Erica Feels Her Reforms Are Failing Because Academics Keep Telling Her to "Get Stuffed"
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
by ELV
For nearly two years we've been told New Zealand education has one big problem.
Teachers just weren't teaching the right way.
It was all too "balanced". Added to that, the curriculum was too vague and assessment wasn't rigorous enough. The science was being ignored. (Cue stamping feet and an exaggerated pout.)
The solution, we were assured, was obvious.
Rewrite the curriculum (several times over). Better still, get it internationally benchmarked and AI-checked. Top it off with tightly prescribed structured approaches, a shiny new assessment system and enough educational jargon to confuse everyone except the people who invented it.
Then tell teachers exactly what good teaching looks like.
Problem solved? Apparently not.
Because this week the conversation has 'pivoted'. With laser focus, it's been gripped up and equalised. The problem, it seems, is no longer the curriculum, the assessments or the very expensive reforms themselves. The real problem is that teachers keep thinking for themselves!
According to Michael Johnston on The Platform (I'd add the link but don't wish to contribute to their viewing figures), the reforms won't achieve their full potential because the same teachers are still standing in the same classrooms (with the same mentality). The finger now points towards universities, academics and teacher educators. They're "woke". Teachers have been "ideologically captured". Universities have too much academic freedom and apparently feel quite comfortable telling ministers to "get stuffed".
I nearly spat my coffee across the room.
Only days earlier Professor Stuart McNaughton, one of New Zealand's most respected literacy researchers, publicly challenged the direction of the reforms (journal attached at the end). His criticism wasn't that structured literacy or explicit teaching are wrong. It was that education is far more complex than the reforms acknowledge. Achievement isn't lifted by one programme, one method or one assessment. It depends on language, knowledge, relationships, wellbeing, attendance, culture, professional expertise and the countless interactions that happen inside classrooms every day.
That's not a 'fringe' opinion btw. That's one of the country's leading educational researchers saying we are oversimplifying an extraordinarily complex system.
And suddenly...the defensive conversation becomes about "woke" universities.
So, if the reforms succeed, the reforms (and the Minister) deserve all the credit. If they struggle, universities produced the wrong teachers. That's quite a spectacular insurance policy.
Apparently the curriculum can be rewritten and assessment systems rebuilt; billions of dollars spent. But if classrooms don't suddenly transform, the fault now lies with people who graduated years ago from universities exercising too much academic freedom.
When evidence agrees with you, it's science. When respected researchers question your interpretation of that evidence, academics become the problem. When universities don't immediately align with government thinking, academic independence suddenly becomes an inconvenience rather than one of the foundations of a healthy democracy.
One of the comments that genuinely floored me, was the frustration expressed about universities even having (or being entitled to have) academic freedom.
Academic freedom.
Why would universities have the freedom to disagree with ministers? Because that is literally their job! I started shouting.
Education should be difficult to coordinate, because no minister—of any political persuasion—should be able to instruct every lecturer, every researcher and every teacher to think exactly the same way. We all know what that starts to resemble.
Dear Mr Johnston (and Erica),
Academic freedom and professional judgement in this country exist for a reason.
Just as independent research exists for a reason.
None of them exist to make governments comfortable. They exist to test ideas, challenge assumptions and question those in power.
If you don’t like it, then maybe you should move somewhere else in the world that aligns with your type of thinking.
.
Sincerely,
A teacher.
Teachers, apparently, are also leaving because education has become too "woke".
Really?
After speaking with hundreds of teachers over the past year, I've heard many reasons people are leaving: unsustainable workload, constant reform, escalating behaviours, no funding, staff shortages, poor pay and stress (the latter two Johnston does take time to acknowledge himself — after then going back to blaming the academics of course).
.
I've yet to meet someone who handed in their resignation because there were simply too many conversations about equity.
Teachers don't leave because universities taught them to think.
They leave because too often they're expected not to. Perhaps that's the uncomfortable truth for this government. If every reform that fails is blamed on teachers, and every criticism is blamed on universities, and every academic who disagrees is dismissed as ideological
…then maybe the problem isn't that educators won't fall into line.
Maybe the problem is the belief that they should.
Education has never advanced by everyone agreeing with the minister of the day. It has always advanced because somebody, somewhere, had the courage to ask,
"Are we sure we've got this right?"
Long may our universities, our researchers and our teachers keep asking exactly that.
Thank you to all those wonderfully 'woke' academics that save us all from madness!!
Journal article by Prof. Stuart McNaughton that was published in New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies and referenced in the RNZ article.
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