you.
National’s current policy does not propose any major reforms of the types that invoked widespread outrage in the 1990s. But Mrs Tolley is struggling against the unions to bring in even those smaller scale changes for which it has a broad public mandate.
My biggest criticism in Education is of the policy, not the Minister. I think wider ranging reforms are needed. I want performance pay, standard funding etc.
Related posts:
- Hartevelt on Tolley
- A battle too important to concede
- NZEI says Tolley should have attended US conference, not dealt with earthquake
- Tolley terminates food police
November 4th, 2009 at 7:52 am
I know that they’ve thought around this, but I want it now: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html. I have a sister who visits Massachusets regularly and she has commented on the effectiveness of this program, basically summarised as ‘teaching kids stuff rather than learning skills’.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 8:07 am
DPF said: Personally I would recommend deploying 245-T against the teacher unions
Thats a sledgehammer approach DPF, I suggest lithium in coffee supplies to the MoE and teachers lounges.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 8:19 am
“I think wider ranging reforms are needed. I want performance pay, standard funding etc.”
Tolley is in for one of the biggest fights in politics if she is going to effect changes to the education system beyond mere tweeking. The education politburo and the teachers unions are two of the most intransigent organizations in this country. They’ll not give up on decades of dedication to their failed progressive ideas without a fight.
Tolley probably has the balls to do it. Her boss ? No.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 8:31 am
.My biggest criticism in Education is of the policy, not the Minister. I think wider ranging reforms are needed. I want performance pay, standard funding etc.
And who engages in policy and reform?
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 8:45 am
I agree with you David about performance pay and standard funding; I would also pour more money into assisting clever students and cut funding (which, logically, is ultimately a waste of money) for retarded children.
http://www.nightcitytrader.blogspot.com
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 8:49 am
“My biggest criticism in Education is of the policy, not the Minister. I think wider ranging reforms are needed. I want performance pay, standard funding etc.”
DPF – performance pay? standard (bulk?) funding? – as far as PPTA and NZEI are concerned, hell will freeze over first.
[DPF: I call it standard funding, for it is how the rest of society functions. Here is your funding - you decide how to spend it]
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:03 am
@Elijah, you have a distorted view of value if you think that funding the education of children with additional mental and physical needs being uneconomical means that we should not do it.
Performance pay and standard funding are terrible ideas – and you must know it by now dpf, surely! Education is a right, not a privilege, and as you must be aware performance and standard funding only divert teachers’ attention away from children with the most needs towards the middle 60%, and reduce the amount of attention teachers give to the top 20% of students who they imagine will pass the standards anyway. Bad, bad idea.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:04 am
“Tolley probably has the balls to do it. Her boss ? No.”
…and neither do the rest of the spineless wimps. Education is the jewel in the crown of socialism. Mallard and the rest love interfering with children’s minds. They lie awake at night dreaming of ways to convert education into an immersion in left wing politics.
Tolley needs much more support, but she’s unlikely to get it from a bunch of Progressive weasels without the ability to articulate any argument in opposition to the standard leftist position.
Too long have these weak inarticulate devoid of ideas compromisers posed as a group who oppose Labour. They’re no opposition and offer no real solutions.
We need a clean out of the National Party here the way the Republican Party in the US is being cleaned out.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Forgive me, Itsallapriori, I forgot about the vast numbers of Scientists and Engineers with Downs Syndrome….
http://www.nightcitytrader.blogspot.com
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:11 am
” Education is a right, not a privilege, ”
You have no right to steal my money to educate your children, especially when that education is a farcical non performing charade where children are unknowingly saturated with left wing ideology at the expense of their education.
‘No child left behind’= ‘Every child held back to the same level as the most stupid.’
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:16 am
‘No child left behind’= ‘Every child held back to the same level as the most stupid.’
Yeah, the double whammy outcome:
Illiterate drones or literate drones subliminally mindfucked by progressivism.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:19 am
RB
I know this is off topic but I’m not so sure that the GOP is being cleaned out but rather that they are in paralysis mode as there is no difference between them and Democrats in the eys of the majority at present.
What is going on in the US is in spite of them not with them yet as they still control the purse strings, when the money moves to Palin et al then we’ll see change in the GOP to protect their funding.
Let’s hope Palin et al can build the little people and hidden trusts funding OB1 did so well for the next election, hell I’d send them a donation if I could.
One parallell is the stranglehold the NEA has on US education is the same as our unions have here, maybe it’s all part of the same game plan
Tolley has got her work cut out and I think the dealbreaker Mr Key isn’t up to it either. He’s a man of compromise not principle.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:28 am
The indoctrination of children with politically motivated “green” propaganda is another heinous crime. Hitler and Goebbels with their damn Hitler Jugen had nothing on these damn socialists/ watermelons running education in NZ today. Pure evil.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:33 am
LOL @ comments about “indoctrinating” children with left-wing politics. I was involved in a discussion recently about teachers feeling afraid to even mention politics, the economy, or society at all, because of the fear of being met with backlash from right-wing “parents”. Panopticism, if you ask me, you’re doing it well.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Exactly, Redbaiter. I’m sick of the left perverting the concept of a “right”. No-one has a right to be given anything, because time/resources/money must necessarily taken away from someone else to pay for it. The only true rights are those that take nothing away from anyone else to have e.g. liberty.
Education may be something that has an external benefit beyond the benefit to person receiving it, and so society may wish to input some contribution proportional to that benefit but there’s no individual right that mandates society do anything.
On this note: “Social justice” is also a perversion of the term “justice”. Justice is blind, and treats all equally. “Social justice” intends to treat people differently based on who they are with a view to redistributing between them.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:41 am
itsallapriori – The parents only seem right-wing to the many teachers because they’re so far left! “Parents” are much closer to a random sample than “teachers”. The former are at least a reasonable cross-section of a community, whereas the latter self-select into the profession and are immersed in it thereafter (via training, union membership, and the large amount of time spent with like-minded colleagues).
In short, it is highly unlikely (no matter exactly where each group sits on the spectrum) that parents are not closer than teachers to the mean. Consequently, parents cannot be the extremist group and if teachers say they are “right-wing” it means that teachers must be closer to the extreme on the left.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:41 am
@Camryn “Because time/resources/money must necessarily taken away from someone else to pay for it.”
You do realize that property ownership, in any form, in a finite world, equates to the literal removal of property from every other person? Your libertarianism is internally contradictory. Furthermore, why should the property-less majority put up with you owning property at their expense? When we have no freedom, no access to education and meaningful opportunity within the world of property ownership, why wouldn’t just take it from you? Like seriously, why would we not go into civil war?
Socialism is a gift to the libertarians. You either get that or revolution.
Not to sound like a loonie, but seriously – if you don’t appease us within the capitalist system, then we have no reason not to overthrow it. I mean, why would we just take it?
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:45 am
“if you don’t appease us within the capitalist system, then we have no reason not to overthrow it. I mean, why would we just take it?”
Evil is among us. Here speaks the voice of the communist murderer. This is the thinking that led to over 100 million deaths last century. ‘If you do not give us what is yours, we will use force to take it from you.’
Tell you what you example of human filth. why don’t you do your damn best one day??
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:49 am
“because of the fear of being met with backlash from right-wing “parents”.”
You don’t have a clue what’s about to befall you buddy. You ain’t seen nothing yet. You think parents in NZ are “right wing” today, wait till they wake up. Wait till they fully understand what you and your ilk are doing. Then you’ll see some “right wing” parents, and then you’ll really have something to fear.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Well obviously that’s not my preference! Hahaha.
I was just pointing out the notion that socialism is in your best interest.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am
“Hahaha.”
Crawl away reptile.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Itsallapriori you are talking nonsense – appease poor people or they will rise up and steal what you have.
That is blackmail by people who are too stupid and scared to go out and make something of their lives and are motivated by envy of more successful people.
In the good old days poor people knew their place, respected their ‘betters’, doffed their cloth caps and life went out quite well for everybody…. until left wing intellectuals encouraged envy and revolution.
http://www.nightcitytrader.blogspot.com
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Property isn’t just physical property, it’s all forms of resources including one’s own labour and initiative. A huge advantage of respecting property rights is that it gives us all reasonable certainty that we will be able to keep the fruits of our labours and inventiveness and hence an incentive to deploy them. Look at the countries that have tried socialism and see how they’ve stagnated, whereas those that have protected property rights have surged ahead and brought massive increases in wealth to even their poor such that poverty in these countries is now more relative than absolute.
It is only the intense jealously of the *relatively* poor that threatens to derail progress for all, and the solution is to prove the fallacy of the beliefs on which their jealousy is based (such as “resources are limited”, “the success of some must always be at the expense of others” and other lies) rather than to pander to it.
It is leftism that is contradictory: you claim to hold the value that we’re all equal above all else, but you must believe (deep down) that we’re inherently unequal and many of us are unable to succeed or you wouldn’t pursue with such blind passion various failed systems that attempt to force the outcome instead of giving everyone the chance and incentive to chart their own course and succeed on their own merits.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 10:13 am
“Itsallapriori you are talking nonsense”
See. That’s why you have been losing for so many decades.
He’s not talking “nonsense’. He is talking pure evil.
Call it what it is.
Do not participate in the deceit that these ideas deserve the same consideration as ideas that are uplifting to the human spirit and condition.
This person is evil and his ideas are evil, and he must be confronted with this truth, not appeased with mild admonishment as if his evil is just some minor misdemeanor, like a child might steal from a cookie jar.
This person and his thinking is a political clone of some of the most evil persons in the history of civilisation. Call him what he is.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Where are the demerits for Itsalla apriori, who with his advocacy of violence and mass murder, has written some of the most offensive posts I have ever read on Kiwiblog??
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 10:41 am
The MoE and the teachers unions are impediments to progress. The socialists dogma that pervades T-Coll needs to be exorcised from the New Zealand education system.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Its time the teachers were taught a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry. The have been pushing their socialist dogma for years and polluting the minds of our children while feathering their own nests for far to long. If they can’t be sorted out now when the Government is so far ahead in the polls then they never will be. I suggest the Ronald Reagan solution.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan%27s_ultimatum_to_striking_air_traffic_controllers
and
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5604656
Note it took 12 years before any of the strikers were rehired!
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 11:32 am
There are some seriously warped people inhabiting this thread. Education should be results driven, not subject to the ever changing whims of ideology. Results are able to be, and in fact actually are, objectively verified rather than relying on narrow anecdotal evidence as the major criteria of success.
New Zealand’s results are up there with the best, problem areas identified and are the subject of work-in-progress even as the loonies here spew their garbage. The best thing you loonies could do is pay your taxes and encourage the government to reduce or eliminate child poverty. I suspect the reason for lack of commitment to this goal is just good old fashioned racism, but that’s just my opinion, anecdotally based, of course
And the silliest item on the morning news was Tony Ryall saying that boards of trustees should determine the content of school cafeterias and diminished the topic with a sound bite about custard tarts (and let’s ignore the fact that these horrendous concoctions are highly likely to send one to the dunny real quick!).
There are many ways in which our food is subject to state prescription. An obvious one is hygiene regs, but we have additives in all sorts of stuff these days, even in toothpaste, at the behest of the government.
To hive that responsibility off to under-resourced school boards is reprehensible. Aside from making a positive contribution to the health of our children (although one could be forgiven that given the proportion here who delight in hitting their kids, that’s not important) teachers report that kids return form a break no longer jumping out of their skins from sugar and other substances hidden in the junk food. Believe it or not, it helps the kids to learn and this is more important than whacko ideologies.
I’m encouraging teachers to boycott Tolley’s ignorant standards and to concentrate instead on providing hard evidence to back their viewpoints. Much evidence is accessible and it should be communicated to the public effectively.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
“if you don’t appease us within the capitalist system, then we have no reason not to overthrow it. I mean, why would we just take it?”
Because you’re incapable of doing so.
Don’t you think the do-ers of this world would have the better guns, and the ability to use them well?
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Tolly is a fail. That article gave her more credit in its limited scathering than she deserved. She is one of National’s worst performing ministers. Not only did she manage to piss of the teachers union, which is almost expected under National, she pissed of the principals as well, traditional National support.
At tertiary level she has refused interviews by all student magazines, ignoring the media.
She is incompetant. Her hardest policy sell to date is abolishion of night time courses, whilst I strongly disagree with this I would hardly sell its the hardest sell when you compare it to some of the others.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I have only seen her on Q&A but I considered her very competent indeed and that was the general view of the panel. Still she obviously didn’t share the agenda of the previous Government resulting in the displeasure of LUC and JEFF.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
If I was Anne Tolley I wouldn’t listen to the teachers union – instead I would listen to the parents!
And I think the ACE funding for every available course is plain stupid. Over the years I’ve done courses in ballroom dancing and photography – which I never realised were subsidised until Anne Tolley cut the funding. If they weren’t available through the ACE scheme I might have (shock horror) gone to the private sector providers of these same courses.
Vote:November 4th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Well put Michael – why listen to the people who actually do the work and the sector experts when we all know parents know everything there is to know about everything, including how to thrash a kid to within an inch of his life to do him/her a favour?
Vote: