PARLIAMENT | PARTY | GRASSROOTS

Red Alert

Posts Tagged ‘education’

Dumb and dumber

Posted by Darien Fenton on October 23rd, 2009

Does John Key realise how much he has annoyed both teachers and school support staff with his comments to the CTU conference this week that teachers should trade off their own pay rises to fund pay increases for low paid school support staff?

I’ve been doing the rounds of North Shore schools today and staff – teachers and support staff – are not impressed. They say his comments are divisive and stupid. Teachers and support staff work together to make the school community function well and there’s no way they will buy into this kind of divide and rule tactic.

John Key’s comments were dumb politics. But what’s even dumber is the PM’s ignorance about how teachers and support staff are funded and how their employment agreements are bargained.

Teachers are centrally funded by the Ministry of Education, and their negotiations are separate to those of school support staff. School support staff are funded out of school’s operations budgets.

So even if the teachers were to forgo pay increases (and that couldn’t happen until next year when bargaining is due), there’s no guarantee that would translate into increased ops grants to pay school support staff more.

Tags: ,
Filed under: Pay Equity, education
43 Comments

The new Victorians

Posted by Phil Twyford on October 22nd, 2009

Further to Grant’s ‘listen and weep’ post on Anne Tolley’s performance on Morning Report, Gordon Campbell has written how the Minister’s approach harks back to the golden age of Queen Victoria “when the three Rs and a stern testing regime were seen to be all that a young lad or girl really needed”.

He notes that standards and the three R’s hardly help equip our kids to compete and do well in the face of globalisation.

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times takes up the argument:

Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination… to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Tags: , , , , ,
Filed under: education
7 Comments

Education cuts don’t add up

Posted by Sue Moroney on September 16th, 2009

The Government has cut valuable education programmes like night classes and the enviro schools programme because it says it wants to use those funds for improving literacy and numeracy.

Imagine how surprised Literacy Waikato was when that same Government cut its funding last month.

When I took Labour leader Phil Goff to meet with the Hamilton-based literacy service recently, they were still perplexed about how the Government rhetoric could be so misleading.

With 25 part-time paid tutors and 35 volunteer tutors all trained to high professional standards, they offer highly-effective literacy classes for adults in our community. They regularly see lives turned around and opportunities opened up through the work they do.

And yet, the Government has cut the funding to its parent organisation, Literacy Aotearoa, by $600,000. The impact on Literacy Waikato could be in the order of $100,000 less funding at a time when the Government is supposed to be prioritising literacy.

I believe that night classes involving everything from cooking through to parenting classes do contribute to better literacy and numeracy.

Phil Goff and I also visited Hamilton East Primary School to see their fantastic environmental programme. It certainly taught literacy and numeracy skills in a hands-on practical way. The children showed an enthusiasm for their projects that would put most maths lessons to shame. And yet, the Government has pulled the funding from the Hamilton-based unit that supports schools across New Zealand to develop and sustain these excellent programmes.

It just doesn’t add up.

Is the Government just using the “literacy and numeracy” line as an excuse to make severe and short-sighted cuts across our precious education system? If the funding from those cuts is supposed to be going into literacy, then why is that funding being cut too?

And why do private schools deserve an increase in funding at the same time as the vast majority of ordinary New Zealanders have their education programmes cut?

Just don’t get me started on how short-sighted it is for the Government to force hundreds of people in Hamilton onto the unemployment benefit instead of giving them the opportunity to further their education at the University of Waikato or Wintec by capping the student numbers.

In just 10 months, this Government has our education system in a state of turmoil.

Tags: ,
Filed under: Hamilton, education
10 Comments

Upper Hutt meeting on ACE

Posted by Chris Hipkins on September 11th, 2009

Last night we held a public meeting in Upper Hutt about the National government’s decision to axe funding for Adult and Community Education courses, including night classes. About 50 people came along to hear Maryan Street and Paul Quinn outline their respective party’s policy on the cuts. We then had an opportunity for questions and discussion.

I was really moved by some of the personal stories people shared, particularly the young woman who talked of how she had dropped out of school to train as a hairdresser. Unable to find work and feeling depressed, she signed up for a night class in cake decorating. She went on to win awards and has since been inundated with requests for her services. Anne Tolley refers to these kind of courses as ‘hobby’ courses, but for this young woman it was a step up to a job and she is now keen to take more courses and continue learning.

Many members of the same Spanish course attended the meeting and spoke of how much they valued their weekly classes. Some have been taking the class for many years and have built up a very strong bond with their fellow students. They regard each other as family and their weekly class has become and integral part of their world and helps them to feel connected to their community.

I’ve also had feedback from a recent widow who attended cooking courses after his wife passed away. His wife had previously done all the cooking and housework and he was left to fend for himself after she died. He got sick of eggs on toast and decided to do something about it. Not only did he learn to cook for himself, he also made new friends. It was an important part of his grieving process.

The total cost of these courses is about $13 million a year. Not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but the impact on the people who will be affected by these cuts will be huge. And before anyone says that they could chose to continue their classes by paying the full cost I’d point out that every secondary school in the Hutt Valley has indicated they’ll be axing all night classes from next year.

On a final note, I had to laugh when Paul Quinn pointed out that the new National government are spending $30 million upgrading Upper Hutt’s two state secondary schools and two intermediates. I think that’s a great investment, but isn’t it a shame those fantastic new facilities will be used less than 25% of the time. For three quarters of the time they will sit empty. All that money tied up in buildings that for the sake of a very small marginal cost could be used by a much wider group of people.

Tags: , , ,
Filed under: education
8 Comments

Kia ora

Posted by Kelvin Davis on July 21st, 2009

Tena koutou katoa

Better late than never, here’s my first blog.

I’m in parliament to raise Maori educational achievement.

The good news is that with the correct approach we should see significant lifts in Maori educational achievement in a relatively short period of time – say 5-7 years. We don’t need to wait another generation to see the results.

The bad news is the correct approach isn’t being taken by the present government. 

While we fixate on superfluous, peripheral and ideological issues instead of focusing on the ’specific acts of teaching’ that make kids learn, we will continue to see a ‘tail of underachievement’ that is mainly comprised of Maori kids.

Our solutions need to be based around what is proven to make kids learn as fast as possible and to as high a standard as possible.

The secrets to raising achievement are no longer secret. Over time I’ll spell them out.

Tags: ,
Filed under: M?ori, education
13 Comments

Lifelong learning?

Posted by Grant Robertson on June 24th, 2009

It would be fair to say that when the current Speaker was the Minister of Education in the 1990s, we had a somewhat fractous relationship. He refused to come to Dunedin where  at the time I was the Student Association President. So we drove to Christchurch to find him. This carried on for a year or so, and culminated with Lockwood climbing out a window at Canterbury University. Ah, those were the days.

But through it all, one thing I could say for Lockwood was that he took seriously his commitment to ‘life-long learning’. I disagreed with many of the policy ideas, but the concept that we should never stop learning, up-skilling, training and developing is one where I was in total agreement. It is only with this kind of view of education that society will continue to develop and productivity improve.

Sadly, the recent actions of the National Government, and Minister Tolley make it clear that there is very little commitment to the concept of lifelong learning at the moment. The roll call is sad:

  • a lack of real initatives on training as part of the Jobs Summit or the nine day fortnight;
  • no plan to implement the Skills Strategy;
  • cutting back the Training Incentive Allowance;
  • cuts to Adult and Community Education in schools that puts at risk the further education of thousands of people;
  • and now today we see Anne Tolley is reviewing the ability of seniors to access student loans.

This is short-sighted nonsense from National. Lockwood Smith understood that lifelong learning was part of a cohesive, productive society. Just like not properly funding super, we might not see all the effects of this immediately, but over time we will all pay for not making these investments.

Tags: , , ,
Filed under: education
8 Comments

Newer Entries »