The habitual damage that the Ministry of Education does to NZ students

There are a couple of pieces of reported progress with education recently. They are anecdotal but are at least in the right direction.

1. The government has found out what many parents, who pay for private tuition, have known for a long-time. That is: small group or individual intensive tuition actually works. The Ministry claims to have been measuring this through “progressions”.
2. The Ministry reported to the Education and Work-Force Committee that the new Maths and English curriculum have been well-received and there are some good, anecdotal, signs.

A major issue is that the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) has produced a report that makes it clear that the Ministry of Education has pretty much no idea how students between Y1 and Y10 are doing (as well as pretty narrow data for Years 11 – 13).

Key statements are:

“The Ministry of Education does not have comprehensive information about student achievement or progress in Years 1-10.”

“The Ministry of Education needs to work with others to address gaps in its information.”

These two statement are stark given an experience in 2017 that shows the significance of the impact of Ministry incompetence.

From 2013 – 2018 I had oversight of South Auckland Middle School. It was a Charter School with the genuine focus on improving education for marginalised children.

The school started on Day 1 2014 with 120 students – and – as soon as possible went to 180 (with 100 students on a waiting list). Children were chosen through a police supervised ballot. There were special features of the school such as a split-day (academic morning, Arts and Activities afternoons) 15 children per class, a project based curriculum – alongside high-quality core subject teaching.

As a researcher / statistician / economist / educator I was determined to measure the effects of what we were doing.

1. A tool called E-ASTTLE was valid at the time in the NZ system. With the assistance of Evaluation Associates I designed a spreadsheet to measure each student’s progress for Maths and Reading via E-ASSTLE testing three times per year. This tool told us how much progress students made against norms for each year with us.
2. I tracked every student who left SAMS at Year 10 and went into local schools to do NCEA.
3. We fully engaged with Ministry contracted evaluations – Martin Jenkins and Cognition.

All of the results were outstanding.

1. Across the four years with us students were making two years progress for each year in Maths and Reading. This was done through our normal classroom teaching and not through extra tuition.
2. Our students were achieving Level 1 NCEA at 85+% in their first year out. Even better than outstanding given that our students were Decile 1 and over 85% were Maori and Pasifika and that stats were well above national averages.

(It is a sad but important note to make that – after I left the Villa Education Trust in 2021 – the CEO – Karen van Gemerden – now with NZPAA – decided to take the view that the Middle School was not responsible for the subsequent results of the students. If you don’t know how your students do when they leave – you have no idea if your programme is working. The key purpose of a Middle School is to enhance achievement in the qualification years.)

3. Both the Martin Jenkins report and the Cognition report were entirely positive. E.g. Cognition concluded:

“In summary we find and conclude that in both schools, the management and staff are actively involved in continuous development, and the delivery, of a unique programme of teaching and learning which is based on a comprehensive ‘local’ curriculum that is aligned with the New Zealand Curriculum, and which provides for the personalised needs of priority learners ‘many of whom have been failed by the current education system.”

Given that we could show that our model was working and, probably more importantly, we had developed a way of measuring “student progressions” with validity – I invited the Ministry of Education to meet with myself and Michael Absolum from Evaluation Associates.

We met with Pauline Cleaver who still holds a high level leadership role in the Ministry.

We patiently outlined how the measurement methodology we had developed was exactly what the Ministry kept saying publicly that they were working on – for six years at the point.

We offered the tool to them, for free, and it could have been rolled-out broadly and enhanced practices in the whole NZ Year 1 – 10 system.

Pauline Cleaver – in the meeting – without further evaluation – said NO!

Not only is there the consequence of the OAG report, but students/families have been further impacted for 8 more years and any “data” currently released from the Ministry of Education/Minister is treated with well-deserved scepticism.

Dr Oliver Hartwich or the NZ Initiative previously asserted that the solution to the issues created by NZ’s Ministry of Education involved a truckload of TNT. They haven’t changed under the new government and Erica Standford recently rates the 4/10 for policy advice.

Why do we constantly allow bureaucrats to undermine the delivery of high-quality systems for the good of NZ society?

Image credit: Pixabay