Erica Stanford: Making a difference? (1)

Erica Stanford is clear in her priorities, but there is saying and there is doing. Ambitious aims are all good but it is how policies play out in the classroom with teachers and students that matter.

With the budget due out tomorrow and already some spending indicated for education, this is the first of four posts that analyze Erica Stanford’s education policies.

In this post, I provide a broad context for her reforms and outline how her policies are a shift from the previous 40 years. The following posts will critique the implications for teachers and our young people of structured literacy, structured mathematics and the ‘knowledge curriculum’.

Erica Stanford comes across as pragmatic centralist. While she doesn’t make a song and dance about her philosophical views, she is clear eyed in her aim to educate our young people, so they can “do whatever it is they want with their lives”. But, while she is clear in her priorities and engages with the sector, there is saying and there is doing. Stanford needs to be aware at every step, that good intentions and ambitious aims are not enough. It is actions rather than words that count. In schooling, this means what happens in the classroom and understanding how teachers operate and how students learn.

David Seymour as Associate Minister of Education, provides a useful example that what matters, is what politicians do (rather than what they say). Seymour is impressive in the saying. There is no ambivalence with what he believes, he is articulate and consistent in his messaging, and he knows how to play the media. But when it comes to the doing – e.g. school lunches debacle - Seymour appears to be seriously clueless in how schools operate, what efficient business models look like and what our kids need. Inflated rhetoric doesn’t cut it, when it comes to getting things done.

Policies in education don’t always achieve everything that is initially planned. Teaching and learning is typically way more complicated than it first appears (with numerous variables) and there are often unintended consequences. What good policy making looks like, are policies that are based on robust evidence, that draw on the guidance of experts in the teaching and learning and that are realistic in what they want to achieve. An approach encapsulated by Auditor-General John Ryan’s advice for all government ministers to ask themselves: “Has all this activity and spending made our lives better?”

For Erica Stanford the question is, will structured mathematics, a ‘knowledge based’ curriculum and structured literacy and make kids’ lives better. Will we see all our young people learning the essential knowledge and skills they need? If this is the case (and I’m cautiously optimistic) this would make our schooling system more egalitarian. And this is no small thing. We have one of the most unequal education systems in the developed world. Our best schools (typically in affluent communities) are equal to any, but a substantial number of our disadvantaged schools, fall well short of providing a quality learning experience for our young people. Equitable outcomes need to be front and centre, if all our kids are to get the education they deserve.

Unlike recent Ministers of Education, Stanford is open to directly intervening in the sector to implement her policies. This is a shift away from how Ministers have operated since the 1980s. For the last 40 years we have seen schooling based on the high autonomy Tomorrow’s Schools model, where local school communities largely decide how to operate. Ministers have typically stayed out of how kids learn and teachers teach, and the Ministry of Education has been pretty ‘hands-off’ here. Stanford’s interventionist policies are a shift in direction from the neo-liberal schooling model, that was introduced in the late 1980s and has dominated schooling ever since.

When David Lange (Labour PM and Minister of Education) applied neo-liberal ideas to the schooling sector in the 1980s, the claim was that schools would become more responsive to their local community. While the rhetoric was about meeting the diverse needs of local communities, Tomorrow’s Schools was essentially the state stepping back from taking responsibility for ensuring all our people were educated. Although introduced by a Labour government, it ignored the reality that there are major disparities between wealthy and poorer areas in this country. For affluent and well-connected school communities, Tomorrows Schools has been seriously beneficial. But not all our school communities have access to the same level of resources and support; some are disadvantaged, and Tomorrow’s Schools has done little to address the high levels of disparity between school communities.

In many ways the logical endpoint of the Tomorrow’s Schools model is Charter Schools. A high autonomy community-based model and where government involvement is minimal. I suspect that this is a key reason why Seymour’s ideological enthusiasm for Charter schools, will be little more than a vanity project. Despite massive media interest (Seymour knows how to generate headlines and our MSM are susceptible to barking at every passing car) the number of charter schools is tiny. About 50 schools out of a total of 2500. This is arguably because, Tomorrow’s Schools already allows a high degree of autonomy and the shift to charter schools is largely unnecessary.

Stanford’s willingness to intervene directly in the sector is a step back into a space, where it is the state that controls what taught, how our young people learn, and how our teachers teach. In this, it is to her advantage that she does not come out of the education sector. Tomorrow’s Schools is notoriously difficult to critique in the education arena, because most NZ teachers and principals (and at least 2 generations of parents) have been thoroughly embedded in this high autonomy model. Few can recall anything different. It is seen as ‘normal’. Also, Tomorrow’s Schools especially benefits affluent, well connected school communities and these powerful voices have little interest in changing.

Ironically, considering the ‘slash and burn’ approach of her government to social infrastructure, in intervening directly in schooling, Stanford is in step with the egalitarian notions that shaped education in the 40 years prior to Tomorrow’s Schools. Both National and Labour governments saw the responsibility of the state was to provide a quality education for all and to intervene accordingly.

It is a long time since egalitarianism has been a founding concept in schooling. As a policy it emerged in the 1940s by the Labour Government of Peter Fraser that reframed education as a right and not a privilege. Frasers reforms became the norm for both Labour and National administrations; where the state assumed that its role was to ensure a quality education for all its citizens. It was a radical departure from the hierarchical education model that shaped education in NZ until the Second World War. As well as leading NZ during the worst global war in history, Fraser worked with Clarence Beeby to set up an egalitarian schooling system for the benefit of everyone.

As an aside, it was no coincidence that Peter Fraser was Scottish. Presbyterian Scotland saw the beginning of a universal education for all, in the 17^th century. Presbyterianism was based on the congregation being literate so they could interpret scripture for themselves (and select their local preachers). Scottish children were typically literate 250 years ago, while this was not the case in the rest of Britain. In England, education was based on a hierarchical model that excluded most children and provided an academic education for the wealthy elite who ran the Empire. The Scottish commitment to a high quality, universal education for all, was evident in all the areas of the British Empire where the Scots settled (including NZ – e.g. Otago).

So will Erica Stanford’s policies make our schooling system more egalitarian? They have the potential to ensure all our young people are literate and numerate and this would go a long way in addressing declining literacy and numeracy rates. But while it is clear Stanford is committed to practical solutions that will see all our children learn, there are legitimate concerns in the sector, with how these changes are being rolled out. Aside from questions around resourcing, critics argue that the reforms are being implemented hastily, lack sufficient evidence, do not adequately address the diverse needs of students and are not closely aligned with how teachers operate and how students learn.​

These are the issues that will ultimately make the difference in addressing the high level of inequality we have in our schooling system and ensuring all our young people get the education they deserve. In short, they are the difference between Erica Stanford’s policies being successful or not. The commitment and the ambition of these policies is to be applauded but in the final analysis, it is how they play out in the classroom – with teachers and students – that matters.

In the next post I will examine the challenges and implications of structured literacy policies and how these will play out in the classroom.

Thanks for reading and I very much appreciate your support.

NZeducator: An independent dialogue on how we educate our young people that goes beyond binary perspectives and explores pragmatic, sustainable approaches to building a fairer, more egalitarian schooling system.

I have been a teacher in the school/university sector for 50 years and receive no funding for my writing or interviews.

Mark Sheehan (PhD, MA, Dip.Tchg)

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