Kiwiblog

The Press reports:

Schoolchildren will be asked to help fill the roles of Christchurch support staff facing job losses, a support staff worker says. …

“In one case, a librarian has lost her job, a part-time position will be created and that person will be assisted in the library by students,” she said. “Our students go to school to learn and receive a quality education, not to work in the library because there is not enough funding in the school to provide a librarian.”

Well at my secondary school, several dozen students helped out in the school library. Far from stopping us from receiving a quality education, it enhances our education. You got to learn more about how the library worked, got to read more books and also a degree of responsibility.

Being a good geek, I ended up Head Librarian in my final year. We had a gap of several months between staff librarians, so us students ran the library for an extended period of time. It was a great experience in learning adult responsibility.

Amanda Fisher at Stuff reports:

After huge community pressure, including a hikoi to Parliament, the education minister has partly backtracked on proposed mergers of schools.

In May, Anne Tolley announced her decision to merge three Kawerau primary schools into one, close Kawerau Intermediate and turn Kawerau South School into a year 1 to year 8 primary school.

That was despite four of six schools opting for a different outcome, and a petition signed by 70 per cent of the town’s adults. About 250 people joined a May hikoi from Kawerau to Wellington.

However, Mrs Tolley announced yesterday that a Maori immersion kura, going up to year 8, would be established on the current Kawerau North School site. She has delayed deciding the fate of the intermediate, which could be merged with Kawerau College, saying any changes would not take effect before 2013.

However, the three intermediates – Kawerau North, Kawerau Central and Putauaki primary schools – would still merge.

I think it is regrettable that our funding model means that the Minister is the person who has to decide which schools are viable, and which ones are not.

Ideally schools should be fully delegated their funding – property, salaries, IT, operations etc. And parents and students should be able to choose which school they wish to attend, with funding following them.

That way, then the Minister would not have to decide on school mergers. If a school can attract enough students to remain viable, then good on them. If their roll shrinks to the point they can not cover their costs, then they close.

A friend of mine has their kids at St Marks (which by coincidence was my intermediate school) but it has got too expensive for him as fees have gone up 25%.

They live in the Hutt but are happy to move to the right suburb to get into the right school.

Any readers out there have any recommendations or experiences with primary schools in Wellington. if so, please share them in the comments.

Trevor Mallard blogs:

Anne Tolley will announce a progressive introduction of bulk funding for schools starting soon with the staffing component for guidance and careers counsellors being abolished and a small increase going into the bulk operations grant.

Now it comes from Trevor, so it is hardly reliable, but we can all keep our fingers crossed that it is actually true.

Bulk funding is in fact how almost every other part of society operates.

Hospitals don’t have their staff paid out of one budget on a fixed scale, and an operations grant for everything else.

Universities don’t have their staff paid out of one budget, and an ops grant for everything else.

It is pretty much only in the school sector that you have this abnormal arrangement.

The Dom Post reports:

Education Minister Anne Tolley unveiled plans at the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) national conference in Wellington yesterday to put 12,000 parents of disruptive kids through parenting courses and give 5000 teachers from low-income areas extra training to deal with violence.

PPTA president Kate Gainsford said the plan was “a step in the right direction” but was not enough to help secondary teachers already dealing with disturbed and violent students.

“It’s a great idea, we won’t see the results for another decade, and that’s just too late,” she said.

Hmmn, who has been in Government for the last decade? Is the PPTA saying Labour should have done this in their first year of office, rather than leave it to National to come up with solutions in their first year of office?

“It needs to be supplemented at the adolescent level now.”

That would be nice, and it is tough for teachers with disruptive adolescents. But in an era of limited funding, the targeting of the scheme at kids when they are much younger will have the most impact in the long term.

A stinging editorial:

At least one school head has outrageously threatened publicly to undermine the education policies that contributed to National’s election win last year it promised to set literacy and numeracy standards for primary-school kids, and make the results available to parents.

Teachers, afraid that, because such results will be subject to the Official Information Act, the public will be able compile “league tables” that show how each school compares with its fellows, pretend theirs is principled opposition. Rubbish. Their objections are political this Government is not stuffed with former teachers and university lecturers and visceral. …

They fear any weaknesses will be exposed and that parents, some of them able to see for the first time that the empress in front of the class is naked, will opt to send their littlies to a school that does better. …

Though inspirational teachers are integral to the process, at the heart of public education should be the six to 16-year-olds for whom it is compulsory.

And regrettably often, these kids are let down. Last year, research showed that 90 per cent of prisoners are “functionally illiterate” their reading and writing skills are inadequate to cope with the demands of daily life.

Yet most of these inmates passed through a New Zealand primary school. As these kids struggled to read, write and do arithmetic, their teachers happily collected pay rises they saw as entitlements.

How can these teachers live with themselves knowing they have failed so many children? How do they explain the uncomfortably long tail of under-achievement throughout the public education system? How do they rationalise the millions the taxpayer must now spend helping the illiterate and innumerate recover wasted years? …

You know the more some schools try to suppress information and stop the public knowing how well the school is doing, the more you wonder what they are hiding.

An excellent column:

It’s about time parents formed a union equally as militant as the teachers’ unions and Principals’ Federation. Because who, in the current war over national standards in education, is sticking up for the kids?

A parents’ union – not a bad idea.

The education unions whine that if these standards proceed, media will publish them, parents will compare teachers and schools, and do what I and hundreds of other parents do – exercise choice. Well, we can’t have that, can we?

We’re trusted to choose our family doctor, our car, our fridge, our house, our MP, but when it comes to choosing the school our children go to, if the left have their way, we must go where the State dictates. Only those who can afford it are lucky enough to choose.

Spot on.

This all reminds me so much of that wonderful British comedy written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, Yes, Prime Minister. I’m thinking in particular of the episode titled “The National Education Service” when the Prime Minister decides he will let parents take their children to any school they choose. Sir Humphrey explodes into protest: “That’s preposterous. You can’t just let parents make these choices. How on earth would parents know which schools are best?”

Sir Humphrey, the consummate bureaucrat, is then asked which school he went to. It was Winchester, he says, and it was excellent. And who chose it?

“My parents, naturally, that’s quite different. My parents were discerning people. You can’t expect ordinary people to know where to send their people.”

I’ve said this many times – Yes Minister was a documentary.

I have no doubt the leaders of teacher and principal unions, when they buy a car or house, compare brands, neighbourhoods, or performance. Why then, when parents must by law trust their most precious and loved children to other adults’ care, do these same unionists deny them the right to compare schools’ performance?

Hundreds of primary school principals are threatening to keep secret the standards data because it might lead to a “blame and shame” culture. That behaviour graphically illustrates where their best interests lie, and it’s not with their pupils. Perhaps they need reminding of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights – “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

Once the date is made available, I’m wondering how hard it would be to do a mashup with it on Google Maps. People could see schools in their local areas, and their assessment data. You could even add stuff in like decile ratings, level of school funding etc.

The Dom Post editorial:

Education Minister Anne Tolley should stick to her guns.

Parents are entitled to know how their children are doing at primary school and, if unimpressed, should be able to march them off to a school that is performing better, taking the state funding attached to him or her with them.

Hear hear.

Regrettably, this Government is not brave enough to go that far. But it should not resile from implementing its “national standards” policy in the teeth of opposition from principals and unionised teachers or buckle to their wish to have such information kept secret. …

What is it exactly that teachers and principals so fear? What is wrong with sharing with taxpayers those who pay to keep state schools operating just which schools do well and which do not? Is it that teachers’ methods might be scrutinised if their pupils are not keeping up with their countrywide cohort? Are they afraid that pay rises might not be forthcoming if it turns out that the youngsters in their class are falling behind?

A fear of accountability I say.

If so, principals and the NZEI would profit from looking across the Tasman to Labor-ruled New South Wales, where a similar row has erupted. There, the Greens and the Coalition equivalent to our National Party have joined forces in the NSW Senate to make it illegal to compile league tables backed by fines of up to $55,000 for organisations such as newspapers from statistics publicly available on a federal website. Labor’s deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, has ridiculed the NSW ban.

While Labour in NZ wants to make school assessment data more secret than the SIS.

Poneke laments how Waterfront Watch’s campaign against the Wellington Hilton, has meant no waterfront development is likely for a decade. Instead we are left with those awful tin sheds.

Bruce Simpson at Aardvark covers the efforts of Associated Press to claim that even using their headlines is a breach of the US DMCA. This may be very significant if bloggers are not able to significantly quote articles in order to critique them.

Whale Oil detects more links between The Standard and Labour or more specifically labour.co.nz. The Standard responds. A great thread for those who get hot with talk of DNS and MX records

The Economist looks at the school system in Finland and Sweden.

And since I’m coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.

The Dim-Post has some solutions for the South Auckland crime wave:

• Limit numbers on all polytechnic courses teaching home invasion and armed robbery techniques.
• Increase existing levels of sedatives and oral contraceptives in Manukau water supply.
• Create an economic disincentive to homicide by amending the Emissions Trading Scheme to double carbon fees on vehicles used during a murder
• Introduce cultural sensitivity training to South Aucklands migrant communities teaching them to be more open and tolerant towards the kiwi tradition of random assault and pointless execution style killings.
• Point to multiple Asian murders as irrefutable statistical evidence for sending ‘em all back.

Also, finally not a blog but of interest to EFA watchers is this note of a meeting between Federated Farmers and the Electoral Commission over the EFA.

A group of 15 school principals have written an open letter to the Minister of Education Chris Carter saying

“We do not concur with your statements that current funding is enough to provide a quality basic education.”

So what is the problem. Hasn’t funding increased? Well yes it has, but so has the paperwork:

In an open letter to Education Minister Chris Carter, the principals detailed Government innovations they claimed were not fully funded and had increased pressure on already-stretched finances.

The list of 21 included pandemic planning, maintaining electronic student management systems and running the healthy lifestyle programme Mission On.

“We respectfully suggest you provide for the current demands before introducing new and more underfunded priorities,” the principals wrote.

So what are they doing about it?

Northcote College principal Vickie Barrie said in a separate email: “Schools will not engage in the Government’s new Schools Plus initiative until the minister has recognised the dire funding situation secondary schools find themselves in.”

Schools Plus is a major initiative that aims to keep New Zealanders in education or training until age 18.

It was outlined by Prime Minister Helen Clark in her opening address to Parliament this year, as part of a “quantum leap” in changing the aspirations for young people.

Wow, that is a slap down for sure.