Education Questions That Demand Answers!


The latest OECD report on education has New Zealand still ranked at the top in educational achievement. We are rated 4th in reading and science literacy and 7th for mathematics. England on the other hand has slipped hugely since 2000, having dropped from 7th to 25th in reading, from 8th to 28th in mathematics and from 4th to 16th for science. Australia is ranked well behind us and the US can only manage middle rankings.

It was also revealed that New Zealand spends less on education per student than nearly all 34 OECD countries. The report shows that we still have a spread of achievement, but then again our levels of child poverty remain amongst the highest in the OECD.

Some questions:

If teachers are working in an education environment that is under resourced compared to other developed countries, yet we still manage maintain our top rankings, shouldn't we be celebrating the quality of our teachers?

If England is plummeting in their education achievement, why did we employ someone who was partly responsible for that decline to head our Education Ministry?

When our government is spending $12 billion on motorways that do not pass basic cost/benefit analysis and maintaining tax cuts to the rich that cost around $800 million a year of lost revenue, why are they subsidizing both by cutting funding to education?

Comments

Anonymous said…
"When our government is spending $12 billion on motorways that do not pass basic cost/benefit analysis....."

You have to wonder about the cost/benefit analysis, don't you?

A prime example is the dedicated bus lanes beside the motorway on the northern side of the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
A motorway lane carries a maximum of 1800 vehicles per hour. In peak hour traffic, even if each car carried only one person, the bus lane would need one bus every minute, each carrying 30 passengers, to be as efficient.
How can our politicians not understand even the most basic cost/benefit analysis?
Dave Kennedy said…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_lane
http://www.transportpolicy.org.uk/PublicTransport/BusLanes/BusLanes.htm

I'm not an expert on bus lanes, Anonymous, but I have read more that supports them than otherwise. Most cities in Europe appear to use them or light rail and they don't suffer from the same levels of congestion.

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