The Post: Erica Stanford has made education a bright spot of first-year legacy

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If you only read the headlines, and had seen last week that education minister Erica Stanford called her opposite number “a stupid bitch”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that schools policy was mired in the usual political pettiness. And you’d be wrong.

The woman thus abused, Labour education spokesperson Jan Tinetti, did make clear her displeasure. But she also told RNZ that just the night before, she and Stanford had had a constructive meeting about curriculum reform.

Behind the scenes, there are promising signs that New Zealand’s school results may soon flip from Bs to As – and that the change, being relatively bipartisan, will endure. As the National-led Government celebrates its one-year anniversary, education stands out as a potential bright spot amid a stalling economy and David Seymour’s attempt to rip up the Treaty of Waitangi.

Stanford’s core ambition is to restore balance to the way we teach our children. New Zealand has long had an exceptionally flexible curriculum: teachers have wide discretion over what they cover, and when. And this has unmistakeable advantages.

When I lived in London, the teachers I knew complained about an over-prescriptive British curriculum that robbed of them of the creativity and autonomy that animate the best instructors.

Many people now think, though, that the New Zealand curriculum is too flexible. It can require teachers to make decisions above their pay grade, and leave them unsure of what they should be doing. Weaker teachers can dodge the most difficult elements of their subject. Too many students leave school unable to properly write or do maths.

Hence Stanford’s push for a more clearly articulated curriculum. Teachers will get detailed instructions about which elements to cover and when, and – in theory – more classroom materials to support that work. Teacher training and professional development will be overhauled; assessment likewise.

Though distinctively Stanford-esque, these reforms continue on a path that Labour had tentatively trod. During her brief tenure as a minister, Tinetti had announced a list of “the essential and foundational maths and literacy assessment standards” that a student must achieve in order to pass NCEA. And while Stanford is rolling out “structured literacy” and “structured maths” curricula, Labour had already begun implementing “a comparable literacy curriculum”, according to Newsroom’s Laura Walters.

One might, of course, question just how quickly Labour was actually creating change, given its enthusiasm for expert advisory groups and reviews that went nowhere. Stanford has clearly stepped up the pace and thoroughness of reform. But then Covid-19 had put a wrecking ball through Labour’s school plans; some allowances must be made.

In any case, the attribution of success or failure – a favourite sport of politicians – is far less important here than the basic, underlying message of hope: the New Zealand state retains the ability to solve problems.

Sure, it took too long to recognise a decline in school performance that had occurred under both Labour and National. But as public concern has grown, so too have experts, public servants and politicians of all stripes responded. This is elementary stuff, but stands in stark contrast to, say, the American political system, now so dysfunctional that it is more likely to exacerbate problems than solve them.

Stanford’s reforms should, by contrast, bear fruit over coming years. This includes her mobile phone ban and her moves to cut construction costs by standardising classroom design.

And whenever Labour gets back in, we can hope to be spared the usual destabilising 180-degree change of direction. The alternation of parties should instead help us tack towards the goal, like a boat sailing into the wind.

Labour was right to introduce a curriculum that corrected the long neglect of Māori history, but the curriculum’s principles ignored Pākehā history entirely (save “colonisation”); Stanford’s promised restoration of “balance” could be beneficial.

In place of a draft science curriculum that didn’t even mention physics, emblematic of a certain wooliness of thinking, we’ll have curricula that emphasise the acquisition of core facts and good grammar.

The reforms are, however, being implemented at a speed that threatens to overwhelm teachers, and could become too prescriptive and test-focused; a Labour administration might need to tack back a little.

Better support for teachers, through enhanced professional development and classroom resources, will also cost money, something National is loath to spend. Beyond Stanford’s own reforms, the mess soon to be left by Seymour’s charter schools and other evidence-free ideas – fining parents for their children’s truancy, anyone? – will have to be fixed.

And there is one inconvenient fact National prefers not to confront: the biggest handbrake on learning, research shows, is not bad teaching but poverty and its related socio-economic ills. It’s hard to succeed when your parents can’t afford a laptop, your house’s mouldy walls are incubating rheumatic fever, and stress and violence are all around.

Given National’s profound lack of ambition on tackling poverty, that may be one problem Stanford leaves for her successor.