{"id":1191,"date":"2025-12-09T22:07:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T22:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/?p=1191"},"modified":"2025-12-09T22:07:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T22:07:23","slug":"keeping-education-at-the-table-not-on-the-menu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/?p=1191","title":{"rendered":"Keeping education at the table, not on the menu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I attended an event hosted by Aotearoa Educators Collective<\/a> recently. They screened the excellent documentary \u201cMultiple Choice\u201d<\/a>, directed by Ted Dintersmith, which explores the unique execution of combined academic and vocational training at the John Handley High School and Innovation Center<\/a> in Winchester, Virginia. After the film, a panel of guests addressed the ways the movie\u2019s message related to the current shifts in Aotearoa New Zealand\u2019s curriculum<\/a> under the current right-wing government.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After some discussion of the ways education has been used as a political football (both in terms of knocking it all over the field as well as point-scoring opportunities), an audience member asked the guests, somewhat desperately, how to keep politics out of educational policy. I jolted in my seat as my brain shouted out, \u201cYou can\u2019t!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I have about 45 years experience at masking these intrusively loud opinions (okay, that\u2019s entirely debatable\u2014I know plenty of people who\u2019d say I\u2019ve never mastered that skill completely), so I was able to mostly keep my mouth shut. I did<\/em> whisper to my companion, \u201cThat\u2019s the wrong question,\u201d but otherwise held my tongue until my chance to contribute to the discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I absolutely get where this person was coming from. It seems wildly illogical that educational content and funding get shoved back and forth by every change in the political winds\u2014why shouldn\u2019t enough money for schools and teachers with the highest standards be a nonpartisan issue? Why don\u2019t education experts and subject specialists design curriculum that everyone can agree does the best job of helping kids learn what they need to be good citizens with a bright future? I mean, it only makes sense! Why does politics have to enter into this at all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I regret to inform you, however, that politics is all over this and always will be. Politics is about deciding who a government should serve and how best to collect and distribute resources to perform that service. The differences among parties and politicians come from the different answers to all the things that go into those decisions: taxation, budgeting, social programmes and services, among many others. As long as there is disagreement about these things, politics is going to influence education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The current right-wing government believes that if corporations are doing well, New Zealand is doing well. Corporations want lower taxes, government subsidies, and access to more resources to expand so they can raise their profits. Those profits flow to their C-suite leaders and shareholders, not the workers or communities who provide the material and labour that actually generate wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That labour is where education comes into the picture. If the corporations, and the government that prioritises them, want schools that churn out labourers<\/a> that are most easily jammed into the system as widgets to keep the gears turning, that\u2019s the kind of education policy<\/a> you\u2019re going to get. It\u2019s going to be light on critical thinking<\/a> so workers can be more easily influenced and exploited by both corporations and politicians, and it\u2019s going to be heavy on standardised testing<\/a> so workers are accustomed to low-creativity tasks and politicians get sound bites about success or crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why would politicians want a crisis in education<\/a>, you might be asking? Fair question. The answer is that crisis provides more opportunity for change than success does. Naomi Klein\u2019s analysis in The Shock Doctrine<\/em><\/a> looks at government regime change and opportunities for economic exploitation, but the same principles apply to other places people operate on the \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d ethos. It\u2019s harder to drum up a sense of urgency for continued improvements when things are going well than it is to make sweeping revisions if it seems like the system is failing. This serves the corporate masters who are served by messaging that education needs to be continually pared back to just literacy and numeracy<\/a> because we\u2019re not meeting those basic standards. How do we know we\u2019re not? The testing regime<\/a> whose data are analysed and publicised by the same politicians<\/a> who benefit from them–there\u2019s no incentive to do anything but report small gains<\/a> to claim success, but continued failure<\/a> to keep the crisis motivation for increased change.\u00a0As education expert Diane Ravitch<\/a> says, “Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also serves the idealogues who feel that a broader, inclusive, creative kind of education violates the social norms that their sense of nostalgia for a time when \u201cthe right people\u201d were in charge of things. Make no mistake: \u201cback to basics\u201d always means means back<\/a> in<\/a> time<\/a>. Testing shows that kids aren\u2019t learning to read<\/a> very well? It must be all the M\u0101ori words<\/a> in their primary school curriculum. Statistics show that fewer students are succeeding at university<\/a>? It must be the focus on inclusion and applied cross-curricular learning instead of sticking to the Western Classics<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the fatigue among educators<\/a> serves the political mission of the current right-wing government. When curriculum is constantly changing<\/a>, teachers have less time to create thoughtful lessons that challenge their students to think critically. That leaves them open to two corporate interests: curriculum factories<\/a> that churn out ready-made material that a teacher only has to read out, and the AI tech lords who offer their products as the answer to a time-poor profession\u2014just put in the concept you need to teach tomorrow, and AI will produce a full lesson plan<\/a>, complete with activities, slides, and assessments. And so what if the fatigue and lack of agency drives educators overseas<\/a> or out of the field<\/a> entirely? There are always more low-quality workers who are happy to get paid to read out their soulless scripts and create another generation of low-quality workers to succeed them. It even degrades the quantity and quality of future educational experts who might develop the critical evaluative skills to challenge the status quo and offer up innovative strategies to expand the possibilities beyond the narrow parameters they\u2019ve been sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are only two ways I know of to combat what every educator feels is a backwards slide. One is agency<\/a>. If teachers have control over their classrooms, they can choose the best way to teach their students. If that means spending a little longer on one concept to make sure everyone gets it before moving on, they can make that decision. If that means changing something that hasn\u2019t been working or feels out of date, they can make that decision. If that means having a stronger voice in school policies, that\u2019s their choice too. People who feel like they have power over their work find more joy<\/a> in it, and their standards and performance rise accordingly. Teachers will never have enough time for everything they want to do\u2014that\u2019s as much a part of the job as running out of whiteboard markers and fighting with the printer. When you\u2019re empowered to think creatively, ideas pop up faster than you can catch them. Teachers are eternal tinkerers\u2014a good lesson can always be better, can reach more students, can make more connections. We can only get better at the job if we have the freedom and agency to act on those innovations and improvements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second way is the answer to the question at the beginning of this essay: it\u2019s politics. It is not<\/em> unprofessional for educators to engage in political activities when politics determines what<\/a> they\u2019re<\/a> told<\/a> to<\/a> teach<\/a> and what<\/a> resources<\/a> they\u2019re<\/a> given<\/a> to do it with. We should expect teachers to have opinions on how to draw the best results out of their students\u2014they\u2019re the experts, in the classrooms where learning does or doesn\u2019t happen every day. As they say in community organising circles, if you don\u2019t have a seat at the table, you\u2019re probably on the menu. Much as the current right-wing government may want to tell us otherwise, it\u2019s not a conflict of interest for educational experts when they get involved in policymaking. They\u2019re the people we want<\/em> making the curriculum, based on the best evidence-backed methods, even if they include things the people in power don\u2019t feel serve their corporate or ideological priorities.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the only way to guarantee we have a government that puts those people in charge is to make sure voters elect the people who agree that it\u2019s the government\u2019s job to provide schools that give every child the best, most fulfilling future. That means taxing the people who can most afford it to fund public services like the education system. That means making a budget that adequately equips every school with the resources it needs to support its children, generation after generation, not year-by-year. That means paying teachers like the essential experts who are entrusted with our most precious resource, which attracts the best, most dedicated people to the profession. That means investing in research to keep education effective and responsive to changes in the world, whether that\u2019s new technology or economic shifts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this happens on its own. It all depends on politics. There\u2019s no way to disentangle political motives, actions, or speech from education. And we need to stop wasting our time and energy trying to. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I attended an event hosted by Aotearoa Educators Collective recently. They screened the excellent documentary \u201cMultiple Choice\u201d, directed by Ted Dintersmith, which explores the unique execution of combined academic and vocational training at the John Handley High School and Innovation Center in Winchester, Virginia. After the film, a panel of guests addressed the ways the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,606,81,214],"tags":[130,17,84,626,298,624,42,623,378,147,625,18],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curriculum-instruction","category-new-zealand-studies","category-political-science","category-social-studies","tag-activism","tag-children","tag-education","tag-funding","tag-government","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-public-education","tag-schools","tag-teaching","tag-testing","tag-values"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}