Given Hekia Parata's claims on National Radio, I felt the need to write another letter. I have covered much of this in an earlier post in more detail because the 250 word limit poses restrictions in including all of National's damaging initiatives.
Dear Sir
The National Government is so determined to lift the "quality" of teaching in our public schools that they have:
- Sent their
own children to private schools that received $35 million in extra
funding.
- Gave the rich
over $2 billion in tax cuts while allowing a huge increase in child
poverty.
- Cut $25
million from the Ministry of Education budget.
- Sacked advisors
for science and technology
- Spent $60
million on implementing the flawed National Standards, without a
trial and against advice.
- Employed a
Ministry of Education CEO from a country ranked behind New Zealand in
educational achievement.
- Closed our
residential schools for children with behavioural needs.
- Refused to pay
school support staff a living wage.
- Refused to
increase school operations grants to reflect the true costs of running a
school.
- Bullied and
berated teachers so that morale is low and many of our best teachers are
considering leaving the profession.
- Planned to
increase class sizes to 1:27 when the OECD average is 1:21.
- Dropped the qualified early childhood teachers target from 100% to 80%
Under a National Government we have seen our OECD ranking for water quality (the Yale report) drop from 2nd to 43rd and New Zealand was in the top 5 for education when National took office but we have already seen a drop in science achievement.
Education Minister, Hekia Parata,
claims that the National Government's changes are all about lifting the quality
of teaching in public schools but all I can see is one hell of a Tui billboard!
Yours sincerely...
2 comments:
Hi Just to correct about the ECE funding leve. THey dropped the 80% funding level as well so that the difference you receive in funding for 50-79% and 80+% does not cover the salary differences for registered staff to reach this. So if you were in ECE for the money you would staff at 55% registered teachers and get a better financial return than breaking the 80% margin
Thanks, Rachel, it's even worse than I thought :-(
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