I confess I do not really understand the debate on national standards for education. This is a sad admission for an opinionated bloke like myself, but I really just don’t understand the teacher’s unions objections to them. I have tried to follow the debate but the union’s response makes no sense at all to me.
It seems [...]

I’m puzzled.
There seems to be a lot of negativity being generated by the principles and teachers concerning the new education standards introduced yesterday. I understand the usual plea of  schools saying they “needed more time to prepare”. The education system is notorious for having more resistance to change than even the health system, a resistance [...]

Remember Helen Clark’s “keep ‘em in school” plan’s? John Key cried “me too” and has followed through with a scheme for employing young workers. Proper apprenticing schemes have yet to be set up.
It is a pity that politicians usually have egos that are too big to be humbled, because it seems that normal market forces [...]

Pita Sharples calls for universities to grant open access to all Maori. He thinks this will improve the percentage of Maoris with bachelors degrees, currently 7.1% as compared to 17.6% for Europeans. I think he is making a number of fundamental errors.
Firstly, as David Farrar points out over at Kiwiblog, giving open access to all [...]

Both Kerre Woodham and The HOS editor comment on Professor John Hattie’s study that reveals that the only thing that really matters in education is the skill of the teacher – everything else comes a very poor second. Both Woodham and the Editor observe that this has the strong implication that teachers should be paid on [...]

Apparently, tens of thousands of students are passing NCEA without sitting any sort of examination. This means they pass on the internal assessment only in that particular subject. Frankly this is the inevitable result of a system that seems to lump everybody into “achieved” or “not achieved”. Once you have passed, there is zero incentive to achieve more, even [...]

Readers of MacDoctor Moments will know that my wife and I home-schooled both of my children. Consequently, I don’t have a lot of experience with parent/teacher meetings and school reports; at least, not past primary school. So I have not seen reports as turgid as this one detailed in the SST:
James “finds self-management quite challenging”. [...]