Category: education

Critic of “Woke Kindergarten” suspended

February 13, 2024 • 10:30 am

Remember “Woke Kindergarten”, a lesson plan for teachers to use in instructing propagandizing students in Hayward, California (see posts here and here)?  The program was designed by an extreme “progressive” named Akiea “Ki” Gross, who was given $250,000 in taxpayer money by the school.  And, lo and behold, performance in English and math actually dropped after the wokeness was sprayed on the students. (To see how completely bonkers this program is, go here or to the program’s website here.)  All power to the little people! Sadly, the program appears to be designed for black students and the students are 80% Hispanic.

After an article was published in the San Francisco Chronicle describing the program, there was a huge backlash from people who, properly, thought it was bonkers.  So what did the school district do? Did they drop the program? There’s no indication of that. Instead, they did what defies common sense:  they put one of the teachers who criticized the program in the article on leave (with pay) for unknown violations. They are actually defending Woke Kindergarten when they should be defunding it. I suspect, however, that we’ll see no more of the program. It’s simply too stupid, woke, and embarrassing.

At any rate, the Chronicle has a new article (click headline below, or find it archived here), discussing the firing and giving the school’s defense.

First, though, this is how the teacher critic was quoted in the first Chronicle article:

 Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

And from the new piece, his punishment for such heresy:

The East Bay teacher who publicly questioned spending $250,000 on an anti-racist teaching training program was placed on administrative leave Thursday, days after he shared his concerns over Woke Kindergarten in the Chronicle.
Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said district officials summoned him to a video conference Thursday afternoon and instructed him to turn in his keys and laptop and not return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary until further notice.

 

They did not give any specifics as to why he was placed on paid leave, other than to say it was over “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” Craven-Neeley said.

District officials declined to comment on his status or any allegations, saying it was a personnel matter.

A defense of Woke Kindergarten from the original article:

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Defenses in the second article. Yep, they refuse to say that adopting it was a bad move:

District officials declined to comment on their social media posts, given Gross was paid using taxpayer-funded federal dollars.

“We cannot comment on her personal political or social views,” Bazeley said.

Some teachers have defended the Woke Kindergarten program, saying that after years of low test scores and academic intervention, they believed in a fresh approach. The training was selected by the school community, with parents and teachers involved in the decision.

“We need to try something else,” said Christina Aguilera, a bilingual kindergarten teacher. “If we just focus on academics, it’s not working. There is no one magic pill that will raise test scores.

“I’m really proud of Glassbrook to have the guts to say this is what our students need,” Aguilera said. “We didn’t just do what everybody expected us to do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Sixth-grade teacher Michele Mason said the Woke Kindergarten training sessions “have been a positive experience” for most of the staff, humanizing the students’ experiences and giving them a voice in their own education.

These are clearly teachers who want to keep their jobs.  Finally, a bit about how Craven-Neeley was treated by his colleagues:

The Wednesday staff meeting, however, was tense, Craven-Neeley said, as he tried to explain that before going to the Chronicle, he approached school and district staff as well as the school board to raise questions about the program and the expense, with no response.

“There was so much anger toward me,” he said. “I was explaining my point of view. They were talking over me.”

. . . . Craven-Neeley said the meeting grew tense about an hour in, when another teacher stood up, pointed a finger in his face and said, “ ‘You are a danger to the school or the community,’ and then she walked out of the room.”

Not long after, a district administrator asked him to leave the meeting.

“I was shocked. This is my school. I didn’t do anything inappropriate,” he said. “I left. I was very shaky.”

Another Glassbrook teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions at the school, confirmed that a staff member put a hand in Craven-Neeley’s face and called him a disgrace and a threat to the school.

Craven-Neeley then had a video meeting with school officials and was told he’d be placed on paid leave pending an “investigation”. The university also “denied the district’s actions were related to Craven-Neeley’s participation in the story or his complaints about the program. The district spokesperson added, ‘We would not put any employee on leave as any sort of retaliation or squelch anyone’s free speech rights,” [Michael Bazeley] said’.”

Well that sounds like a flat-out lie to me. What Craven-Neeley said to the Chronicle was indeed free speech, and there’s no other indication of anything else for which he’d be punished.  All I can say is that it looks as if Woke Kindergarten affected the teachers (if not the students). They’re all censorious and defensive!

Remember the “woke wonderings” that were part of the program? Here’s one:

The answer, of course, is “not much!”

Chicago mayor preparing to eliminate magnet schools. Is that a good thing to do?

December 16, 2023 • 11:15 am

We have a new “progressive” mayor, Brandon Johnson, and although one of his election promises was to keep our “magnet school” system in place, he’s preparing a resolution to end it.

“Magnet schools” are a form of student secondary-school tracking in which students can apply to go to any school, but the best schools, often specializing in subjects like science, are very selective. This is a form of “student tracking” in which students are grouped with others, in classes or in whole schools, of similar achievement.

The parents of high-achieving students are of course incensed at the proposal, and I initially opposed it as a misguided form of achieving “equity”. But after talking to a friend who was a long-time school principal and teacher in Boston, and whose school went from being a magnet school to a school any kid could attend, I’ve rethought my view.

This article from the Daily Mail (of all places) gives the details, and of course the paper is opposed. Click to read.

An excerpt:

Chicago’s progressive mayor has announced plans to axe the Windy City’s high-achieving selective-enrollment schools to boost ‘equity.’  

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Board of Education has proposed shifting back toward neighborhood schools – away from the system where kids compete for selective programs.

But when he was campaigning to become Mayor, Johnson put out a statement saying that he would not get rid of Chicago‘s selective-enrollment schools.

According to the Chicago Tribune, woke Johnson specifically said: ‘A Johnson administration would not end selective enrollment at CPS schools.’

Now, he is seen to be back peddling [sic] – by allowing a vote to stop gifted children from lower income backgrounds from academically competing to get into high-performing schools.

Selective schools cause a ‘stratification and inequity in Chicago Public Schools,’ according to the board’s CEO.

Chicago has 11 selective-enrollment high schools — Northside College Prep, Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, John Hancock College Prep, Jones College Prep, Lane Tech, Lindblom Math and Science Academy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School.

Walter Payton College Prep, South Shore International College Prep, Westinghouse College Prep and Whitney M. Young Magnet School are also on the list.

The schools are not just the best in Chicago – but rank among the top high schools in the entire country.

Walter Payton College Prep is ranked 10th best school in the US. Northside College Prep is 37th. Jones College Prep ranks 60th.

Now, a resolution is up for a vote by the school board on Thursday.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has prepared a resolution for ‘a transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.’

It would lay out a five-year ‘transformation’ to effectively get rid of selective schools in Chicago – which have been heralded as the gems of the city’s education system.

At first I was instinctively opposed to this plan on the grounds that it was aimed at making all students perform equally, presumably by lowering the achievement of the high-achieving students, creating a kind of “equity” in which all students would perform at the same middling level, pulling down high-achieving students and preventing them from reaching their potential. (It would, of course, elevate the learning environment of low-achieving students.)

But then I had a long chat with a friend who for many years had been a teacher and then a principal in a Boston area “magnet” school that later transitioned to an “anybody can come” school. His own experience was that magnet schools were a bad idea, and that they should be eliminated in favor of neighborhood schools, as Johnson proposed.

Why? For two reasons. First, magnet schools reduce opportunity for many students, for they attract students whose parents who are highly motivated to get involved in schools to improve their quality. Those parents tend to be better off and educated themselves, and so provide an environment that makes their kids high achievers as well, and more likely to get into magnet schools or be put in a higher “track”. (Advanced placement [AP] classes in schools are also a form of tracking that my friend objects to.  I myself refused to take AP classes in high school because I didn’t think I was smart enough.)

In other words, either tracking or using magnet schools gives kids an unfair advantage based on their parents and their environment. Highly motivated parents also intervene in schools more often to ensure that their kids are getting a high-quality education.

The second factor, according to my friend, is that when faced with a mixed class of students with different levels of motivation and achievement, many teachers respond by getting the students to learn in smaller groups, so that high-achieving students help low-achieving ones. This, he said, raises the level of everyone’s achievement. Of course, teachers have to be willing to do this, which itself is a matter of how the teachers are trained. But my friend said that he’s seen the “mixed-class” system work in two states, and remains convinced that tracking and magnet schools, by quashing opportunity and preventing students of different levels to learn collaboratively, creates, overall, worse outcomes.

Now this doesn’t mean that tracking shouldn’t be used in colleges; that is, we shouldn’t just have a lottery for all colleges so that it becomes no harder to get into Harvard that into Grunt State University. For one thing, many elite colleges are private and wouldn’t be part of such a system. Further, parental influence doesn’t work in college like it does in secondary schools.  But we should remember that there are plenty of “non-elite” colleges where you can get just as good an education as in the Ivies.  Having been to both Harvard and the College of William and Mary, and taught at both Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Maryland, I’d prefer to send my kids—if I had any—to an education intensive William and Mary rather than a research-oriented school like Harvard. I’m convinced that the education I got in Virginia was better than the one I would have gotten at Harvard. After all, Williams College, which doesn’t have graduate students and concentrates heavily on teaching ability of its professors, is rated by Forbes as the best liberal arts college in America. It ranks #10 among all colleges and #8 among private colleges. (U.S. News and World Report also ranks it the best liberal arts college in the U.S.)

Further, getting rid of secondary-school tracking doesn’t mean you’d eliminate standardized tests or grades, either.  After all, you need some way to assess how students are doing, and these measures also help colleges select their students.

I don’t have the experience of my teacher/principal friend, but his argument seemed pretty sound. True, it’s based on one person’s experience, but there are ways of testing whether tracking is not a good way to go (granted, those tests would be hard, and parents would oppose them).

The update: according to CBS News in Chicago,  on Thursday the school board did vote to move away from magnet schools towards neighborhood schools:

The Chicago Board of Education took a key vote on Thursday that could alter the future of schools in the city.

The resolution moves away from school choice in favor of “elevating” neighborhood schools.

It is designed to guide engagement and development of the Chicago Public Schools’ five-year plan. CPS said it “outlines parameters that emphasize strengthening all neighborhood schools as a critical step toward supporting students and closing opportunity gaps.”

“This resolution declares a new chapter in CPS,” Chicago Board of Education President Jianan Shi said in a news release. “While the strategic plan will be developed in partnership with our entire CPS community, we are centering equity and students furthest from opportunity. As such, this moment requires a transformational plan that shifts away from a model that emphasizes school choice to one that elevates our neighborhood schools to ensure each and every student has access to a high-quality educational experience.”

Do you agree with the mayor and the school board? Weigh in below.

The double irony of classes voluntarily segregated by race

November 28, 2023 • 11:15 am

Here we have a news piece (not an op-ed) from a recent Wall Street Journal, reporting that a high school in the Chicago-adjacent town of Evanston, Illinois, is offering voluntarily race-segregated classes as a way to achieve “equity”.  These classes, called “affinity classes”, are of course optional, because mandated race-segregated classes are illegal.

The claim is that voluntary racial segregation produces better academic results for minorities (the minority classes are black and Latino, not white or Asian, and the “classes of color” also have race-compatible minority teachers), but the evidence for “reducing disparities” is either thin or nonexistent.

Moreover, there’s a huge irony involved in doing this: segregating classes by race reduces diversity in the classroom, yet advocates for diversity always (again, here the evidence is thin) that greater diversity of groups leads to greater achievement of those groups on average. You can’t have it both ways! (As far as I know, Evanston was also the first city in America to effect reparations for black people, giving them money for mortgages or home improvement. Voluntarily segregated classes, however, are found in other places, including, as the article below notes, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland.  There are also classes voluntarily segregated by sex.)

Click to read, or see the article archived here:

An excerpt:

School leaders in this college town just north of Chicago have been battling a sizable academic achievement gap between Black, Latino and white students for decades. So a few years ago, the school district decided to try something new at the high school: classrooms voluntarily separated by race.

Nearly 200 Black and Latino students at Evanston Township High School signed up this year for math classes and a writing seminar intended for students of the same race, taught by a teacher of color. These optional so-called affinity classes are designed to address the achievement gap by making students feel more comfortable in class, district leaders have said, particularly in Advanced Placement courses that historically have enrolled few Black and Latino students.

“Our Black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” Monique Parsons, Evanston school board vice president, said at a November board meeting. “It’s not good.”

School districts across the country have sometimes struggled to find ways to boost the performance of Black and Latino students, who, nationwide, tend to enroll in fewer advanced classes and score lower on standardized tests than white students.

. . . Evanston is taking the strategy one step further, offering courses for Black and Latino students in core math classes: algebra 2, precalculus and AP calculus, as well as an English seminar. Evanston’s classes for Black students are known as AXLE, an acronym for Advancing Excellence, Lifting Everyone, and those for Latino students are called GANAS, from a Spanish expression that means “giving it all you’ve got.”

The reason this is done, so it’s said, is that voluntary segregation makes the students more comfortable, and hence facilitates learning. (Quotes from students attest to their comfort level.) There are other rationales that are not as appealing, as “white standards”:

“A lot of times within our education system, Black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” said Dena Luna, who leads Black student-achievement initiatives in Minneapolis Public Schools. The district offers middle- and high-school students electives focused on African-American history and social-emotional support, taught by teachers of color. Created in 2015 for Black boys, the format has expanded to Black girls and will soon expand to Latino students. An internal study showed improved attendance for Black boys in the program in 2017 and average GPAs of 2.27, compared with 2.14 for Black males districtwide.

“In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness,” Luna said.

Some quotes:

Student testimonials included in a presentation Evanston teachers gave at a conference last fall described how students feel more accepted in the classes.

“I feel like I represent me and not the whole black race in this AP class,” said a student who took an AXLE class in 2021. “It’s a safe space. In AP classes that are mostly white, I feel like if I answer wrong, I am representing all black kids. I stay quiet in those classes.”

A GANAS student who identified as half-Latina said, “I feel accepted for the first time in a long time.”

Note that the difference in GPAs associated with voluntary segregation is minimal—only .13 points, or about 6%. But there’s another possible reason for that. Suppose that professors grade on the curve, or, on average, minority teachers tend to grade their minority students higher than do teachers that are “race incompatible”. In that case you’d get higher GPAs in the segregated classes than in the integrated classes. No, the only way to really test if voluntary segregation improves performance is to use standardized tests as controls—tests in which everybody has to answer the same question. If this kind of segregation works, we should see higher test scores on minority students if they’ve been in self-segregated classes.

But what if that turns out to be the case? That has potentially upsetting implications for “progressives.” First of all, the mantra is that “increased diversity within groups increases average group performance”.  That conclusion is based on very weak evidence (psychology experiments, for one thing), so I’m not confident about it.  But if the standardized test data refute it, then there goes the argument for diversity!

Further, if segregated classes improve performance of minorities, wouldn’t voluntarily segregated schools do that as well? That, of course, is the second great irony of this issue: minorities fought for years to end segregation in schools, and finally got it, both in secondary schools and colleges.  But then they claim that, well, integrated classes are inimical to minority achievement. You can’t have it both ways. If the result above proves to be true (and I have no idea whether it is), the argument for integration goes down the tubes. Further, one might argue that if this holds on the college level—and the “comfort” argument should also apply there—colleges shouldn’t be trying to get around the ban on affirmative action but should instead be urging minority students to go, for instance, to historically black colleges.

One possible counterargument to the above is to claim that = students do mix racially outside of class.  But I’m not sure that is the case.  I’ve often heard that in both colleges and secondary schools (and witnessed this when I was young, though racism was more prevalent then) students self-segregate outside the class, also for “comfort” reasons.  We all know that minority students tend to eat lunch together in secondary schools, and colleges are even pushing for “affinity dorms”, in which students can voluntarily choose to live with others from their same ethnic group.

My question, then, is this. If you want integration, but claim that integration is bad for minority achievement, then aren’t you being a hypocrite?

My own view is that the differences in achievement due to voluntary segregation are small, and may be due to factors other than “comfort.”  The proper tests have not yet been done. But even if they show some boos in achievement boost due to segregation, there are other advantages to integration beyond possible boosts in achievement, which I would imagine at any rate to be small.  Those advantages include learning to get along with different types of people, which is a personal and societal good. If you always segregate yourself voluntarily, or are given the opportunity to do so, then America once again becomes divided into racial groups with little mixing. So much for E Pluribus Unum!

Now perhaps this whole problem will disappear as minorities increase in achievement. But that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

I have no dog in this fight except to say that I favor integration because of its social benefits, not necessarily academic ones.  But if liberals encourage self-segregation as a way to boost achievement, and it does, then they will have to structure schools and curricula on that basis. And that will lead them back to how schools were in the 1950s.

How Palestinian kids are taught to hate Jews

October 27, 2023 • 10:45 am

It doesn’t take much studying or Googling to learn that Palestinian kids, like many kids throughout the Middle East, are taught from a young age to hate Jews, to embrace the goal of killing them, to be joyful when Jews are killed, to celebrate the “martyrs” who die while killing Jews, and sometimes to aspire to martyrdom.  Their textbooks and teachers encourage that, as does the state-run media and the schools run by the UN organization UNRWA (see below). It’s simply the way that society runs.

Now that’s not the way Israel conducts its schooling. Yes, you may be able to find one or two textbooks that criticize Palestine, but you simply don’t find the overweening hatred and joy at killing the Others that you see in Palestinian education. This is an important difference between Israel and the true apartheid states.

You can see the glorification of jihad and murder in the video and two articles below. The first is a short piece from Palestinian Media Watch that includes the video.

Click the screenshot to read:

 

The text:

Four young Palestinian girls, approximately 4 to 6 years old, carry a younger girl around in an infant seat.

It could be a normal children’s game. Only the infant seat represents a stretcher and the baby is the “dead Martyr.”

The children are playing “the Martyr game.”

During the game, the girls giggle and praise the “Martyr” child because: “The Martyr is the beloved of Allah.”

This game, and the girls’ joy is the terrifying result of decades of PA education of Palestinian children to see death for Allah and “Palestine” as an ideal and a goal. Palestinian Media Watch has documented hundreds of statements elevating death as a Martyr to a supreme and praiseworthy goal, even for children.

In Fatah’s Waed magazine for 6-15-year-olds Palestinian children are taught:

“We will die, and Palestine will live.”  [This link goes to Fatah’s magazine for kids]

In 2002, at the height of the PA’s 5-year terror war against Israel (the second Intifada), PMW likewise exposed a video of young Palestinian boys playing “the Martyr game.” For over two decades nothing has changed.

I’ve posted similar videos before showing Palestinian kids (not even teenagers) putting on school plays in which they pretend to kill Jews, but this one is especially depressing as it involves a child playing a “martyr”. The video speaks for itself, though the YouTube caption is this:

Four young girls, approximately 4 to 6 years old, are seen carrying a younger girl in an infant seat that is supposed to resemble a stretcher. The baby in the seat is the dead “Martyr.”

Oh, and the text is also given in the article and the YouTube notes.

Reader Norman sent me the following article (click to read; it’s from the Jewish magazine Forward) with this comment:

You’ve mentioned education in Gaza a few times, but here is an essay calling out how Palestinian children are being indoctrinated into Jewish and Israeli hate. Every time I read that 50% of people in Gaza are children [JAC: that’s close; I think that 47% are under 18], I am reminded of how they are educated. They are poisoned, probably for life. Even if a serious and sustained peace process were to begin today, it would take generations to achieve peace.

You can also click the screenshot below to read it. Do so; it’s short.


The author was a member of the Democratic Party, and also a commentator for CNN.

An excerpt:

While serving in Congress between 2001 and 2017, I studied what goes on in Palestinian schools. I reviewed their textbooks, met with educators and diplomats, and introduced legislation and amendments compelling the Department of State to monitor antisemitism in foreign classrooms. I saw firsthand that a generation of Palestinian children were being taught at an early age to reject living peacefully with Israel. They read about it in their schoolbooks and heard about it from their teachers. They were raised on a steady curriculum of violent rejectionism. My colleagues and I in Congress were unable to change that reality.

Now, as the world reels from the devastation of Hamas’ terrorism, understanding how Palestinian children are taught is essential to any discussion of the future in the region.

. . . The children of Gaza have three education options: Those classified as refugees attend schools run by the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency. Most others attend schools run by Hamas, the de-facto governors of Gaza. And there are a handful of private schools.

A 2013 New York Times article said that Gaza schools run by Hamas and the U.N. both use the Palestinian Authority curriculum that is also taught throughout the West Bank, but that “Hamas has added programs, like a military training elective” and other teachings to “infuse the next generation with its militant ideology.”

This curriculum “includes references to the Jewish Torah and Talmud as ‘fabricated,’” the Times reported, and a description of Zionism as a racist movement whose goals include driving Arabs out of the entire area between the Nile in Africa and the Euphrates in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.”

This is a curriculum designed to indoctrinate and radicalize its students in support of Hamas’ terrorist aims.

Even the comparatively moderate Palestinian Authority textbooks are problematic. In 2020, the European Union’s Parliament adopted three resolutions condemning the authority “for continuing to teach hate and violence in its school textbooks,” following a study confirming incitement in the curriculum. To teach physics, a textbook showed students “a picture of Palestinians hitting Israeli soldiers with slingshots,” the study found, while another “promotes a conspiracy theory that Israel removed the original stones of ancient sites in Jerusalem and replaced them with ones bearing Zionist drawings and shapes.”

UNRWA schools in Gaza, too, are replete with antisemitism. A 2018 article in The Times of Israel cited examples including the lionization of Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led a 1978 attack on a bus in Tel Aviv that killed more than 30  people, as a “heroine and martyr of Palestine,” and the description of the victims of an attack in Psagot, a settlement in the occupied West Bank, as “a barbecue party.”

When I hear Israeli survivors of the massacre describe the sheer hate and absence of humanity in the eyes of their attackers, I’m unsurprised. Those eyes were forced open to a false, hate-filled view of Jews for years.

I could show you more videos or textbook excerpts (but check this link given above), but you can find them yourself if you’re interested.

Is it any wonder that the Hamas butchers showed no hesitation, and certainly no contrition? They were brainwashed.

h/t: Malgorzata, Norman

New Zealand educational attainment plummets, as does school attendance, all while students demand a four-day school week

October 6, 2023 • 10:50 am

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.

American secondary schools ditch algebra and advanced math requirements in the name of equity

July 23, 2023 • 9:30 am

Here’s a bit of Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary that I highlighted on Saturday.

→ Make algebra illegal! Progressives have been waging a long battle against accelerated math courses in middle and high school, and they are winning. A lot. First they won San Francisco, where Algebra I was banned in public middle schools. Now this week, they basically got that to be the new California math policy. And it’s been spreading: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other school districts have followed suit. Basically, white parents are 1) convinced that black kids simply can’t learn algebra and the only possible solution is to ban the class, and 2) alarmed how much better the Asian kids are at this class and worried it might hurt little Miffy’s prospects. For now, just read this great takedown by economics writer Noah Smith: “Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity.”

Well, of course you have to check the references for yourself, but by and large they do check out. Remember that in America “middle school” is all secondary school from grade 6 up to the beginning of high school, which is grade 9—students from about twelve to fifteen years old.  Nellie’s explanation for the banning of algebra, however, is undoubtedly correct.

First, let’s check out her three claims, which I’ve put in bold below. Two of them are accurate, and one is semi-accurate:

1.) San Francisco bans algebra in public middle schools: This appears to be true: go here or here.

2.) New California math policy bans algebra in middle schools: This appears to be questionable. The source above says this (my emphasis):

Critics, including many parents of high-achieving students, worried that students would be prohibited from taking appropriately challenging courses—and that delaying Algebra until 9th grade wouldn’t leave students enough time to take calculus, generally viewed as a prerequisite for competitive colleges, by their final year in high school.

That language has since been revised. The approved framework still suggests that most students take Algebra I or equivalent courses in 9th grade, through either a traditional pathway or an “integrated” pathway that blends different math topics throughout each year of high school.

But the framework notes that “some students” will be ready to accelerate in 8th grade. It cautions that schools offering Algebra in middle school assess students for readiness and provide options for summer enrichment support that can prepare them to be successful.

This implies that algebra will be optional (as other sources say) in the 8th grade, the last year of “middle school” (“junior high school” as mine was called). It’s possible that some schools won’t offer it, though.

HOWEVER, the new California standards don’t appear to ban algebra, though I haven’t read them carefully. What they seem to offer up to grade 8 is a form of  optional algebra: “algebra lite”. Perhaps that’s why Nellis said “basically” that is the new California math policy.  From a FAQ on the state’s website:

Chapter 8 of the draft Mathematics Framework notes that: “Some students will be ready to accelerate into Algebra I or Mathematics I in eighth grade, and, where they are ready to do so successfully, this can support greater access to a broader range of advanced courses for them.”

The framework also notes that successful acceleration requires a strong mathematical foundation, and that earlier state requirements that all students take eighth grade Algebra I were not implemented in a manner that proved optimal for all students. It cites research about successful middle school acceleration leading to positive outcomes for achievement and mathematics coursetaking, built on an overhaul of the middle school curriculum to prepare students for Mathematics I in eighth grade, teacher professional development and collaborative planning time, and an extra lab class for any students wanting more help.

To support successful acceleration, the framework also urges, in chapter 8: “For schools that offer an eighth grade Algebra course or a Mathematics I course as an option in lieu of Common Core Math 8, both careful plans for instruction that links to students’ prior course taking and an assessment of readiness should be considered. Such an assessment might be coupled with supplementary or summer courses that provide the kind of support for readiness that Bob Moses’ Algebra project has provided for many years for underrepresented students tackling Algebra.”

3.) Cambridge, Massachusetts bans algebra in middle schools. The link above, via the Boston Globe, appears to give an accurate account: algebra is banned until high school:

Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.

Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.

Now getting rid of the algebra option in middle school, which is where I took it, is about the dumbest thing I can imagine, even if you buy the rationale: to “level the playing field of knowledge” so that the variation in math knowledge is reduced among all students, providing a kind of “knowledge equity”. Because minority students don’t do as well in algebra as white students or especially Asian students, by eliminating algebra you reduce the disparity in achievement among groups.  But preventing advanced students from taking algebra before high school only punishes those students, including minority students, who have the ability and desire to handle algebra. It prevents those students from going on to calculus, and perhaps other advanced math classes, early in high school. The result: a impediment in the way of students who want to and have the ability to go onto STEMM careers. This may be the craziest move I’ve seen done in the name of “equity”: removing the ability of capable students to access classes they want and can handle.

But Noah Smith’s column, cited by Nellie above, gives a much better summary, underlining the sheer lunacy of this policy. Click to read:

An excerpt:

A few days after Armand’s post, the new California Math Framework was adopted. Some of the worst provisions had been thankfully watered down, but the basic strategy of trying to delay the teaching of subjects like algebra remained. It’s a sign that the so-called “progressive” approach to math education championed by people like Stanford’s Jo Boaler has not yet engendered a critical mass of pushback.

And meanwhile, the idea that teaching kids less math will create “equity” has spread far beyond the Golden State. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.

It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.

The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.

. . . When you ban or discourage the teaching of a subject like algebra in junior high schools, what you are doing is withdrawing state resources from public education. There is a thing you could be teaching kids how to do, but instead you are refusing to teach it. In what way is refusing to use state resources to teach children an important skill “progressive”? How would this further the goal of equity?

. . .Now imagine what will happen if we ban kids from learning algebra in public junior high schools. The kids who have the most family resources — the rich kids, the kids with educated parents, etc. — will be able to use those resources to compensate for the retreat of the state. Either their parents will teach them algebra at home, or hire tutors, or even withdraw them to private schools. Meanwhile, the kids without family resources will be out of luck; since the state was the only actor who could have taught them algebra in junior high, there’s now simply no one to teach them. The rich kids will learn algebra and the poor kids will not.

That will not be an equitable outcome.

In fact, Smith cites a fairly well-known study from Dallas Texas in which students were all put into honors math classes and were forced to opt out instead of opt in. This policy was implemented in 2019-2020, and the result was a dramatic increase in ethnic diversity in honors math classes in the sixth grade (students about 12 years old). The rise is stunning.  This is what we could have if we challenge students rather than accept their deficiencies. But no, that’s not the “progressive” way, which is to dumb down everything to the lowest level.

, , , , How did we end up in a world where “progressive” places like California and Cambridge, Massachusetts believe in teaching children less math via the public school system, while a city in Texas believes in and invests in its disadvantaged kids? What combination of performativity, laziness, and tacit disbelief in human potential made the degradation of public education a “progressive” cause célèbre? I cannot answer this question; all I know is that the “teach less math” approach will work against the cause of equity, while also weakening the human capital of the American workforce in the process.

We created public schools for a reason, and that reason still makes sense. Teach the kids math. They can learn.

I’m not even going to get into the debate about those who suggest that math class could be a way (surprise!) of teaching social justice. That’s also part of the revised California standards, and is summarized in this article by the Sacramento Observer (click to read):

A short excerpt:

The state of California is under scrutiny for its release of a math framework that aims to incorporate “social justice” into mathematics, despite calls from parents for improved education. The California Department of Education (CDE) and the California State Board of Education (SBE) unveiled the instructional guidance for public school teachers last week.

One crucial section of the framework  [JAC: go to chapter 2 of the link] emphasizes teaching “for equity and engagement” and encourages math educators to adopt a perspective of “teaching toward social justice.” The CDE and SBE suggest that cultivating “culturally responsive” lessons, which highlight the contributions of historically marginalized individuals to mathematics, can help accomplish this goal. The guidance further advocates for avoiding a single-minded focus on one way of thinking or one correct answer.

It’s clear from reading the California standards (especially Chapter 2 above) that “equity” means not just equal opportunity, but equal outcomes.  I want to take a second to address that because a few readers have maintained that “equity” simply means “equal opportunity”. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need the word “equity,” would we? No, equity is understood, in all the discussions above, to mean equal outcomes: children of all ethnic groups should be on par in their math learning.

That this is the standard meaning of equity (i.e., “groups should be represented in a discipline exactly in proportion to their presence in a population”) is instantiated in this well known cartoon:

Now this cartoon has a valid point: “equality” means little if groups start out with two strikes against them. But it’s also clear that “equity” means “equal outcomes” (more boxes) not equal opportunity (everybody gets a box).  I’m completely in favor of equality of opportunity for all groups, recognizing at the same time that this is the “hard problem” of society, one that won’t be solved easily. But it has to be solved if you believe in fairness.

I’m not a huge fan of equity, simply because it’s often used as proof of ongoing “systemic racism”, when in fact there are many other causes for unequal representation. Further, it’s the single-minded drive for “equity” that has led to to ridiculous actions like removing algebra from middle school.

Indigenous New Zealand “moon school” runs on superstition and astrology

July 13, 2023 • 10:30 am

This is what will happen if the “indigenization” of New Zealand’s public education proceeds apace, accompanied by the view that “other ways of knowing” are to be given equal time with modern science—or modern education. Both articles below, the first from Ako, “the [New Zealand] journal for education professionals, and the second from New Zealand’s Newshub via MSN, describe the same school.

As far as I can gather, this Māori-centric school is funded by the government, but appears to cater mainly to Māori students, although fewer than 10% of the students are Māori. The kicker is that the school runs on Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, and appears to involve a heavy dose of astrology.

While the students do appear to gain some practical knowledge about harvesting and cooking food (see below), it seems to me that they’re not getting the kind of comprehensive modern education that will get the students jobs and make them useful citizens to the country as a whole. And if you’re one of the 81% of non-Māori students, you’ll learn a ton about the culture and language, as well as some practical knowledge of the Māori. But will you be in good educational stead?

But read for yourself. I’ll quote mainly from the first article (click on screenshots to read). First, from Ako:

From New Zealand’s Newshub via MSN:

From the first article, which is heavy on Māori words.  “Maramataka”, as I said, is the Māori lunar calendar. The school is Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Tūtūtarakihi (“Tūtūtarakihi Māori Education School”), on the North Island, which teaches students through their first eight years of school. (That would be up to the beginning of high school in the U.S.)

Here’s part of the justification for such a school:

What does understanding of ancient knowledge give us? Imagine having the blueprints for the pyramids of Giza right in front of us, the schematics for the mysterious Nazca Lines or the astronomical codex that guided the construction of Miringa Te Kaakara.

Sadly, the principles of knowledge used in the construction of these marvels have been largely lost to time, held only through the passing on of ever decreasing pools of understanding amongst the older generations.

Within maramataka, we are fortunate enough to have a vast assortment of knowledge remain present. Do we relegate this know-how to be lost in time, or apply it to increase wellbeing and a deeper understanding of our environment and how it affects us?

What do the Nazca lines and pyramids have in common? They are “spiritual”, often thought to involve aliens or numinous inspiration. And yes, we have pretty good ideas about how the pyramids and Nazca lines were constructed, though the significance of the lines are debated. As for the Miringa Te Kaakara, that is simply a cross-shaped house whose “principles of construction” are well known.

This school has been going about four years, but hasn’t been formally assessed in terms of educational outcome. Nevertheless, the teachers express overwhelming enthusiasm about the results:

When Henarata Ham (Te Aitanga aa Hauiti) principal at Te Kura oo Hirangi in Tuurangi was asked “Why did you do it?” the simple answer was, “Why not?” She said that after surveying whaanau and staff there was a 100 percent uptake for the concept. “So far, there have been no negatives, all of the results have been positive. This is the foundation for all of our knowledge, growing our iwi and whaanau citizens.”

From Newshub:

The Ministry of Education told The Hui: “The establishment of Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Tūtūtarakihi delivers on education objectives for ākonga Māori, tamariki, and rangatahi to be able to access kaupapa Māori learning where they and their whanau are connected and engaged.”

(Translation: “The Ministry of Education told The Hui: “The establishment of Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Tūtūtarakihi delivers on educational objectives for Māori students, children, and young people to be able to access standard Māori learning where they and their family are connected and engaged.”)

Could there be confirmation bias here? We won’t know until there’s a formal assessment of the students’ progress and knowledge.

And there’s this:

It added: “Kura Kaupapa Māori settings deliver great educational achievement and wellbeing outcomes for their akonga Māori, and their whanau.”

Rangimarie said the children and their whanau benefit through the revival of lost customs.

“If we truly seek well-being through that path, we can continue. There is no well-being for the Māori people living in poverty and illness. Therefore, this is one way to restore well-being to our people.”

This tribalism reminds me of the Orthodox Jewish schools in both Israel and the U.K., which don’t have separation of church and state. It’s fine to have religious or ethnic-centered schools run by astrology, but not ones funded by the public.

So here’s what the students learn: a combination of practical Māori knowledge, a smidgen of “standard” scientific knowledge, and some astrology:

Michelle Haua (Ngaati Porou, Te Awe Maapara) of Hiruharama Kura in Ruatooria spoke to Ako in 2021 about how she uses the maramataka in her classroom. So what has changed since then?

“One of the effects of COVID-19 was general price hikes, couple this with increased weather disturbance due to our global climate crisis, we are seeing food costs in particular becoming a huge problem for whaanau [extended families].”

Haua looks to the maramataka [lunar calendar] to help with these issues. “We use the seasons to do the things we are naturally good at. We are pragmatic and due to the rise in price of food, feel it is important to teach our children how to get kai [food] from our natural environment. The holistic practicalities of oranga pai [a good life]. We can teach them ABC and 123, but we are teaching them how to catch, prepare, cook and preserve kai under the auspices of maatauranga Maaori in conjunction with the maramataka.

Is this a general-education school or a cooking school?  But it’s said to “decolonize” thinking:

Te Wharekura oo Ngaati Rongomai, the first kura [school] to receive official confirmation of their transition to using maramataka, assisted greatly in “decolonising the thinking process. We made sure we had the facts to back us up, so this wasn’t change, it was a returning.”

Here’s the money quote, which mistakes the phases of the moon for what we think of as astrology:

The maramataka gives us information about phases of the moon which can be used and adapted to plan ahead whilst suiting localised curriculum, as well as regionally specific environments.

If you’re not convinced yet, I ask that you think about this for a minute: the Moon pulls the Earth’s tides which are largely comprised of water. Adult humans are made up of around 60 percent water. Does the Moon affect our “water” as it does the oceans? You be the judge.

The answer they are looking for, of course, is “yes”.  But the tides come in and go out twice a day, so we should have four episodes of psychological change per day. Is that astrology? You be the judge.

From the Newshub piece:

The Kura Kaupapa Māori o Tūtūtarakihi has set out to be one of the first kura to utilise Te Taiao, the natural environment, as the foundation of the curriculum – like doing maths by counting pipi [chickens] or reading stories about phases of the moon.

So that means that 80 percent of the time, the outdoors is their classroom and only 20 percent of school time is spent inside.

“The children will read and learn about the phases of the moon,” Kaiako Wikatana Popata said.

And when the children focus on holiday activities, it’s not Christmas or the January New Year.  Instead, following the Maramataka Māori, they’re marking the end of the year now.

“For some schools, the main strategy of learning is through paper and pen. But for us here at Tūtūtarakihi, [the children] can learn all sorts through environmental activities,” Pomare said.

Popata said people have judged the school because pupils are often at the beach.

“People assumed we were a bunch of hippies.”

But he said when the children gather shellfish, they’re also learning to analyse the waves and currents. They learn how to keep themselves safe and also learn the ancestral stories related to Tangaroa and Hinemoana.

Forgive me if I’m a bit dubious about teaching children how to “analyze waves and currents” while gathering shellfish on the beach. Yes, they can learn how not to drown, which is a practical skill useful in a country surrounded by water, but note that they also learn Māori ancestral legends. That’s a bit of anthropology and sociology that may be useful to know, but it sounds like the class—again 81% non-Māori—is being inundated with this stuff at the expense of what the country is falling behind in: reading, science, and math.

Instead, the curriculum appears to comprise astrology, legends, and practical knowledge relating to food. Such are the wishes of New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, who fostered this kind of stuff as Education Minister before he became The Boss.

The anonymous Kiwi who sent me these articles had the following to say:

Criticise this and you’ll be called a racist. To me this is pretty much equivalent to creationism.

This is certainly more like astrology than astronomy (e.g., the Māori never figured out that the Earth revolved around the sun, and they had no idea what stars were), but it does involve some accurate natural history observations and was useful in scheduling annual food production.

Maramataka was used to record seasonal cues for all sorts of things.  For example, the flowering of the pohutukawa tree was used to indicate the time of year when sea urchins (kina in Māori) have ripe gonads and are therefore good to eat. Of course this is correlative, not causal, and I’m sure you’re aware that various factors can lead to a decoupling between air and sea temperatures (e.g. upwelling, onshore movement of warm currents, etc) that would lead to errors in prediction, but as a rule of thumb based on inductive logic it’s reasonably reliable. There are other things like the flowering of certain trees coinciding with the spawning of a certain species of fish, and at that time Māori would stop fishing them.

So this is practical knowledge about an annual cycle of planting crops, harvesting crops, catching certain types of migrating fish, etc. It also involves a lot of woo.

Leaked curriculum proposal shows further degradation of science in New Zealand

July 5, 2023 • 10:30 am

UPDATE: (Read after reading what’s below the line.) NewsHub, which has seen the proposed curriculum document described below, also says that biology is largely missing from the proposed curriculum. For crying out loud! Click to read, and remember, I have not seen the confidential document but am reporting about it based on the statements of those who have seen it.

A bit of the article and some reaction from a NZ science educator:

Science teachers are stunned that a very early draft of the revised science curriculum makes no mention of physics, biology or chemistry.

Newshub has obtained the document, which was sent to a few teachers for their feedback.

Some of them were so alarmed they went public.

Doug Walker is the Head of Science at St Patricks College in Wellington.

“The moments I really thrive on are when you see that dawning epiphany on a student’s face,” Science Teacher Doug Walker said.

He has an absolute blast teaching science.

However, Doug is among a number of teachers who’re worried after seeing a leaked draft of the revised school science curriculum.

“I was quite surprised and concerned about what seems to be missing from the document,” he said.

That document proposes to teach science through five contexts – including the Earth system, biodiversity, and infectious diseases.

But nowhere in the draft does it actually mention teaching the basics of science, like physics, chemistry or biology.

h/t: Michael

Pardon me for writing about New Zealand science education again, but part of what I see as the function of this website is to serve as the voice of those scientists and science teacher in that country who are too cowed and fearful for their jobs to speak up against the dismantling os science teaching happening in their country. And I am encouraged to do so by many Kiwis who email me. So, here goes. . .

A draft of a proposed national New Zealand science curriculum was apparently leaked by concerned teachers to Dr. Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. His bona fides are these:

Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. This includes being the Associate Dean (Academic) of the University’s School of Education for the last 3 years.
Prior to his time at Victoria, Dr Johnston was the Senior Statistician at the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, a position he held for 6 years. Before that, he held positions at Melbourne and Latrobe universities.
Dr Johnston holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne.

The New Zealand Initiative, which published Johnston’s appalled reaction to the leaked curriculum, is described by Wikipedia as “a pro-free-market public-policy think tank and business membership organisation in New Zealand” whose areas of focus “include economic policy, housing, education, local government, welfare, immigration and fisheries.”

You can see Johnston’s outraged piece at the Initiative’s site by clicking on the screenshot below.  And below that is an article in the New Zealand Herald, the country’s biggest newspaper, that reports not only on the leaked document, which outlines secondary-school curricula, but also on the reaction of teachers and educators, which is by no means positive.

What’s missing from the new secondary-school curriculum is, well, most of chemistry in physics. Instead, these subjects will apparently be integrated into a “Big Four” holistic approach, which will teach all science under the rubrics of “climate change, biodiversity, the food-energy-water nexus, and infectious diseases.” (These are Johnston’s words.)  You can see that there’s no coherent coverage of a given subject, and I can’t even see how biology will be integrated into this framework.

Remember, this is just a draft, and perhaps public outrage will get the Ministry of Education to fix the curriculum, though I doubt it. But if it doesn’t fix it, the decline in New Zealand’s public education, as measured against comparable countries, will continue.

A few quotes from Johnston:

The Ministry of Education has recently produced a draft of the ‘refreshed’ curriculum for school science. But calling this document a science curriculum is far too generous. It is a blueprint for accelerating the decline of science in New Zealand.

Central concepts in physics are absent. There is no mention of gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, mass or motion. Chemistry is likewise missing in action. There is nothing about atomic structure, the periodic table of the elements, compounds or molecular bonding.

These are key concepts for any student wanting to study the physical sciences or engineering at university. The universities will have to prepare themselves to teach science from scratch. If the Ministry gets its way, our schools will no longer be doing it.

What, you might be wondering, does the draft curriculum cover?

It seems that everything in science, from early primary school through to Year 13, will be taught through just four contexts: climate change, biodiversity, the food-energy-water nexus, and infectious diseases.

These are all important topics, but they do not comprise the general science education that is our young people’s birthright. In fact, to understand these things with any degree of sophistication, a solid understanding of basic science concepts and theories is required.

No doubt Ministry officials think that young people will find these topics attractive. They may be right. But if they are not systematically taught the basic theoretical content upon which study of these matters depends, they will never understand them. Initial attraction will turn to frustration. The likelihood of our best and brightest finding their places on the shoulders of giants like Rutherford and MacDiarmid will be diminished.

Nothing about gravity or the structure of atoms, nothing about the periodic table or mass and motion? What is going on there?

I won’t quote at length, as the article is free, but I’ll add that Johnston finds that the curriculum proposal distorts even the nature of science, making the curriculum seem parochial:

Just as disturbing as what is absent from the new science curriculum, is that the curriculum writers don’t appear even to know what science is. The document reads as if it was written by bureaucrats, not scientists. It opens with a ‘purpose statement’, outlining three overarching things that students are supposed to learn.

The first reads, “science is developed by people being curious about, observing and investigating the natural world.” That is true – curiosity is an important attribute of scientists. Observation and investigation are key elements of scientific methods. But these are not the things that make science unique as an approach to understanding the universe.

What makes science unique is its highly refined, methodical, approach to investigation, linked to the logic of theory testing. The experimental method is preeminent in this regard. But ‘experiment’ is another word that is absent from the Ministry’s new science curriculum.

And here’s the parochialism, which will be the death of science in this country:

Next, the curriculum tells us, students will “develop place-based knowledge of the natural world and experience of the local area in which they live.”

As Johnston retorts, “One of the beautiful things about science is that it takes us beyond the local.” I may be wrong, but I suspect this “place-based knowledge” comes from influence of the Māori, who are increasingly insisting that they must have control over their own scientific endeavors rather than integrate them into the whole of science. And Māori science is perforce local science.

The article below, from the New Zealand Herald, reprises what Johnson said (the paper must have seen a draft), but adds some comments. Click to read, and if it’s paywalled you can find it archived here.

A few bits:

Science teachers are shocked that an advance version of the draft school science curriculum contains no mention of physics, chemistry or biology.

The so-called “fast draft” said science would be taught through four contexts – the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases.

It was sent to just a few teachers for their feedback ahead of its release for consultation next month, but some were so worried by the content they leaked it to their peers.

Teachers who had seen the document told RNZ they had grave concerns about it. It was embarrassing, and would lead to “appalling” declines in student achievement, they said.

More critics, some of them apparently big machers:

Association of Science Educators president Doug Walker said he was shocked when he saw a copy.

“Certainly, in its current state, I would be extremely concerned with that being our guiding document as educators in Aotearoa. The lack of physics, chemistry, Earth and space science, I was very surprised by that.”

New Zealand Institute of Physics education council chairman David Housden said physics teachers were not happy either.

“We were shocked. I think that physics and chemistry are fundamental sciences and we would expect to find a broad curriculum with elements of it from space all the way down to tiny particles.”

. . .Institute president Joachim Brand said he was worried teenagers would finish school without learning fundamental knowledge about things like energy and matter.

He warned the draft was heavy on philosophy and light on actual science.

“There is too little science content. Science needs to be learned by actually doing it to some degree. You need to be exposed to the ideas of how maybe atoms work, how electricity works, how electric forces and if that is not specified and you’re only given these broad contexts, then I’m really worried there will be huge gaps,” he said.

. . .Secondary Chemistry Educators New Zealand co-chairperson Murray Thompson said after he read the document he was left asking where the science was.

“The stuff in there is really interesting, but we have to teach basic science first. Where’s the physics and chemistry and why can’t we find words like force and motion and elements and particles, why aren’t those words in there?

“It’s the same mistake that they made with maths and literacy. They said ‘here’s the system, here’s the way’ and the maths was all about problem-solving and written problems and all that stuff without the basic skills,” Thompson said.

But of course given the fact that many educators don’t seem to care that much about a rigorous science education, you can find defenders of this plan, though only one is quoted:

One of the curriculum writers, director of the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research at the University of Waikato Cathy Buntting, rubbished suggestions key areas physics and chemistry would not be taught.

“Absolutely not. But they will be teaching the chemistry and the physics that you need to engage with – the big issues of our time – and in order to engage with the excitement of science and the possibilities that science offers,” she said.

However, Buntting said the document was intended to encourage change.

“What we are pushing towards with the current fast draft is more of a holistic approach to how the different science concepts interact with each other rather than a purist, siloed approach.”

Bunting is not a scientist but a specialist in education, and her concentration appears to be largely on “citizen science”.  (By the way, I’ve realized that the word “siloed” should raise a red flag, as, when used as a pejorative as above, it’s the opposite of “holistic”, another red-flag word, as is “stakeholders.”)

I should add that Wikipedia notes that the founders of the University of Waikato “From the beginning. . . . envisaged that Māori studies should be a key feature of the new university. It appears to be the center for Māori studies among New Zealand universities, and its webpage says this:

The world is looking to Indigenous knowledge to solve modern-day issues. Rated as one of the leading Mātauranga Māori centres in the country, we represent innovation and tradition in teaching and research, and provide global leadership in sustainable development and Indigenous issues. Our students are armed with the knowledge and attitude to advance Indigenous peoples and provide cultural perspectives in contemporary environments. Create positive change. Learn from the best.

No, the world is not looking to Indigenous knowledge to solve modern-day issues (I’ll name two of these issues: development of vaccines and global warming). Indigenous knowledge, if relevant, can surely be folded into the science mix to solve problems, but it’s usually more tradition-based than forward looking. And the mention of Mātauranga Māori (MM), or Māori “ways of knowing” is a bit disturbing, for MM that’s more than just empirical, trial-and-error based knowledge that can be taken as part of science. MM includes, as I keep saying, religion, ethics, morality, tradition, and superstition. It is not a “way of knowing” but a “Māori way of living.”

At any rate, although the leaked document was a draft, it doesn’t bode well for Kiwi science education. The only two readers’ comments on the NZ Herald page show that at least some of the public isn’t fooled: