Oh My Gosh, There Is a God and It’s Erica

by Rebecca Thomas

I knew I should have checked the news before I went to bed.

There I was, worrying about education unnecessarily: apparently it is fixed! Twenty years of decline simply, turned around. Science and maths are up.

The post-Covid slide has stabilised. The equity gap is narrowing. Halle-bloody-lujah. And presumably, somewhere in Wellington, somebody is polishing the educational equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

Except… you know me. I saw the headlines and immediately wanted to know what was underneath them.

I teach these kids.

I want to discover that after years of being told our education system is declining, failing, plummeting, broken and generally heading to hell in a handcart, our tamariki are doing better. That would be bloody marvellous. But before we erect the statue of Erica outside the Beehive, perhaps we should work out what today's numbers actually tell us.

So, for the teachers currently making lunches while reading the news, the parents wondering whether their child's school has miraculously transformed overnight, and everyone else who doesn't speak fluent OECD: Here is today's educational miracle translated into human.

First, they didn't test every kid in New Zealand

This is probably worth saying because when we read:

“NZ science and maths students turn around 20 years of decline”

it sounds rather like somebody tested the nation's children and discovered they had all suddenly become better at maths and science ( a science curriculum that was released moments ago, let alone been taught yet).

That's not how these international assessments work btw.

PISA tests a sample of 15-year-olds. That sample is carefully selected so researchers can use it to tell us something useful about the wider population. That's important data: it is still a sample.

So the more boring, less clickable translation of the headline is something like:

A representative sample of New Zealand 15-year-olds performed better on particular measures of maths and science than previous samples of New Zealand 15-year-olds.

I appreciate that nobody is clicking on that. Headlines have a nasty habit of turning that something into everything.

Next, what exactly have we “turned around”?

This is where I start getting twitchy.

We have heard some version of the phrase “20 years of decline” so often that it has almost become an accepted fact about New Zealand education. Say it enough times and we all know what it means. Kids today aren't as clever as kids used to be. Schools aren't as good. Teachers aren't teaching properly. The system has declined.

Except international education data is much more complicated than that. Our scores can move. Other countries' scores can move. Our ranking can move because somebody else's score moved. The students participating change. The measures change. The world changes. And then, just to make things particularly interesting, a global pandemic wandered through the middle of it all and disrupted children's education across the planet.

So when somebody tells me we have “turned around twenty years of decline”, I want to know: What turned around? The average score? Our international ranking? The percentage of students reaching a particular benchmark? Science? Maths? Reading? Particular groups of students? And parents deserve to understand the difference.

Then we arrive at my favourite educational word: equity

Apparently the equity gap is narrowing.

Now that got my attention.

Because if there is one headline I desperately want to believe, it is that one. But let's translate that into human too. Imagine two groups of children running a race. One group is 100 metres ahead. Next year the distance between them is 80 metres. Fantastic. The gap has narrowed. But one group is still 80 metres behind.

It does not tell us that we now have an equitable education system. And this is where I want much more detail. Not simply: Did New Zealand's average go up?

I want to know: What happened for children experiencing poverty? What happened for disabled and neurodivergent learners? What happened for kids who aren't attending school regularly? What happened in places like Te Tai Tokerau? What happened to the children who were already doing well? And, most importantly to me: What happened to the kids who weren't?

If I put one foot in boiling water and the other in freezing water, statistically speaking, my feet are experiencing quite a pleasant average temperature. I am still having a terrible day.

And then there is the timeline

This is the bit I really want parents to understand.

These are 15-year-olds.

The young people sitting these assessments have been travelling through our education system for roughly a decade. Their results did not begin this year. Or last year. Their educational lives stretch across governments, Ministers, curriculum changes, assessment changes, teaching approaches, school changes and one fairly significant global pandemic.

Which makes the political temptation to plant a flag in these results rather fascinating.

Because education data moves slowly. Children are not an economic quarterly report. A 15-year-old sitting an international assessment today carries years of teaching into that room.

Their Year 1 teacher is in that result.

So is their Year 3 teacher.

Their intermediate teachers are there.

Their whānau are there. Covid is there.

Their attendance history is there.

The books somebody read to them when they were six are there.

Their housing situation is there.

Their culture and language are there.

Their friendships are there.

The teacher who noticed they were struggling and quietly pulled up a chair beside them is there too.

Education is cumulative.

Education is NOT Erica Stanford!

Which means we should be very cautious whenever any government points to the achievement of 15-year-olds and says: Look what we did.

Equally, perhaps we should have been a little more cautious when governments pointed at previous groups of 15-year-olds and said: Look what schools did wrong.

Funny how that works.

I don't want to rubbish these results. Actually, quite the opposite. If achievement has stabilised after falling: Celebrate it. If mathematics and science performance has genuinely improved: Celebrate it loudly. If inequities really are narrowing: I'll bring cake. Because teachers could really use some good news (and some cake!)

For years we have been told New Zealand education is in crisis. And a seemingly endless parade of people explaining what teachers need to do differently.

Urgently.

So if today's data is genuinely showing us that things are stabilising, I think we should stop for a moment and notice something rather important. These children were already in our schools while we were being told the system was broken. These teachers were already teaching them. These schools were already doing the mahi. These whānau were already raising them.

Perhaps there wasn't one miraculous intervention.

And perhaps instead of immediately racing to decide who gets the credit, we could ask a much more useful question: What appears to be working — and how do we make sure the children who are still furthest from opportunity get more of it? Because the gap is narrowing should never be where we stop. It should be where we lean in. And if achievement really is stabilising, perhaps that should make us think very carefully about our apparently irresistible desire to reform education every five minutes. If green shoots are appearing, the clever response probably isn't to immediately dig up the garden.

So, is Erica God?

Probably not. Hopefully not!

Sorry, Erica.

But if these results really do show green shoots after a long period of decline, perhaps there is something miraculous we could try. Don't dig them up. Give schools some stability. Ask teachers what is working. Give our kaiako the people they need around them.

Maybe New Zealand education was never quite as broken as we were told it was.