I’ve regularly posted about the declining quality of New Zealand’s secondary schools, a trend that’s been going on for about two decades. While quality is being further eroded by the government and school authorities’ attempts to imbue the curriculum with indigenous ways of knowing, this trend preceded that sacralization of the oppressed, and has affected all ethnicities. It’s something wrong with the whole damn system.
Three things are going on, each the subject of one recent article that you can access by clicking on the headline. Indented bits are excerpts.
1.) The educational attainment of New Zealand pupils is abysmal. First, the NCEA is The National Certificate of Educational Achievement, something you get if you pass a test near the end of secondary school. Possession of the NCEA is used to gain employment or to get into universities.
Some quotes:
More than 40 per cent of students failed the writing and maths components of the latest NCEA literacy and numeracy tests.
Results from the June 2023 tests were released last month and show only 56 per cent of the 41,000 students who took part passed writing and numeracy. Reading results were slightly better with a 64 per cent pass rate.
Reading results were up from a 58 per cent pass rate in the September 2022 tests, while writing jumped from 46 per cent to 56 per cent.
In numeracy, the pass rate dropped very slightly from 57 per cent in September last year to 56 per cent in June.
Students will be required to pass all three components of the new tests, which are still being piloted, before they can be awarded NCEA at any level.
More than 70 per cent of those who sat the June tests were in Year 10.
Initially, the tests were going to become mandatory next year but Education Minister Jan Tinetti announced in April there would be a two-year transition period when students could also gain their literacy and numeracy requirements through passing a set of maths and literacy achievement standards.
The tests will now be compulsory from 2026, but students will be able to re-sit the tests every year until they pass.
Tinetti reiterated the assessment was still in the pilot phase and the number of students who participated was very small.
“It is not appropriate to make generalisations based off this small cohort,” she said.
“Achievement rates reflect that specific assessment of literacy and numeracy skills is new, and students and teachers are still becoming familiar with the requirements of the standards, and developing targeted teaching and learning.”
Of course the authorities are defending this abysmal performance (seriously: almost half of the students fail reading, writing and numeracy!), but this isn’t a sample size effect, for achievement has been slipping for over 20 years, and is lower than comparable countries like the U.S., the U.K., Singapore, and Australia. This is a serious problem, and one the authorities need to come to grips with. If it continues, New Zealand will find itself with an undereducated population that would have to go to other countries to get a decent education.
2.) New Zealand students have a chronic truancy problem. The government defines “regular school attendance” as missing less than one school week during a term, which means they’re in school more than 90% of the required time. But in the latest statistics (below), barely half of the students meet this goal! And it can’t be blamed entirely (or even largely) on covid:
An excerpt (my bold):
The latest truancy report card is out. In term four of last year, 50.6 percent of students were regularly attending class.
The good news? It’s not quite as bad as the term before, up 4.6 percentage points. But the bad news is on average across 2022, less than half of our tamariki (45.6 percent) were attending school regularly.
The truth is our national attendance data has looked grim for a while and it left me wondering – is attendance as bad as it looks, or is something fudging the numbers?
. . . . James Cook High School Principal, Grant McMillan, says our truancy problem is bordering on a national crisis.
“Truancy is a thief. It steals opportunities, and it takes away futures.”
Agencies tasked with getting kids back to school, like Bluelight, say they simply can’t keep up with the growing numbers of truant kids referred to them.
The Government has admitted our attendance is well below where it should be, with Minister Jan Tinetti going so far as to tell me it’s her “number one goal” as Education Minister to lift attendance. The goal is 75 percent of students regularly attending school by 2026.
It’s easy to assume Covid-19 is responsible for this problem, but the data shows that while it has badly disrupted attendance, we had lower attendance rates than other countries even before the pandemic. Attendance has been dropping significantly since 2015.
It’s not just irregular attendance. In my interview with the Education Minister, she revealed approximately 9,000 children across the country missing from the education system altogether – a number that’s almost doubled in the past year.
Here are the data over the last four years, showing the big drop in 2022. Even in 2019, only about 70% of term 4 learners were “regular” attendees. And the 2022 data showed that barely half of the students came to class 90% of the time or more.
The next two charts show that New Zealand has consistently lagged behind comparable countries in regular attendance, so it’s not the pandemic. And it’s not just a gap, but a big gap. And the second graph shows that compared to the U.K. and Australia, Kiwi children still lag in attendance. This, and the data above, suggest an educational crisis in New Zealand. Other data show that indigenous people suffer greater attendance problems, but that is surely the result of cultural or socioeconomic issues, not any “indigenous ways of knowing.”
The number of chronically absent students (attending class less than 70% of the time), has also been climbing over the last several years:
3.) The students’ response is to demand four-day school weeks, pleading exhaustion, too much homework, and stress. They even claim that the stress of school could increase suicide rates. Click to read:
I’m trying to be sympathetic, but it’s hard given the data above. The students are missing school, not doing that well when they do go to school, but claim that they’re stressed and would do better academically if they were given an extra day off. Do you believe that? I don’t, but am willing to test it (see below).
An excerpt (my bolding):
Thousands of Kiwi kids have signed a petition asking the Government to change the current school system to a four-day schooling week.
More than 4,000 students have signed the “Change the school week in NZ to 4 days” change.org petition, with the creator hoping to get at least 5,000 signatures.
According to the creator, students want to change the schooling week because the current “school system is draining” and a number of schools give students “mountains of homework daily”.
The person who also started the petition claimed the current system “has an extremely heavy impact on the mental and emotional health of our tamāriki in Aotearoa”.
“So having four school/work days would change everybody’s life for the better.”
The petition organiser believes children are experiencing burnout, and with all the extracurricular activities, there is no longer any time for them to be a kid and relax.
“If things change, then our children will be happier and everyone’s dopamine levels will increase. Therefore leading NZ’s teen [suicide] rates to drop. We need this NZ, we deserve this majorly.
“With all of the extracurricular activities and tutoring, when it comes to the weekend, you barely have any time to have a genuine break. Do you want your kids to be on the edge of a mental/academic burnout? No, didn’t think so.”
Does the petition organiser’s point stack up?
A study reported by Education Week in the US in 2021 showed that students enrolled in a four-day-week school facility got more hours of sleep, on average, and reported feeling less tired than students attending school for five days a week.
Almost all the students enrolled in a four-day-week school spent their day off at home, giving more time to school activities, hobbies, homework and jobs.
Students report stress:
Kiwi students responding to the petition weighed in on the idea, with many sharing their stresses with readers.
“I don’t like the fact that we have to work on Friday. I have a lot of teachers who give me homework on Friday, so I hope this will make a difference,” one said.
Another added: “Two days is not long enough when every week we have school, people have sports homework, tutoring – there are no days to rest.”
“I get too anxious to go to school, and I sometimes can’t even get there because of the workload put on me,” a third claimed.
A fourth added: “School is just too much and very overwhelming.”
Well, I won’t dismiss these beefs out of hand, as I’m feeling charitable today. Let the government do an experiment, having four-day school weeks in half the schools and five-day weeks in the other half. Choose the schools randomly. If the five-day-week issue is the problem, we’d expect an increase in achievement in a year or two. If that doesn’t happen, it’s back to five-day weeks.
Regardless, there is clearly an educational crisis in Kiwi schools, and it needs to be addressed. There’s an election coming up, and the National Party, seen as right-wing in New Zealand but would be considered centrist in the U.S., says this:
National Party education spokeswoman Erica Stanford said the latest test results reflected the “dire state of education in New Zealand”.
“Evidence shows that without these literacy and numeracy skills, young people find it much harder to succeed in the workforce, and earn less later in life,” Stanford said.
National has promised to require all primary and intermediate schools to spend an hour a day on reading, writing and maths, rewrite the curriculum to include clear requirements about what students should learn each year, measure students’ progress twice a year, require all schools to teach reading using the structured literacy method, and ban cellphone use at school.
The Labour Party, currently in power, has presided over the decline, so maybe National deserves a chance. One thing is for sure: educational effort would be better invested in getting kids to come to school, and working on ways of improving instruction, rather than trying to “decolonize” the curriculum. If the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. can teach their kids to a reasonable standard, so can New Zealand.
Obviously, they need to lower the bar for passing scores in their tests. Problem solved. [/sarcasm]
On a more serious note, one of the benefits of school is that it is state funded child care. Parents depend on having schools watch their kids while they put in a 5 day work week. A compromise solution would be to give kids a study hall day where they can focus on finishing their homework and study for upcoming exams.
School is stressful? Yep, sure is. Welcome to the real world. If NZ kids think they get it bad maybe they should talk to their peers in S. Korea.
You are (inadvertently?) touching on a very real issue. NZ kids are going to have to compete is a world with Chinese kids, S. Korean kids, Japanese kids, Singaporean kids, etc. Are they prepared? Apparently, not. Will a four-day school week help them? No. They days of easy, Western (Europe and its offshoots) supremacy are over (they live on in the minds of the woke).
Yes, I spent some time in a Chinese family, the table was cleared for doing homework, older children often helping the younger ones, while the mother made food, the father was watching over the children.
Only when all the homework was finished satisfactorily, the table was cleared again, for the food this time.
As far as learning goes, I guess that is an unbeatable formula.
“One thing is for sure: educational effort would be better invested in getting kids to come to school, and working on ways of improving instruction, rather than trying to “decolonize” the curriculum.”
You can say that again!
Oh, well, if it increases dopamine then of course! Because science.
The student comments also seem to reflect a lot of stress about their own lack of ability to do the work (overwhelmed by homework, too stressed to go to school). Those comments aren’t a reason to go to a 4-day week – they are evidence of a teaching & learning crisis.
Surely the wizards of decolonialized education have responded by now to these statistics. We can rely on them to explain that tests of literacy and numeracy are culturally biased: they omit the kinds of knowing (such as the meaning of “whakapapa”, when to catch eels, and how to sail an outrigger to Antarctica) that enriched life in the halcyon days before the arrival of Captain Cook. The goal of Progressive educators is to bring these days back.
Out of interest, how much homework do Kiwi kids get given, compared to other similar countries?
I was struck by this statement in the 4-day school petition: “Therefore leading NZ’s teen [suicide] rates to drop.” Is this a sign that the suicide meme is spreading? It has, as we know, been used in the medical debate over “affirmative care”. Perhaps we can look forward to new invocations of the suicide danger. More trigger warnings and lists of forbidden, triggering words will be advised in order to forestall student suicides. And students who object to technical lectures by the likes of Dorian Abbott might threaten to commit suicide if such lectures are scheduled.
The UK’s persistent absence rate was 22.3% for the 2022/23 school year, which is pretty atrocious but pales into insignificance given NZ’s. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-attendance-in-schools/2023-week-29
The UK definition of ‘persistent absence’ is less than 90% over the school year. The NZ definition of ‘chronically absent’ (what a peculiar term to use) is less than 70%. The school in SE England of which I am Chair of Governors goes to great lengths to reduce the level of persistent absence, including visits to families by our Families Liaison Officer and even by teachers.
It’s not clear what, if anything, the NZ responsible adults are doing to tackle the issue.
Polls point to a National-led centre-right coalition government after next week’s election. But National’s front bench is pretty woke, so it’s unlikely we’ll see much pushback against “indigenous ways of knowing”.
I’d say this though. I am in favor of less homework. The excess one can sometimes see of several hours a night is tough when one must do stuff around the house, eat, care for pets, sleep and for that matter live ones private life.
Homework works pretty well if it is interesting, I like many of the ‘assignments’ my young sons get. But it is a lot of extra work for an overworked single parent.
Children with ADHD -which appears to be every other boy nowadays- need a lot of help doing these assignments (not the parent just doing the work, that is the easy way, but keeping them focused).
I note that if the children did a great job they take pride in their work, that is the great thing about ‘assignments’.
Making teaching interesting is a not a mean task in a world inundated with YT, Tiktok and the like (not to mention X-boxes and PS5s). These teachers face serious competition.
I think making teaching interesting for learners is a much more daunting task now than it was, say, even as little as 20 years ago.
Eg. exploratory hikes are a a great instrument, but are not always easy to integrate into the curriculum. More than ever, we should value teachers who are able to do a good job in waking children’s interest. They are woefully undervalued.
And not excessive, one has other requirements in life.
Yeah, and most of those are not ADHD at al, just the school labeling a kid who doesn’t conform.