POLICY DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN NEW ZEALAND

A SUBMISSION ON THE GOVERNMENT GREEN PAPER



QUALITY TEACHERS FOR QUALITY LEARNING: A Review of Teacher Education

EDUCATION FORUM

April 1998

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In recent years there has been an upsurge of public concern with the state of public education in New Zealand, as has occurred in other English-speaking countries. Public confidence in the use professional educators make of the increased resources made available to formal education has declined.

In this context, several reports on aspects of public education have been published. However, they have been written mainly by people responsible for the system giving rise to this anxiety. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Ministry of Education Green Paper, Quality Teachers for Quality Learning: A Review of Teacher Education, like similar official publications, is written in a spirit of confidence and complacency with many lofty aims but little acknowledgement and analysis of problems.

The Green Paper's proposals are not clearly related to its objectives, the problems in attaining them and alternative ways of addressing them. This results in proposals which are inconsistent with the objectives and which could well make matters worse.

Unlike the Green Paper, this submission views teacher education and related issues as problematic. It concludes that the Green Paper should not form the basis of the government's decisions on teacher education and that submissions should be evaluated independently of the Ministry of Education. However, the Green Paper and the submissions on it might form a starting point for the development of a further discussion paper on the subject.

The government already intervenes in teacher education in numerous ways unique in tertiary education. Its overall effect is to create problems in choice, accountability and information. It is not clear that there are any countervailing benefits; the proposed new interventions could exacerbate existing problems. Before embarking on further interventions, the government should review its objectives for teacher education and the effectiveness of existing interventions in achieving those objectives.

The Green Paper is rightly concerned about the supply of teachers. Unfortunately its proposals are likely to be unhelpful. Rather than raise the attractiveness of teaching as a career, the proposed professional body is likely to isolate teaching as an educational backwater. The creation of flexible pathways into teaching is suggested by the Green Paper, but existing problems arising from the quasi-monopoly of the major providers of teacher education are not addressed. This submission concludes that greater centralised controls via standards and through a unified pay system seem likely to compound problems of recruitment, especially in areas of shortages, and thus to portray teaching as an increasingly unusual occupation.

Teacher supply would be assisted by rigorous student selection and demanding pre-service training with some relevance to employment outside teaching. Flexible pay structures which reward merit and address specific shortages are required. The ministry should encourage more mature people with a sound education or specific and relevant skills to enter teaching without the need for a lengthy and expensive period of pre-service training. Therefore, teacher registration requirements should be reviewed.

The role of formal schooling has become diffuse, creating uncertainty about the role of teachers. In official pronouncements from the Ministry of Education knowledge has become downgraded as a priority for schooling and the gap filled by wider societal and politically correct concerns. Debate outside child-centred and reconstructionist ideologies is actively discouraged. All this further isolates teaching and has adverse effects on recruitment. The role of formal schooling needs to be reviewed and 'no-go' areas opened up for critical debate if teaching is to be seen as an intellectually vigorous profession and its status and morale improved.

The Green Paper fails to recognise that effective teaching requires effectively organised schools. Research on this issue points to fewer external controls on schools, not more. The establishment of a government-run professional body, the imposition of national standards controlling entry to, and progression within, the profession, and further centralisation of teacher compensation are likely to lead to less effective schools and less effective teaching within them even in the unlikely event that the Green Paper's other proposals led to better pre-service training.

The Green Paper stresses teacher 'quality' without defining the concept. The proposed means of ensuring quality is through further government interventions. The Green Paper, while identifying some problems such as in science and maths teaching, does not acknowledge the failures of the existing central planning approach to education and the reasons for those failures.

In discussing teacher quality, the Green Paper's treatment of substantive knowledge of the relevant curriculum areas is inadequate. Its treatment of pedagogy is far worse, being based on slim evidence and endorsing unhelpful approaches. This submission's view is that the government should not endorse any particular pedagogy. Instead it should open up the issue to objective debate drawing on research from, inter alia, continental European and some Asian countries.

A critical omission in the Green Paper is discussion about how quality teaching - in the sense of causing learning to happen - is to be identified. Of course quality teacher education and quality teaching are essential, but standards used in the managerial process proposed in the Green Paper are unlikely to correlate with how well pupils actually learn. This submission proposes that national assessments of all children at certain stages or ages, undertaken by an independent agency or agencies, are urgently required, and the results should be published. Ideally a value-added concept should be pursued.

Better information about the quality of teaching and learning in schools is critical, but it is of little use if parents cannot use it to determine the best schooling arrangements for their children. Thus the supply side of schooling must be opened up by equalising funding of private and state schools.

Generally the image of the education sector is poor. Teacher status is a complex issue, depending on some factors exogenous to teaching such as the value New Zealanders place on education. Factors within education include general perceptions of the sector as a whole, including the bureaucracy, colleges of education and university education faculties. In addition, concerns about pupil achievement and the constraints on debate about education are inimical to improving the status of the profession. A blinkered ministry appears to follow the tramlines of political correctness, uncaring or unconscious of where they may lead. The critical divide between education and indoctrination has become blurred. If the government wishes to address seriously issues of quality teaching, it must confront these concerns.

The Green Paper promotes professionalisation. However, it does not examine the characteristics of a profession, and the extent to which those characteristics do already, or should in the future, apply to teaching. Some present characteristics of teaching make professionalisation problematic including teaching's diffuse role, its lack of a clear and widely accepted knowledge base, and its domination by the teacher unions for whom the client is, understandably, the teacher and not the pupil. Heavy-handed managerial control of who can teach and how, via a government-run professional body, seems likely to deprofessionalise the sector, with adverse effects on morale, status and teacher quality and supply.

The professional body proposed in the Green Paper is likely to become a very costly bureaucratic nightmare. Moreover much of what the Education Forum considers unhelpful in terms of pedagogical directives within existing government approaches to education could well become mandatory or further enforced through the interpretation of a professional code. This submission urges that the professional body outlined in the Green Paper should not be established.

In teacher education, unit standards may assist student teachers to map the curriculum, but they should not be relied on for assessing student teachers. Prescribing standards for teacher education might seem an attractive short cut to raising quality but it is highly problematic. Unit standards consist of general descriptions of activities in which every teacher is bound to engage, whether well or badly. Consequently, unit standards are unlikely to guarantee educational standards. Further, the agencies responsible for enforcing unit standards may have little incentive to act in the best interests of school pupils. Teacher unions have strong incentives to set standards in such a way that the standards erect barriers to entry for new members but do not unduly disturb existing members. Supervisory bodies are likely to be stacked with educational professionals eager to ensure that their views are replicated and possible challenges rejected. Similar concerns can be raised about standards for practising teachers. In short, there is every reason to fear that the arsonists will be appointed to lead the fire brigade.

Generally, the government should not treat the tertiary education of teachers differently to other forms of tertiary education. Emphasis should be placed on full information about courses and programmes.

Established teacher education institutions have wide experience of assessing the practicums of student teachers. By and large the organisation of the practicums is one of their strengths, but there are shortcomings as well. The Green Paper should have devoted some thought to the strengths and weaknesses of current practicums and, in particular, considered what difference it might make if the onus of assessment were to lie with the school rather than the tertiary institution.

This submission expresses doubts about the educational usefulness of Maori-medium schooling for children since it does not appear to be aligned with probable causes of Maori under-achievement in education. The government should not assume that promoting Maori culture and language is consistent with improving educational achievement and closing the attainment gap. If the government considers that the interests of language and culture always trump those of educational achievement it should say so. If there is, in fact, no strong supporting empirical evidence for them, current and proposed policies would seem to involve wishful thinking and an irresponsible gamble with the life chances of some of New Zealand's most educationally disadvantaged children.

The government should fund Maori-medium teacher education in the same way and on the same basis as it funds other teacher education. It should fund research into the outcomes of various educational strategies, including forms of Maori-medium schooling, and publish the results so that parents can make up their own minds about where the balance of advantage lies for their own children. The same approach should be adopted for other groups, such as Christian teacher education colleges and schools.

The overall conclusion of this submission is that most of the proposals in the Green Paper are likely to be inconsistent with its objectives, as far as these can be discerned. Current problems in the education sector must be identified and their causes analysed before the government implements any further policy decisions. Since many current problems are due to existing government interventions in teacher education and in schooling, increasing government control is likely to make matters worse, not better.

The Education Forum advises a broad approach to teacher quality and supply issues. This requires a wide range of policy changes, such as less centralised control over the school curriculum, the publication of assessment data, the devolution of pay and conditions to schools, and equal funding of private and state schools. Pursuing improvements in the status of teaching per se is unlikely to be helpful as a policy objective. But treating schools and teachers as professionals capable of managing their own affairs is likely to raise status and morale and improve the supply of able people entering the profession. The best form of status for teachers would come from teaching the children of parents who choose, on the basis of reliable information, to send their children to their school.

On the issue of establishing a professional body, the Education Forum concludes that this should be a voluntary body without government control if it is to have real authority among teachers. Given the range of legitimately contestable issues in education, it is debatable whether one professional body could represent all or most of the views of teachers. A teacher's membership of a professional body that concentrated on improving the knowledge base and pedagogical skills of teachers could assist the school in determining the teacher's remuneration.



The recommendations in this submission are as follows:

Chapter 2: The Green Paper

• The Green Paper should not be accepted as a basis for the government's decisions about teacher education and the occupation of teaching. However the Green Paper and the submissions made on it might form the basis for the development of a further public discussion document on the subject.
• The government should arrange an independent evaluation of the submissions on the Green Paper.
  
  

Chapter 3: The Government's Involvement in Teacher Education

• The government should note that the range of existing government interventions in teacher education is extensive, and that the overall result of those interventions includes:

  - poor differentiation between providers of teacher education;
  
  - a lack of responsiveness in providers to changes in students' needs and labour market trends;
  
  - ineffective controls on the quality of teacher education, dominated by the interests of bureaucrats and providers; and
  
  - the reinforcement of prevailing ideology and much rhetoric by the vested interests.

• Before decisions are made on the proposals in the Green Paper, the government should review its objectives for teacher education and evaluate the effectiveness of existing interventions in achieving those objectives.
  
  

Chapter 4: Teacher Supply

• The government should note that the supply of teachers will be best assisted by rigorous student selection procedures and by academically demanding pre-service training that is also relevant to a range of occupations other than teaching.
• The government should note that the establishment of a government-initiated and government-influenced professional body could hinder recruitment to the teaching profession by restricting entry and encouraging a view of teaching as an occupational backwater.
• The government should note that the attraction and retention of able teachers and remedying teacher shortages in subjects such as science and maths require flexible pay structures which reward merit, not the continuation of centrally determined national awards. The unified pay system may well increase existing rigidities.
• The government should reconsider current teacher registration legislation with a view to encouraging suitable people - especially well educated and mature people, and those with relevant experience in other walks of life - to enter teaching without the need for pre-service training.
  
  

Chapter 5: Teacher Education within the Context of Schooling

• The government should note that there are unresolved tensions within the Green Paper arising from confusion about the role of schools and the responsibilities of teachers. These issues must be clarified before policy on teacher education and many of the other matters raised in the Green Paper can be determined.
• The government should note that effective teaching is most likely to take place in effectively organised schools and consider what are likely to be the features of a policy environment which is the one most likely to encourage effective schooling.
  
  

Chapter 6: Teacher Quality

• The highest priority in teacher education should be given to a trainee's substantive knowledge in the subject or subjects to be taught by the trainee, and the trainee's ability to convey it to, and develop associated skills within, students. The other educational sciences are important but best studied in-depth after some years of practical experience in the classroom.
• The government should not impose any particular pedagogical approach or approaches on New Zealand schools and teachers, whether through curriculum statements, professional standards or other means.
• The government should review the already extensive international research into teaching methods, including approaches adopted in continental Europe and Asia. It should take the lead in opening up this vital area for objective, dispassionate debate in New Zealand.
• The government should reject any notion of enshrining a 'one best' system of teacher education and training. Providers should be able, within broad parameters, to determine their own teacher training programmes and mix of content, pedagogical emphases and such like.
• The most useful government intervention in the education sector is for the state to require all school children to sit, at certain stages, national examinations in core subjects (say, English, maths, science, history and geography) and to publish the results. The publication of this information and a more open and rigorous debate about teaching methodologies will help schools and teachers to decide their own best strategies for, and approaches to, teacher training. It will also help parents to decide which schools are best for their children.
• To enable parents to use school-based information and to take decisions about which schools best suit their own children, the supply side of schooling must be opened up by equalising funding of state and private schools.
• On resourcing issues, the best policy approach is to provide funds for teacher development, as far as is practical, directly to schools, coupled with making data on schooling, in terms of the educational achievement of pupils, widely available.
  
  

Chapter 7: The Status of Teaching and Teachers

• It should be noted that the issue of teacher status cannot be addressed in isolation from several other factors. Some of these factors lie outside the education sector and include long-term societal changes and the degree of importance attached to education by the general public. Other factors are within the control of the education establishment and influence how education generally, including schools and their teachers, are perceived. These factors include:

  - the extent to which leading educators and education academics are open to searching debate, criticism and refutation;
  
  - whether the role of the teacher is well defined or diffuse;
  
  - the willingness or otherwise of educators to seek and publish objective measures of student performance; and
  
  - the willingness or otherwise of the Ministry of Education and other state education agencies to take part in open debate, to work from 'first principles' in developing policy issues, to identify and expose their assumptions, to revisit long-held orthodoxies and, where external advice is sought, to seek the best possible advice whether found locally or overseas.
  
  

• We recommend that the government commissions an objective, quality appraisal of current performance levels of New Zealand school students and the factors that influence their performance.
• The government should not proceed with the proposals in the Green Paper for establishing a professional body and professional standards. These proposals are unlikely to improve teacher quality, the status of teachers or student learning.
  
  

Chapter 8: Standards for Pre-service Teacher Education and Teachers

• The unit standards developed by the Teacher Education Advisory Group (TEAG) may provide a broad and useful overview of the ground and activities to be covered, but it would be most unwise to rely on their detailed application for assessing the quality of thought or performance of student teachers.
• The government should reject the notion that all primary teachers must be generalists, able to cover all the essential learning areas of the school curriculum and teach all children (including those with special needs). Instead, the Ministry of Education should investigate moves in other countries towards greater primary teacher specialisation. It should make its findings available to teacher educators in New Zealand.
• The government should note that the principle that special needs children have the right to take their place in the normal class is simplistic. Such children may have a prior right to special facilities and special expertise. There may also be a conflict of rights - between those of special needs children and those of other children.
• The government should reject the view that teacher education requires more or different supervision and monitoring than other forms of tertiary education. As outlined in the Green Paper, establishing and enforcing standards for pre-service education are likely to reduce innovation and lower the quality of these programmes by reinforcing what is already unhelpful. Instead, the quality of teacher education programmes is more reliably regulated by the publication of full information about programmes and courses to assist prospective student trainees in choosing a programme that suits them and to assist schools in recruiting suitable new staff members.
• Similarly, the government should not establish or enforce standards for entry into, and progression within, the teaching profession. Decisions on the recruitment and promotion of teaching staff are properly matters for principals and boards of trustees.
  
  

Chapter 9: A Professional Body for Teachers

• The government should recognise that the Ministry of Education's role in influencing teaching practice has not been useful, and that its role in this area should be largely restricted to establishing a core curriculum and publishing information on student performance.
• The government should not proceed with the establishment of a professional body as proposed in the Green Paper. The resource and educational costs would be considerable and the benefits very doubtful.
• The government should review the efficacy of existing controls over teaching and teacher education before introducing further controls.
  
  

Chapter 10: Maori Teacher Education

• The government should treat Maori-medium teacher education in the same way as other forms of teacher education.
• The government should encourage the sharing of knowledge and experience of different educational strategies among all teacher education providers.
• The government can usefully fund quality research into the outcomes of various education strategies, including Maori-medium schooling, and publish the results so that Maori parents can decide for themselves about the balance of advantage for their own children between Maori-medium schooling and other forms of schooling.
  
  

Chapter 11: Some Overall Conclusions and a Different Approach

Our recommendations for a general approach to teacher quality and supply issues are as follows:

• The government should address the issue of quality teaching on a broad policy front which involves:

  - less state control over the school curriculum,
  
  - publication of assessment data,
  
  - rigorous national qualifications at the secondary level,
  
  - devolving decisions regarding pay and conditions to schools, and
  
  - the equal funding of state and private schools.

• Pursuing status per se is probably unhelpful as a policy objective. The aim should be to establish an environment in which teachers can redefine their role and establish their own benchmarks for excellence.
• The government should encourage the establishment of voluntary bodies by groups of teachers instead of establishing a government dominated and directed professional body. Such a body or bodies should not be subsidised by the government, although they could be awarded contracts for research and administrative tasks if suitably equipped.
• Membership of a voluntary professional body with suitable entry criteria could be used as a basis for higher pay.
• Supply and quality problems should be identified and addressed directly.
  
  

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In the last ten years or so there has been an upsurge of public concern with the state of public education, particularly with the quality of teachers and teaching, in every leading English-speaking country and in several other advanced industrial nations.

In New Zealand during the same period real expenditure per student in the compulsory sector has risen considerably, and public confidence in the use professional educators make of these increased resources has declined. Doubts about the effectiveness of public education, directed at teacher education as much as at any other branch of education, have been expressed across a wide political spectrum.

In general, professional organisations of teachers and educational bureaucracies decried public concern about teacher quality as ignorant 'teacher bashing', but public misgivings have been largely substantiated. The Green Paper on teacher education, Quality Teachers for Quality Learning: A Review of Teacher Education (Ministry of Education 1997d), cites the findings of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that teachers' lack of knowledge in mathematics and science contributed to the relatively poor performance of New Zealand school pupils in the study and that many current teacher education programmes have a "worrying low" level of study of these subjects beyond the study of the curriculum (p. 32). One cannot teach what one does not know.

Although early childhood and primary teachers may be better equipped to teach 'communication skills' than mathematics or science, many have an inadequate grasp of the basic structures of language and thus lack the capacity to provide students with such knowledge. Public opinion is correct in its concern that school leavers are often equipped with a far lower level of mastery of their own language than is reasonable, given the resources devoted to education. There is also good reason to believe that many teacher educators play a part in the neglect of language skills, often out of a belief that structured initiation into the way the language works might inhibit creativity or fail to interest or appeal to students.

The title of the Green Paper, Quality Teachers for Quality Learning, reflects a natural aspiration. The question is how best to achieve this. In these terms, the Education Forum has grave reservations about the approach of the Green Paper and the value of the questions it raises. This is not to deny that there are some useful specific suggestions scattered here and there throughout the Green Paper. But we find the general tenor mistaken. Because we believe that the Green Paper overlooks certain questions, this submission does not follow the seven-headings structure which the Response Form suggests. To do this would have meant ignoring issues which are not addressed, or that are marginalised, in the Green Paper. Accordingly, we have adopted a rather different structure but make frequent cross-references to the relevant pages in the Green Paper. Because a number of issues arise in more than one context, this submission makes frequent cross-references to other chapters within it where related matters are discussed.

As regards teacher education, it is important to note that the sector is still dominated by the state colleges of education, though it is becoming a somewhat more varied sector as a result of new entrants (see Partington, 1997, especially chapter 5). The range of view within the sector is still limited, reflecting the colleges' dominance. However, this may widen over time in response to, inter alia, developments within the sector. Of course, there has been long-standing differences of interest between the colleges of education and university-based education departments which the current trend towards merged institutions is likely to throw into sharper relief.

In our discussion we have highlighted what we believe to be the underlying and critical issues in relation to teacher education and training, based on a reading of research papers provided by the Ministry of Education, other recent material on the New Zealand context, including Geoffrey Partington's Teacher Education and Training in New Zealand (Partington, 1997), and the wider debate on teacher education here and overseas.

Our submission discusses the question of the 'quality teacher', the issue of status in the teaching profession, the proposed professional body and the 'standards' it would administer, Maori teacher education, and the optimal institutional, funding and regulatory arrangements for teacher education. We begin with an overview of the Green Paper. Later chapters consider particular issues in more detail.

CHAPTER 2

THE GREEN PAPER

2.1 Overview

The Green Paper on teacher education sets ambitious targets, makes several strong claims for formal education and sets out a number of relationships on which the argument and its proposals depend.

The Green Paper's "vision" is for every young New Zealander to "participate fully and successfully in ... society". It is presented within a "strategic framework" within which "lifting educational achievement" is a "central theme" (p. 5). The "key" to educational achievement is a "top quality education" which is the "key objective" of the "recent reforms to New Zealand's compulsory education system" (p. 3). This is part of a wider goal "to become the most highly skilled nation in the world, with [educational achievement] widely distributed throughout the community" (p. 9) - the latter emphasis, on equal participation across ethnic groups, reflects a major concern of the Green Paper on tertiary education (Ministry of Education 1997c).

The Green Paper states that the teaching profession is responsible for "delivering this vision", and consequently the success of the education system depends on the "quality of teaching" in the classrooms. The review of teacher education is part of a "broader vision to enhance the professional status of teachers" (p. 5). The government sees the provision of quality pre-service and in-service teacher training as the principal way in which it can support the teaching profession in achieving the vision.

Thus the issue of teacher quality looms large in the Green Paper. A quality teacher is described as one who is well trained, well informed and capable of achieving results in (of course) a "rapidly changing environment" - an environment changing in terms of both technology and ethnic diversity (p. 3). Hence teachers have to be "proficient managers of change" (p. 3) and aware of "the growing importance of the pastoral side of the teaching profession" (p. 3). Similarly, schools will have to be "increasingly responsive to the needs of individual students and local communities" (p. 3).

The assumed relationships are spelled out more clearly elsewhere: "[educational] achievement is directly linked to teacher quality [which] is in turn influenced by effective teacher education" (p. 5).

What constitutes a quality teacher in the 21st century is expanded to include "strong subject matter knowledge" (for which there will be an "increasing" need), versatility and commitment to success. Education systems are to be "more accountable than in the past for the learning and achievement outcomes of all their students" (p. 5).

The proposals in the Green Paper are for the development of the "the most appropriate pre-service and in-service teacher education arrangements" (p. 5) and include:

o the establishment of a professional body for teachers;

o nationally agreed standards for teachers at entry and higher levels;

o a purchase model (advanced as an "option") for greater security in the qualitative and quantitative outcomes of pre-service teacher education;

o options for "building a critical mass of expertise of Maori-medium teacher education";

o widening practicum experience; and

o methods of improving the effectiveness of beginning teachers' induction.

These proposals are examined individually in later chapters of this submission.

2.2 Some initial observations

The terms of reference of the Green Paper's enquiry are nowhere clearly stated, and hence its structure and proposals are likely to be obscure to readers. The minister's Foreword implies (p. 3, paragraph 4) that the outcome of the review is to ensure that teachers are both trained and educated so that they can provide a good education for pupils in a rapidly changing environment. This is true but banal. It is suggested that the new type of teacher should be able to cope with rapidly changing technology and New Zealand's "increasing ethnic diversity". The Green Paper itself presents a brief Scope of the Review which merely states that the review is restricted to compulsory schooling and to pre-service and in-service preparation. But there is a hint that "new forms of teacher education" might be considered - forms which would permit "flexible entry into teaching".

The Executive Summary (p. 5) increases the sense of dislocation by suggesting that three key factors had provided "an impetus for this review":

o the need for policy reform to improve education for the future;

o the need to integrate teacher education into broader education policies; and

o the need to provide long-term solutions to the problem of the supply of teachers.

Yet another, slightly more elaborate, indication of the objectives of the review is presented in the Introduction's "Rational for the Review of Teacher Education"

(pp. 9-10). The main point here is that under-supply of teachers, coupled with heightened competition in the labour market for high quality recruits, has created "the potential" for lower standards for entry into teaching and limited the incentives for providers of teacher education to be responsive to client needs (i.e. needs of the government, the schools, trainee teachers and teachers).

To "maintain teacher quality", we are told, a fourfold strategy is required. The first two strategies are traditional and obvious (to promote a professional training force and to ensure an adequate supply of appropriate teachers). The third (development of an integrated teaching service and pay system) is new. The fourth (overall accountability of schools) has been pursued over the last two decades.

If this review had included a historical analysis (even if relegated to an appendix) showing how teacher training has developed in New Zealand, some of the variety of possible forms of teacher training would have been identified and some of the ways in which present-day problems have developed might have become clear and possible solutions identified.

A number of more general observations can also be made at the outset.

First, there is little analysis of the present problems in teacher education. Indeed a reader without any prior knowledge of the New Zealand situation would assume from the Green Paper that teacher education in New Zealand is almost entirely unproblematic. There is little hint of tensions, for example, between the 'classroom technician' and the 'cultured individual' view of the teacher and, within teacher education, between the apprenticeship and the pre-service models, between practice and theory, and between producing well rounded 'caring' individuals and respectable academics.

There is hardly any discussion of what are widely regarded as specific and critical issues in teacher education, for example, the content, structure and location of courses and programmes. There is some discussion of possible problems arising from the labour market constraints, though the proposed solutions are not well aligned with anticipated difficulties - labour market rigidities are to be addressed by further government interventions, including a unified pay system for primary and secondary teachers and centralised standards setting entry to, and progression within, the profession. The solutions to changes in the external environment are mostly presented in terms of the intensification of existing requirements, for example, teachers are to be "increasingly" responsive and "more" accountable, and "increasingly" need subject knowledge, and so on (emphases added) (see chapter 3.2 of this submission). The problem of the short supply of teachers in certain specific areas (e.g. Maori language, maths and science) is mentioned in the Green Paper (p. 16), but there is no examination of possible causes of the problem.

The Green Paper makes a number of strong 'vision'-type statements from which, presumably, the reader is expected to draw some direct and logical connections with the proposals. Much is subsumed within the word 'quality'. All this is most unsatisfactory. Without prior analysis of the problems and their causes, today's 'solution' is likely to become tomorrow's problem.

Secondly, while we agree with the Green Paper that good teacher preparation is important, the education sector needs to consider what aspects of teacher preparation are positively correlated with the subsequent academic achievement of their pupils. Hanushek (1986) found that there was no relationship between the input measures usually relied on by education bureaucrats (such as teacher qualifications and teacher-pupil ratios) and students' academic achievement (as measured by standardised tests). This doesn't appear to have been considered by the authors of the Green Paper. Thus what the ministry is likely to accept as evidence of good preparation of teachers may not correlate with the subsequent performance of the children they teach. The changes in teacher preparation proposed in the Green Paper may have little benefit.

Also, the effectiveness of schools in raising the academic performance of their pupils depends on a variety of factors - not only teacher preparation - which relate to the management and governance of schools and the external regulatory framework within which schools operate (see chapter 5.3). Again, there is little evidence in the Green Paper that its authors have placed teacher preparation within this broader context.

Thirdly, even if problems do exist at present (as Partington 1997 affirms) it is by no means clear that more government intervention will solve them. If the problems are found to arise from government intervention, then increasing government intervention as is proposed in the Green Paper (for example imposing greater controls over the labour market for teachers) may well exacerbate, rather than resolve, those problems. It is noteworthy that this trend to greater centralism is opposite to policy directions in virtually all other areas of government activity. However, the reason for this is not provided; the Green Paper assumes that education is different in some significant but unspecified ways.

Fourthly, the costs and benefits of the proposals are not examined. The Green Paper assumes that only benefits will flow from them. With government interventions, this is rarely the case - it is almost invariably a question of comparing costs with benefits and assessing where the net advantage lies. Moreover, there are usually several possible ways of addressing a problem, requiring the evaluation of various solutions with a view to establishing what is optimal in terms of net benefits. However, the Green Paper offers only one set of proposals, though with minor variations in some cases.

Finally, as implicit in much of the above discussion, the Green Paper does not clearly state the basic objectives of the proposed interventions in the labour market for teachers. A better approach would identify the government and market failures that prevent the attainment of the objectives in question, and directly target interventions at the specific problem areas. This approach would have necessarily raised the issue of the efficiency of current interventions in meeting objectives. Without a 'first principles' approach of this kind, further interventions are likely to be no more than tinkering - and, in any system, tinkering can sometimes make matters a lot worse.

2.3 Conclusions and recommendations

In the absence of any clear identification and analysis of its objectives and the barriers that prevent their achievement, the Green Paper relies largely on unsubstantiated assertions resting on uncritically presented assumptions. Moreover, as discussed later in this submission, several of the proposals will exacerbate existing problems and are in conflict with the Green Paper's own objectives. Further, in our opinion, the Green Paper overlooks some considerations which are 'key' to the effectiveness of teaching and schooling, with the result that there is considerable danger that many of its proposals will divert attention from effective solutions to real problems. Therefore, the Green Paper should not form the basis of decisions on teacher education, though it and the submissions made on it might form a starting point for the development of a further discussion paper on the subject.

Further useful work on the review of teacher training could consider how teachers' responsibilities might be simplified (and thus training made more effective). Possible ways of doing this could include simplifying areas of the curriculum, maintaining specialised schools for special needs children or more specialised auxiliary assistance for them within mainstream schools, providing more teacher aides for non-teaching duties, and some external testing.

One immediate and obvious problem is the ministry's policy performance (see chapter 7.3) and its limited capacity to engage with quality critiques and to produce a quality final report. In our view an independent evaluation of the submissions on the Green Paper is required.

Recommendations:

o The Green Paper should not be accepted as a basis for the government's decisions about teacher education and the occupation of teaching. However the Green Paper and the submissions made on it might form the basis for the development of a further public discussion document on the subject.

o The government should arrange an independent evaluation of the submissions on the Green Paper.

CHAPTER 3

THE GOVERNMENT'S INVOLVEMENT

IN TEACHER EDUCATION

3.1 The government's present interests in teacher education

A distinctive feature of teaching and of teacher education and training is the high degree of government involvement. Any effective review of teacher education and of the profession must necessarily consider whether the various forms of government involvement are beneficial or not. This is particularly important as the Green Paper proposes even more extensive controls than exist at present.

Most occupational groups, with their associated pre-entry and post-entry training, exist without any specific government involvement beyond generic funding of tertiary education and training. However, the government has a variety of interests in teacher education, discharged by a number of means. In combination, these differ from, and reach wider than, its interests in the pre-entry or post-entry education for any other occupational group. Also they are neither consistent across the educational sector (between pre-school/primary/secondary/tertiary) nor consistent within these sub-sectors.

This complex of interests is outlined in Appendix A to this submission. It summarises the extensive range of government interests in teacher education and education more generally. The government is funder of teacher training (via the equivalent full-time student, or EFTS, funding system), negotiator of collective employment contracts (CECs) for primary and secondary school teachers, owner of colleges of education and most other teacher education providers, purchaser of teacher training 'outputs' in that most teachers work in state schools, and regulator and standards setter of various aspects of teaching and teacher education. In nearly all of the nine categories listed in Appendix A, there are differences within the education sector (as between the various sub-sectors: pre-school, primary, secondary and tertiary) and between the education sector and other sectors. Typically government control is much more extensive in education than in other sectors.

In combination, the large array of government interests, expressed through various forms of control and liability, reduce the degree to which employers, employees/students and teacher education providers can, as in other occupations, contract freely together to construct patterns of training provision to mutual advantage. Why governments should be so keen to retain control over teacher education would make an interesting study in itself.

The various strands of government intervention mutually support and interact with each other. They create a distinctive pattern of incentives and information at the level of the individual, the institution and the system. The resulting complexities make it difficult for the sector to achieve responsiveness or flexibility to meet different or changing requirements or possibilities. However, the issue is whether these disadvantages are exceeded by the advantages.

3.2 Problems arising from government interventions

To the extent that the Green Paper identifies problems at all, it usually sees them as arising from changes in the environment in which teacher education takes place and hence as largely exogenous to the teacher education system itself. Certainly the Green Paper does not identify any shortcomings in current policy settings relating to teacher education. Thus the issues which the Green Paper seeks to resolve are primarily those to do with the Maori language, some specific subject areas such as maths and science, changing characteristics of learners, a shortfall of supply against rising demand for teaching staff, and changing labour market trends.

Many sectors face equivalent problems of changing and more diverse customer demands and labour requirements. The distinctive characteristic of teacher education is the array of government interests which inhibit its responsiveness to such changes. Unless the inhibiting factors are tackled, the sector's lack of responsiveness may remain or grow. The risk is that steps taken by the government with the aim of improving 'teacher quality' - as they have been taken in the past in response to earlier government reports - may not assist or may even further inhibit responsiveness. Thus problems will grow despite government action and increased expenditure.

In short, the source of current problems needs to be understood before solutions to the problems are proposed. The source is not changes in outputs or outcomes required or in input markets. As noted by the authors of two recent reports on teacher education in New Zealand discussed below, problems arise largely due to the inability of teacher education to respond appropriately to such changes.

3.3 Analysing the institutional problems and their causes

Teaching is successful to the extent that learning takes place. The essential question is, therefore, whether teacher education programmes prepare student teachers to cause learning to happen rather than merely to behave in the general manner expected of a teacher. Institutional arrangements will, to some degree, determine whether or not this essential aim is kept in view and whether incentives and information flows are aligned with it.

Many of the features of the current system likely to cause problems are discussed by Geoffrey Partington in his recent report for the Education Forum on teacher education and training in New Zealand (1997) and by Susan Hitchiner in her background report for the teacher education review (1997). For example, they mention:

o elaborate controls, unwieldy councils and lack of autonomy for colleges of education (Partington) ; an ineffective accountability regime for institutions and weak monitoring by government (Hitchiner);

o unequal funding between private and state providers and the limited pool of funds available to private training establishments (PTEs), which reduce the competitive pressures on state providers and choice for student trainees and employers of teachers (Partington);

o ideological capture and indoctrination (Partington);

o lack of choice in, and information about, teacher education (Partington); employers not able to exercise influence and weak competition between providers (Hitchiner);

o inconsistent courses and procedures (Partington, and Hitchiner);

o ineffective quality control by some major providers (Partington); lack of common external standards (Hitchiner);

o lack of knowledge by some teaching staff of actual developments and issues at the chalk face (Partington); and

o apparent covert exclusion of students from some backgrounds by some providers (Partington); inconsistency in selection procedures (Hitchiner).

Several of these problems reflect the political nature of the process in which decisions about teacher training are made. In such a system the interests and concerns of providers and bureaucrats tend to dominate, and the interests of employers (the schools) are only weakly represented. Employers are concerned to employ high-quality student teachers who are well prepared in relevant and demanding programmes by suitable staff. The interests of bureaucrats are served by elaborate controls, and those of providers by restrictions on new entrants, control over student selection and ideology, and weak accountability links (including poor information flows).

Criticism of any system can be expected, but common themes in Partington and Hitchiner are concern over poor choice, poor accountability and poor information in teacher education. Examination of the government's interests outlined in Appendix A shows how the environment for such weaknesses in choice among teacher education providers, systems of accountability and information is produced, as well as the associated lack of responsiveness to change and to local requirements.

3.3.1 Limited choice of teacher education provider

As the 'demander' of teacher services it might be expected that the government would be concerned to ensure wide choice. But the government is not the ultimate 'demander', and it buys on behalf of parents (who act as agents for school students). In the political process the interests of producers are favoured rather than those of the poorly organised parents.

Several factors lie behind prospective student trainees' limited choice of teacher education provider. Private providers of teacher education are at a disadvantage, as in other areas of tertiary provision, because in most cases their funding is at lower levels than state providers and excludes property costs. Additional barriers to entry are created by:

o the funding of normal schools to provide practicums and expertise for specified teacher education colleges, to which other providers do not have access. This places other providers at a disadvantage. The Ministerial Reference Group (MRG) on school staffing made the helpful recommendation that the normal schools arrangement should cease, but no progress has yet been made (though the Green Paper proposes it);

o the power of the teacher unions (stemming in part from the CECs), who have a clear interest in the inflows to the teaching workforce. Unions will wish to keep up their membership, but they also have an interest in reducing the supply of entrants to boost the wages of existing members. They will also tend to oppose entrants unlikely to join the unions. For example, anecdotal evidence shows that there have been cases where a teacher union has sought to discourage schools from accepting trainees from private providers;

o the tied nature of teacher EFTS funding. Whilst in theory a provider can switch from the teacher EFTS category to other EFTS categories, there is considerable complexity and risk in so doing, and the agreement of the Ministry of Education has to be obtained and its various rules complied with. By contrast, other lower cost EFTS funding can be moved at the discretion of the provider between the many subject areas covered within much broader EFTS categories. Hence, any provider of teacher education is taking on a high and inflexible exposure to that field and cannot re-balance toward other types of courses at its own discretion. Equally, other tertiary providers cannot simply add a teacher education course to their prospectus in the same way that they might add, say, a commerce or arts course;

o the ministry's role as both negotiator of the CECs with teachers and as implicit guarantor of teacher supply means that it will be under constant pressure to adjust teacher supply by changing its purchase of teacher training. As recent policy changes by the ministry illustrate, the number and type of teacher training EFTS funding provided by the ministry is subject to sudden change. So, teacher education providers are vulnerable to shifts in the ministry's policy on teacher education; and

o the CECs for teachers mean that terms and conditions of employment are liable to change across the board as a result of central negotiations and tend to be inflexible and thus unable to meet local circumstances. This increases the risk of mismatches of supply and demand - both in terms of quantity and quality. Negotiated changes in the employment contracts and the consequent supply and demand mismatches increase the likelihood of sudden changes in both the demand for teacher education places from students and in the funding of them by the ministry. Again, providers face high risks which they can do little to control.

These factors produce high barriers to the entry of new providers in the teacher education sector.

Traditionally, colleges of education have covered a geographic catchment area, i.e. maintained a local quasi-monopoly. However, with recent developments, such as the entry of new providers (including some polytechnics, universities and private providers) and the establishment of regional campuses, the situation is much more varied and fluid. But there is still in effect a bilateral monopoly between the ministry and the teacher colleges, which parallels that between the ministry and the teacher unions over the CECs.

Bilateral monopolies do not have a single 'solution' in terms of price and the distribution of financial or other forms of profit or rent. The distribution of rents in a bilateral monopoly depends on the power and games-playing skills of the participants. Insider knowledge and contacts are important and sudden shifts in outcomes may occur. None of this encourages new entrants, investment in the sector or client orientation.

The appearance of new entrants in the provision of teacher education and new alliances between universities and colleges of education suggest that the bilateral monopoly is producing such low quality education of teachers that existing and new players see room for improvement and a role for themselves, notwithstanding the risks involved. Thus, the bilateral monopoly has not created stasis, because the resulting poor quality product has itself attracted attention.

3.3.2 Accountability problems

In addition to the ministry's close relationship with teacher education providers, various of the government's education agencies have roles as owner of the colleges, regulator and standard setter for the quantity and quality of teacher education, regulator of standards for teachers, and standard setter and enforcer of standards of schools' boards of trustees.

This web of inter-dependent relationships reinforces the bilateral monopoly between the ministry and the colleges over teacher supply, and it inhibits accountability. There cannot be clear accountability when the parties concerned are inter-dependent across a range of activities and the performance of colleges is partially dependent upon supply and other critical decisions taken by those to whom they are accountable.

As Partington (1997) points out, one's judgment of outcomes partly depends upon the educational theory one holds. Ideology is a critical issue within the educational community, including for the government's agents. The teacher education providers play a key role in producing, developing and passing it on to the next generation of teachers. To the extent that curriculum and other decisions taken by the government's agents reflect a particular educational theory or ideology, the government's willingness to criticise those providers holding the same views may be undermined.

Hitchiner (1997) notes the ineffectiveness of the accountability regime for institutions:

... the output classes and performance dimensions are generally described at a very high level, with a predominant focus on numbers of students. Other than in respect of enrolment, it is difficult to judge that an institution has delivered its agreed outputs or met its objectives; it is equally difficult to judge that an institution has not delivered its agreed outputs.

... Implementation appears to extend the principle of academic freedom while giving insufficient regard to the accountability and scrutiny elements [of the Education Act 1989 and Public Finance Act 1989].

Providers face conflicting incentives. While they will be concerned to raise the quality of teacher students and thus of new entrants to the teacher workforce, the financing arrangements will tend to encourage high enrolments even if that means lower academic entrance requirements.

Other publicly funded occupational training regimes may have similar weaknesses in accountability to the ministry for their expenditures of EFTS funding. But this is counter-balanced by the discipline of an independent occupation and/or employers and the impact of market forces on wages and conditions of employment for those in the occupations concerned. In other words, outside teaching there is adequate choice and information to enable students and employers to exercise some effective influence over providers.

Such counter-balances are ineffective in the case of teaching. The occupation and the employers are connected to, and dependent on, the government and the interests it defines. The CECs depend on the inter-play of unions and the ministry and lessen the impact of market forces on teachers' wages and conditions. Employers and students lack adequate choice and information to exercise effective pressure on providers. None of this assists the accountability of teacher education providers to students and schools.

3.3.3 Information problems

The complexities described above and poor systems of accountability in the sector also work against the provision of adequate information for students, employers and the government as funder. For teacher education providers, meeting the myriad standards set by government is primarily a matter of requiring or ensuring bureaucratic compliance. The information produced from this process is not aimed at assisting decision making by students or employers, who are likely to find the lack of clear comparators or reference points confusing and unhelpful. As Hitchiner (1997) notes, the ministry as funder focuses on student numbers and, therefore, does not utilise whatever other useful information the various bureaucratic standards may produce.

The lack of choice between providers means that there are weak incentives on providers to give detailed information on courses or outputs to students and employers. Partington (1997) notes the lack of information on course content.

3.4 Implications of poor choice, accountability and information

As a consequence of poor choice between education providers, and weaknesses in systems of accountability and in information produced by providers, the system of teacher education:

o is largely driven by occupational and bureaucratic interests - students and employers have limited influence;

o has weak incentives for providers to respond to changes in the market place;

o may suffer sudden changes in quantity and quality as the balance of power in the bilateral monopoly shifts;

o is subject to ideological capture; and

o is discouraging to new providers - unless they have deep pockets, alliances with existing players or are driven by differences with the prevailing ideology of the existing providers.

Overall, supply of teacher education is likely to be poorly differentiated (apart from niche providers), unresponsive to change, of low quality and characterised by high levels of rhetoric from the vested interests. Both Partington (1997) and Hitchiner (1997) note the rhetoric.

Furthermore, these characteristics are themselves likely to discourage many prospective students from becoming teachers.

3.5 Conclusions and recommendations

The government intervenes in teacher education in a range of ways unique in the tertiary education sector. Its overall effect is to create problems in:

- the range of choice of providers;

- the accountability of providers to students and schools; and

- the provision of information that is comprehensive and of use to students and employers.

It is not clear that there are any countervailing benefits.

Before embarking on a range of new interventions, it is usually wise for the government to review its objectives and the effectiveness of existing interventions in achieving them. The Green Paper does not do this. As discussed in later chapters of this submission, proposed new interventions will in fact exacerbate the problems arising from existing arrangements.

Recommendations:

o The government should note that the range of existing government interventions in teacher education is extensive, and that the overall result of those interventions includes:

- poor differentiation between providers of teacher education;

- a lack of responsiveness in providers to changes in students' needs and labour market trends;

- ineffective controls on the quality of teacher education, dominated by the interests of bureaucrats and providers; and

- the reinforcement of prevailing ideology and much rhetoric by the vested interests.

o Before decisions are made on the proposals in the Green Paper, the government should review its objectives for teacher education and evaluate the effectiveness of existing interventions in achieving those objectives.

CHAPTER 4

TEACHER SUPPLY

4.1 Introduction

In the Green Paper's Introduction the authors claim that a rationale for the review of teacher education is that "to maintain teacher quality" it is necessary to develop "an integrated teaching service and a uniform pay system" (pp. 9-10). They suggest that changing demographic patterns of school-age children necessitate government control to ensure that there is a reasonable balance between the demand for, and the supply of, teachers. Yet over several decades this highly centralised system has frequently failed to anticipate the number and types of teachers needed, even though newly born babies are several years away from entering early childhood education, let alone later stages of schooling.

4.2 Problems in forecasting demand for and supply of teachers

The problem in forecasting the demand for, and the supply of, teachers is that there are other important factors determining demand and supply which are not amenable to government control, for example the competitiveness or otherwise of teacher pay and conditions, the size of the 'pool' of trained teachers not in the workforce for various reasons (particularly women with school-age children) but who might be attracted back given suitable terms, the tightness or otherwise of the labour market for recent graduates, migration trends, and the relative attractiveness for trained New Zealand teachers of other English-speaking countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom.

We are not aware that any government has been notably more successful at projecting numbers of teachers required than any other. It is hard to understand why governments should consider that the operation of market forces is less efficient than government regulation in attracting suitable people into different sorts of teaching. Although apparently not acknowledged by government, market forces are more efficient than a government-regulated sector at sending signals about supply and demand.

An unstated assumption in the Green Paper is that all persons who may be described as teachers have much in common, yet in many countries there are considerable surpluses of some types of teacher but dire shortages of others. The Green Paper acknowledges, as of course it must, that there are currently "shortages of teachers in specific subjects notably mathematics and science" (p. 16) and of Maori and Maori-medium teachers in both the mainstream and bilingual or immersion classes. However, its authors seem unwilling to acknowledge that the absence of a single market for teachers undermines its policies to provide a uniform teaching service.

If it were true that 'a teacher is a teacher is a teacher', then an early childhood teacher could be readily retrained to teach secondary school physics, or vice versa for that matter, and teacher shortages would be much more easily overcome. The Green Paper provides no evidence to support its assumption that broadly the same type of preparation is suitable for all who intend to teach. When it comes to pay and conditions, we consider it odd that the same scales should apply to types of teachers in plentiful supply and to types of teachers whose knowledge is in short supply.

4.3 Ways suggested in the Green Paper of improving recruitment

The Green Paper lists three ways to improve recruitment. In the form outlined in the Green Paper, they will at best be ineffective, and two of the three could be counter-productive. They are:

o improving the image of teaching through establishing a professional body for teaching. As discussed later in this submission (chapter 9), this may increase and complicate the centralisation and bureaucratic control of the teaching occupation, and distinguish it more from other occupations and the thrust of change in other occupations. It may swell the river of paper work and promote dubious educational research while providing no substantive improvement in the actual situation. The activities of this government-sponsored and government-influenced central professional body may well exacerbate recruitment problems by discouraging young people who want the option of a career in the 'real world' from risking a career in such an unusual and centrally controlled occupation. Campaigns by the professional body or the government to 'sell' teaching as an occupation may well prove to be counter-productive;

o providing flexible pathways into teaching. This is commendable but, regrettably, the Green Paper takes the emergence of some increased variety of provision as having achieved this. Until the quasi-monopolies of the major providers are eroded and central controls over the occupation are weakened, little will have been achieved to increase flexible pathways into teaching. The recent reintroduction of compulsory teacher registration has presumably decreased flexibility of pathways, so the emphasis in the Green Paper on "increasing diversity" in provision (p. 28) seems misguided. This suggests that the government regards a very low level of choice and flexibility as an achievement in the context of teacher education and employment; and

o re-affirming the government's commitment to equity and rewarding excellence in teacher pay. And this is to be achieved through central negotiations and the proposed unified pay system. However, reinforcing centralised control may discourage many potential trainees who would prefer to rely on their own capabilities and their worth in a more open market for their services. Whatever rewards teachers or trainees gain from centralised negotiations and a bilateral monopoly may well be taken away by the next shift in central policy or in the balance of power within the bilateral monopoly.

The Green Paper notes (pp. 14 and 23) changes in the female labour market. Teaching is no longer one of the few widely available routes to white collar status and flexible employment conditions open to women.

Where jobs for life are no longer expected or sought, teaching as an occupation must compete not only in terms of wages and conditions but also in terms of its relevance (and, to a degree, status) compared with other occupations. Low quality teacher training with the taint of ideological capture, combined with high levels of central control, rigid pay scales and weak rewards for high achievement, is unlikely to appeal to many of the more able of today's young men and women.

The Green Paper raises the question of whether "special measures", such as incentives, should apply when the teaching profession has difficulty recruiting new members. But recruitment difficulties result from the centralised and peculiar arrangements in the teaching sector, and to counter the impact of government intervention with further government intervention is to make matters worse. The solution is less, not more, government intervention.

4.4 Conclusions and recommendations

Increasingly, schools are having to compete for teaching staff. Some traditional sources of recruitment can no longer be relied upon, and teachers, like employees in many other occupations, are much more liable to move between various kinds of work during their working life.

Potential recruits should view selection for teacher training and successful completion of a teacher training programme as useful additions to a curriculum vitae that is relevant to a variety of types of work. We doubt that this is the case at present, and we consider that the proposals in the Green Paper may make recruitment more difficult and could lower, rather than enhance, the status of teachers.

Any problems in obtaining an adequate supply of suitably trained and motivated young teachers are liable to impact most adversely on schools in lower socio-economic areas, who are least able to pick and choose their teachers.

An obvious way to improve the supply of teachers is to encourage more mature people with a sound education or specific skills (for example in music and workshop practice) to enter teaching without the need to undertake a lengthy and expensive period of pre-service training, which many such people would see as irrelevant. Legislation requires compulsory registration and allows untrained people to be granted 'limited authority to teach'. The compulsory requirement does little to improve quality and restricts the ability of schools to choose the best people to staff their classrooms. A teacher's 'limited authority' requires annual renewal, and able, mature and well educated people are likely to consider this process as patronising and demeaning. Teacher registration requirements should be reviewed.

Recommendations:

o The government should note that the supply of teachers will be best assisted by rigorous student selection procedures and by academically demanding pre-service training that is also relevant to a range of occupations other than teaching.

o The government should note that the establishment of a government-initiated and government-influenced professional body could hinder recruitment to the teaching profession by restricting entry and encouraging a view of teaching as an occupational backwater.

o The government should note that the attraction and retention of able teachers and remedying teacher shortages in subjects such as science and maths require flexible pay structures which reward merit, not the continuation of centrally determined national awards. The unified pay system may well increase existing rigidities.

o The government should reconsider current teacher registration legislation with a view to encouraging suitable people - especially well educated and mature people, and those with relevant experience in other walks of life - to enter teaching without the need for pre-service training.

CHAPTER 5

TEACHER EDUCATION WITHIN

THE CONTEXT OF SCHOOLING

5.1 Introduction

The Green Paper purports to consider both pre-service and in-service teacher education within a wide setting, including professional standards and teacher status, some funding issues, a unified pay system and student achievement. Further it assumes connections between these various factors - stating some explicitly and others implicitly - none of which are examined in any depth.

We agree that it is reasonable to assume that good preparation of teachers will contribute to good teaching and effective learning in schools. But it is not reasonable to assume that the proposals in the Green Paper will lead to more effective teaching, especially in the absence of any changes to the way schools are run.

As a consequence of not first clearly stating what is to be achieved and by what means, the Green Paper introduces tensions into its different objectives. For example:

o achieving a high status for the profession seems inconsistent with the heavy-handed, government management approach to setting standards (cf. "professions are inherently autonomous and self-policing", Benderson 1986);

o the Green Paper endorses a particular (child-centred) pedagogy but also wants the teaching profession to operate like other professions "in all ways that it can" (p. 6). But most professions do their own thinking about how to go about their business and would reject government interference in such matters;

o the aim of improving the supply of quality teachers would seem inconsistent with the proposals for government control of pre-service training and, via the proposed professional body, of teaching standards and entry into, and progression within, the occupation; and

o hierarchical 'accountability' to a government agency (including a government-run 'professional' body) is likely to be inconsistent with 'professional' accountability to 'clients' (in the case of school education, to parents as agents of their children). Both types of accountability seem to be implied in the Green Paper.

Many of the tensions in the Green Paper result from confusion on one question which arises in several contexts: whether school management decisions should be left to schools and teachers or be made by the central bureaucracy. The authors of the Green Paper appear to want to be on both sides of the question at the same time - politically safe, perhaps, but unlikely to lead to sound, enduring solutions.

To work through this issue we will now turn to teaching within the context of formal schooling. However, we note that schools do not have a monopoly on education - the home, the media (especially television), the peer group, the churches and community organisations can exercise a potent influence on children and young people's attitudes, interpretations and knowledge.

5.2 The role of formal schooling

In the Green Paper it is difficult to discern any role for school teachers beyond managing change and pastoral concern for the needs of all children. It is somewhat reassuring to read that "teachers will increasingly need to have ... strong subject matter knowledge" (p. 5), though this demand on teachers appears to relate to the changes in the world outside schools. The traditional notion that knowledge might be of intrinsic value apart from its use appears foreign to the authors of the Green Paper, as it is in much of current government thinking.

As indicated in a number of Education Forum reports, New Zealand's education policy advisers and policy makers tend to see schools as, inter alia, laboratories for eradicating injustice and transforming society, rather than as incubators for developing an educated public. From the morally dubious (for example 'values clarification' and condoms in schools ) to the ideologically or pedagogically suspect (for example excessive reliance or over-emphasis on the 'whole language' approach to reading, group activity, bicultural and multicultural education), our leading educators and successive governments have shown a deep disrespect for the educational purposes of school.

A more traditional approach, and one favoured by the Education Forum, is to understand formal education as being, in general terms, the means by which children and young people are:

- taught the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic;

- introduced to their cultural and scientific inheritance through the study of literature, the arts, history, geography, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology; and

- prepared for life beyond school including, but not exclusively, to learn how to do and hold a job.

In addition, many would expect that formal education would enable children to learn a foreign language and an ancient language (Latin or classical Greek). Regarding the latter, the ministry is clearly as happy to abandon the classical, foundational languages of Western culture as it is determined to retain the modern, unsatisfactory hybrid of social studies which undermines Western culture.

In formal education pupils will learn and encounter much that is worthwhile in itself. Thus, learning, say, physics or history is valuable in the first instance for itself and not because it leads to the acquisition of a 'transferable skill' which could equally be picked up by some other means. On the other hand, in learning physics and history, pupils will learn many useful skills (analysis, criticism, writing, communication, and so on) just because they are dealing with difficult and complicated matters at a high level (and, ultimately, as studied and pursued by some of the great minds in history).

Among other things, schooling should, at appropriate ages and stages, enable young people to engage with various ways of understanding the world through academic subjects, with applied knowledge through subjects like technology and business, and with occupational activities geared towards particular jobs (Smithers 1997, pp. 40 and 74). In so doing, students will become innovative, creative and critical. However, all this can proceed only on the basis of the teacher's knowledge of the area or subject matter. Otherwise, the student's creativity is likely to be a juvenile fumbling towards things already well known and understood, and the student's criticism jejune and shallow.

Reason, in the widest sense, is one of our goals, but before one can reason, one has to acquire the knowledge, experience and habits which make reason and reasoning possible. While some people will go a long way in formal education - and themselves contribute to their traditions and disciplines - others will not. But at least all should have the opportunity of being exposed to the best that has been thought and known, as far as this is possible, and offered at the same time a map to the adult world and whatever educational foundations are necessary for them to acquire a fulfilling career.

All this may well seem axiomatic to most parents, and indeed to many teachers. However, among many education academics and teacher educators in New Zealand this view of the role of schooling is highly contentious and contrary to their own child-centred, reconstructionist views. Over several decades, and perhaps largely unconsciously, New Zealand teachers, and to a degree parents, have accepted the child-centred approach to schooling. In contrast, schooling in much of continental Europe and Asia is still unashamedly academic, that is, concerned above all with passing on useful knowledge and the national culture to the next generation. In New Zealand, the purpose of schooling has become, as we have seen, much more diffuse, embracing the social situation of the child and wider societal concerns.

Partington (1997, pp. 1-6) identifies educational theories as falling into five clusters, each with a different priority:

o transcendental education: what is of greatest value to God's purposes;

o instrumental education: what is of greatest value to society broadly as it is;

o liberal education: what is of greatest value to the development of the mind;

o reconstructionist education: what is of greatest value in transforming society as it is, into a society of a radically different character; and

o child-centred education: what is of greatest value or interest to the child.

These are not rigid, mutually exclusive categories; the same person can embrace more than one, and within each there is room for much disagreement. The point is, however, that whichever cluster is embraced will, to a significant extent, influence the nature of teacher preparation. The question then arises whether through funding, accreditation, professional standards, teacher registration, or other means the state should determine which cluster or clusters of theories should underpin teacher education. On this issue, the Education Forum concurs with Partington that teacher education should "embrace the principle of educational contestability and accept that people of equal intelligence and experience may legitimately choose very different educational priorities" (Partington 1997, p. 6). This, however, is clearly not the view of the Ministry of Education, which wishes to influence the shape of New Zealand society and to inculcate in children its own views through the apparently innocuous means of school curricula (Education Forum 1995 and 1996).

The Green Paper, in endorsing the "child-centred strategies" and the "strong philosophies of education" associated by two particular New Zealand teacher educators with quality teaching (p. 19), further reinforces the view of schooling as a means of reconstructing society. The authors of the Green Paper appear to view quality teaching as correlated with a concern for issues relating to class, race and gender, and awareness and understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi (see chapter 6.5.1 of this submission). If such "strategies" and "philosophies" were to be enshrined in officially sanctioned 'standards', they would advance the reconstructionist cause by effectively imposing a formal ideological straitjacket on entry to the profession and severely limiting contestation of what constitutes 'quality' teaching (see chapter 6.2).

Further, the view adopted by the Green Paper of the role of schooling has implications for the 'professional status' of teachers, which is discussed later in this submission (see chapter 7.5). Should status relate essentially to the ability to develop cognitive abilities or should it relate to the ability to use schooling to reshape society? The high status of teachers in Europe and Asia is associated with the former. Does the relatively low status of teachers in New Zealand and other English-speaking countries reflect confusion about the purpose of schooling and hence the role of teachers? If this is the case, adoption and promotion of reconstructionist philosophies might lower the status of teachers.

5.3 Teacher 'quality' and the effectiveness of schools

The Green Paper asserts that the educational achievement of school students is directly related to teacher quality which in turn is directly related to the quality of teacher education. In a general sense, we agree. However, research on the effectiveness of schools in regard to student achievement has often surprisingly little to say about teacher preparation.

Large-scale surveys undertaken in the United Kingdom and the United States to discover what characteristics of schooling account for the different cognitive achievements of schools, after allowance is made for variations in student intakes, came up with very similar results. Mortimore et al. (1988), from a survey of 2000 London primary children, identified 12 key factors in school effectiveness that are within the control of the school:

o purposeful leadership of the staff by the head teacher;

o the involvement of the deputy head;

o the involvement of teachers;

o consistency amongst teachers;

o structured sessions;

o intellectually challenging teaching;

o the work-centred environment;

o limited focus within sessions;

o maximum communication between teachers and pupils;

o record keeping;

o parental involvement in the school; and

o a positive climate.

A similar list of positive characteristics has been identified by the New Jersey State Department of Education (1988):

o strong leadership;

o a school climate conducive to learning;

o high expectations of pupils;

o a clear and focused mission in the school of the mastery of basic skills for all pupils;

o an on-going assessment of student progress; and

o a supportive home-school relationship.

A Brookings Institution research project (Chubb and Moe 1990) based on a very large data base found that when school resources and school organisation are analysed in conjunction with student aptitude and the characteristics of parents and of student peers, school organisation has the second highest impact on student cognitive achievement, trailing only student aptitude. In importance, school organisation leads parental influence by a little, and school resources and peer pressure by a lot. In fact "[a]ll other things being equal, attending an effectively organised high school for four years is worth at least a full year of additional achievement over attendance at an ineffectively organised school" (Chubb 1988, drawing on research published in Chubb and Moe 1990). Compared with poorly performing schools (in terms of cognitive outcomes), high performance schools were those in which:

o there were different goals, emphasising academic excellence as opposed to basics, occupational skills or good work habits;

o the goals are clearer and more widely agreed;

o the school has an identifiable mission;

o leadership is more pedagogical than managerial - principals are less likely to have accepted the job to escape teaching and take up management, and are less interested in using the job as a stepping stone to higher administrative office;

o leadership is stronger but at the same time more democratic in that teachers are more involved and influential in school policy - the relationship between principal and teachers is more cooperative;

o authority is more delegated to the classroom which leads to more teacher cooperation and mutual support; and

o the organisation is more of a team than a hierarchy.

Hanushek (1986) conducted a survey of 147 studies estimating education production functions, that is, the relationship between various inputs into schooling and cognitive outcomes. He found that, within the range normally encountered, most measurable inputs, such as expenditure per student, were unrelated to variations in student academic achievement. Most of the studies found either an insignificant or negative relationship.

These studies do not show that schools and teachers are unimportant - far from it. They do show that schools and teachers differ dramatically in effectiveness, but that input measures do not capture the differences. Significant differences in teacher quality exist, but student performance is not related to differences in teacher educational backgrounds and qualifications. Interestingly, principals' evaluations of teachers were found to be highly correlated with estimates of total effectiveness (i.e. adjusted mean gains in achievement by the students of each teacher) (Hanushek 1989, citing Murnane 1975, and Armour et al. 1976). This implies that good teaching can be identified at the school level.

Several points of interest relevant to the proposals in the Green Paper arise from this empirical research. First, while there are different emphases, there are clear and consistent themes: within factors under the control of schools, high student achievement is associated with strong academic leadership, clear goals and regular assessment against those goals, and strong involvement of all teaching staff.

Secondly, while it can be assumed that most, perhaps all, teachers involved in the various surveys had attended pre-service teacher education programmes, it is unclear what the significance of teacher education (and its various forms) is in terms of the subsequent effectiveness of teachers in the classroom. However, Stevenson (1992) has noted that many highly successful teachers in China had not had any education beyond high school, and that the Asian view is that teaching is best taught on-the-job under able teachers who can act as effective teaching models. All this raises Alan Barcan's uncomfortable question "[d]oes the form of teacher training really matter?" (Barcan 1995). Clearly these views challenge schools and teacher education providers.

On the issue of the education of teachers, because of the importance of substantive knowledge, we hold strongly to the view that, other things being equal, teachers should themselves be highly educated. On the issue of formal initial teacher preparation versus a school-based apprenticeship model (as seems to be the pattern adopted in Asia), the challenge to providers is to demonstrate that they are better at preparing teachers to teach than most schools. This should be 'no contest' given that, compared with any one school (or even a consortium of schools), tertiary education providers should be able to offer a much more diverse range of settings and more exposure to experienced teachers who can demonstrate how to achieve learning in those various settings. However, the school-based model should not be rejected, and government policy should not preclude it.

Thirdly, to the extent that 'professionalism' involves raising pupil cognitive achievement levels then it is most likely to be exercised in a school which is effectively organised in terms of the characteristics discussed above. The Green Paper emphasises the importance of the individual teacher:

The quality of the education provided for New Zealand students ultimately depends on the quality of the individual teachers in our classrooms (p. 19).

The Green Paper also notes the importance of an "effective and supportive management structure [which] facilitates high quality teaching". However, it does not isolate the features of the regulatory environment in which schools operate that might promote such a management structure. Many able teachers no doubt persevere, notwithstanding failure in leadership and other aspects of management, but it is probably also the case that others give up, 'retire' into mediocrity or leave teaching altogether and seek more satisfying occupations elsewhere.

The type of pre-service education may still be very important, but other factors seem to be at least as important in terms of effective classroom teaching: we want well prepared, effective teachers working in effectively organised schools. From the perspective of educational policy, this observation prompts the question: 'why are some schools more effectively organised than others?'. Chubb and Moe (1990) address this particular issue. Since their definition of school organisation mainly centres on school goals, leadership and collaborative professional relationships among teachers, their findings are very much in line with earlier research on the subject. The question which Chubb and Moe then proceeded to ask, and one which by and large had been previously overlooked, was what determines school organisation. They found that the single most important determinant was the strength of external pressures on schools. Specifically, the more a school is subject to the influence of external administrators and unions, the less likely the school is to be effectively organised.

Chubb and Moe found that autonomy has the biggest influence on the overall quality of school organisation. It is the strongest in the private sector, where schools are controlled by markets, and weakest in the public sector, where schools are controlled by the political process. Chubb and More recommend more parental choice and the use of decentralised markets to allow schools to prosper as effective organisations. This finding is clearly directly relevant not only to matters such as the bulk funding of teacher salaries and the level at which teacher contracts are determined but also to the proposals in the Green Paper for more centralised control over standards and entry to, and progress within, the profession.

5.4 Conclusions and recommendations

Obviously there is no one 'magic' solution to the problem of raising school performance. It is also the case that much of what effective school research has to say is hardly surprising - indeed it is intuitively obvious. All effective organisations - educational or otherwise - tend to display characteristics such as good leadership, clear and ambitious goals, frequent evaluation against goals and cooperative endeavour among staff. It is Chubb and Moe's finding, that high levels of external pressure on schools make the achievement of these characteristics more difficult, together with their recommendation in favour of school autonomy and parent choice, that is of most interest - and most controversial. It is not surprising that some of the loudest protests against decentralisation are from organisations whose influence depends on a system of centralised decision making.

Notwithstanding protests from educational interest groups, the aim of public policy for schools should be to establish an environment in which characteristics conducive to high achievement, including organisational characteristics, are encouraged. We should be wary of introducing new centralising bureaucratic processes such as a government-established and government-run standards-setting professional body which, on the face of it, would appear to be precisely what the research by Chubb and Moe warns against.

Recommendations:

o The government should note that there are unresolved tensions within the Green Paper arising from confusion about the role of schools and the responsibilities of teachers. These issues must be clarified before policy on teacher education and many of the other matters raised in the Green Paper can be determined.

o The government should note that effective teaching is most likely to take place in effectively organised schools and consider what are likely to be the features of a policy environment which is the one most likely to encourage effective schooling.

CHAPTER 6

TEACHER QUALITY

6.1 Introduction

'Quality' is the latest buzzword in all three of the recent Green Papers. It is the dominating concept in the Green Paper on national qualifications (Ministry of Education 1997b) in which the "quality threshold" (consisting of some 13 "attributes" all of which will require breaking down into many 'sub-attributes') is to take the place of the now discredited unit standard as the unifying and transforming concept (Irwin 1997a). In the Green Paper on tertiary education, a further 23 quality attributes are presented, and it is proposed that providers will have to demonstrate that they fulfil these attributes (Ministry of Education 1997c, Appendix C).

'Quality' is, of course, a superficially attractive concept. The danger is that the use of the word will be thought to constitute an argument in itself without the need for further elaboration, thus making the tedious business of thinking unnecessary. Various requisite steps are assumed: identify the attributes of quality for the activity concerned, set them in regulations of various kinds, appoint an organisation to administer them (for example the ministry or a professional body) and, hey presto, many quality problems are solved. Once these steps are taken, many quality problems are solved. This, of course, would be a naive and simplistic approach to education, embracing many dubious assumptions and likely to compound existing problems or create new ones.

6.2 Teacher 'quality' in the Green Paper

The Green Paper on teacher education adds to the massive stock of platitudes already available about the desirability of 'quality' among teachers. It acknowledges that "defining teacher quality is difficult and contentious" and recognises that "there is no nationally consistent means of defining or identifying quality teaching" (p. 25). It notes the dynamic interaction between teacher and student and the importance of the management structure (p. 19). However, it mistakenly assumes that this lack of definition results from a failure to consider the matter, not from more fundamental disagreements which do not disappear after even the most extensive consideration. The Green Paper implies that it has overcome the problem and avoided contention (see chapters 5.2 and 6.5.1 of this submission).

The Green Paper also stresses that change management skills and pastoral ability are desirable attributes of teachers. Consequently, courses in substantive knowledge would cover changing perceptions about the world - and they must avoid "static" skills and knowledge (p. 20).

6.3 The assumed need for government intervention to ensure teacher 'quality'

According to the Green Paper any solution to the teacher supply situation "must ensure that New Zealand has a world class teaching profession capable of serving our country's needs into the future" (p. 6). Leaving aside all sorts of, perhaps pedantic, worries about what "world class" actually means, it is necessary to ask who should make decisions about what teaching needs there are now and how they are likely to change in the future, and about what standards of teaching quality should be sought to meet those needs.

In the production of most goods and services, the government plays no part in setting quality standards. However, if it is a consumer of those goods and services it does play its part, like any other customer (though perhaps a very large and influential one), in obtaining the mix of quality and quantity that suits it best. For the vast majority of the goods and services available in New Zealand the quality results from the interaction of demand and supply in the market place. In most cases there is a range of quality available, and purchasers make their choices on the basis of information available and the competing demands on their resources. Providers compete in the production of the range of goods and services demanded by consumers. Teaching services - the teaching of children and the teaching of student teachers - are, it seems, different, because government intervention is required. Why?

The reasons given in the Green Paper on tertiary education (Ministry of Education 1997c) for government intervention in the quality regulation of tertiary education are to provide information to students and employers and to determine which institutions should be eligible to receive government subsidies. These reasons were analysed at length in the Education Forum's submission on that Green Paper (Education Forum 1997), and they did not stand up to analysis. The Education Forum's submission pointed out that quality is subjective, hard to define and very difficult to measure 'from above'. It is not clear that the government has the ability, much less the incentive, to determine the appropriate level of quality.

In the case of teaching and teacher education, an additional and obvious reason for government intervention is that the government is the dominant purchaser being the owner and funder of the great majority of schools. However, the government still needs to show that the proposed interventions address the identified problems (i.e. they do achieve quality), that government intervention is the best way of achieving it (i.e. the quality outcome is superior to what might be achieved in the absence of government intervention) and that the benefits in terms of additional quality exceed the costs of the intervention.

The general reservations expressed in our submission about the proposals in the Green Paper on tertiary education apply also to teacher education. For example, there can be no market test of whether benefits exceed costs where eligibility for subsidies is tied to achieving a particular standard - the standard becomes de facto compulsory and may survive even when it is inefficient. A standard that sets a minimum standard for the receipt of subsidies may not be very informative to prospective student teachers. Moreover, it is very difficult to establish a single quality standard in educational services - people (schools and prospective teachers in the case of teacher education) have different hierarchies of quality components depending on their own needs and perceptions about what is important.

If quality is set in terms of inputs alone, the result may be a focus on factors which are relatively unimportant in determining teachers' performance in terms of their ability to effect learning in the classroom. Thus government accreditation agencies may impose additional compliance costs on teacher education providers with little beneficial effect on the performance of future teachers. They may in fact serve to hinder innovation and specialisation and thus lower the quality of teaching. (For these and other considerations see Education Forum 1997, section 4.)

Setting standards for teachers may result in diminishing the responsibility on school principals and boards to secure the best teaching services available for their particular needs. They will be less accountable not only for first appointments but for promotions if, as proposed, standards are set at higher levels. Again there has been no assessment of the possible benefits of setting standards against possible costs. If standards are set low, little quality improvement, if any, can be expected, but there will be considerable compliance and monitoring costs. If standards are set high, there could well be additional costs of appeals, judicial reviews and so on. If the standards are not targeted at identified quality problems there may be few if any benefits - only additional supply constraints which will lead to watering down initial, ambitious standards. For example, there may be little point in raising standards for maths and science teachers without substantial increases in pay for teachers with good tertiary qualifications in these specific subject areas.

Raising entry standards into the profession will just reduce the supply of teachers unless teaching is made a more attractive career. In fact, most tertiary institutions could adopt higher standards for admission to, and graduation from, programmes of teacher education if they were determined to do so. That they do not, reveals the faculty stake in low standards. There are no incentives under current arrangements to raise standards.

Moreover, there are features of the current teacher labour market that undermine attempts to raise teacher quality. Schools have little incentive to teach students academic skills (due to lack of accountability and lack of feedback on their performance if they were to do so), and schools have little incentive to hire teachers with strong academic skills or to pay them more. In fact, current pay structures do not reward merit. It is little wonder that there are concerns about the level of talent in teaching. If the talented are not rewarded, then they are more likely to choose a different profession where there is a return to talent. Current policies ensure a lack of good teachers.

The problem is compounded by the fact that trainees must invest in education-specific training, which has little value outside public education and thus reduces the job prospects of trainees outside teaching (see chapter 4.3). The effect is greatest for those with the most attractive options outside teaching, as they incur the greatest loss if they train to become teachers and cannot find a teaching job. The lack of incentive for schools to hire applicants with strong academic records makes this a real problem. A US study concluded that public schools show no preference for applicants that have strong academic records (Ballou and Podgursky 1997). The study found that one reason for this is that academically well qualified staff are less likely to stay within the profession. It also found that private schools place more emphasis on strong academic background in staff recruitment, and are more likely to differentiate salaries on the basis of performance and to dismiss ineffective teachers.

The point made earlier about teacher training institutions - that they are subject to the vagaries of government policy (chapter 3.3) - applies here. The fact that teachers must deal with the government as a monopoly buyer of their services and that they are subject to the uncertainties of the political process makes teaching a less attractive profession. Any movement towards education degrees would exacerbate this problem, by increasing the 'education-specific' content of teacher training.

A better strategy to increase the quality of teachers is to differentiate salaries on the basis of performance and to raise standards for teachers and students (giving schools an incentive to value academically able teachers more). Tenure arrangements for teachers would have to allow for dismissal of incompetent teachers. Relaxing the registration requirements would broaden the recruitment base to include applicants without education credentials but with promise. The latter could also involve a reduction in education-specific investment in training, for example by allowing trainees to complete an education credential while on the job.

6.4 The importance of knowledge

From the Education Forum's perspective on the role of formal school education, teachers must, first and foremost, be knowledgeable in the subjects they are to teach (see chapter 5.2). They should also exemplify certain moral and personal qualities. But as far as formal study is concerned, the focus must be on their subject area. Thus the first requirement of teacher education programmes is to ensure that student teachers have substantial knowledge in the subject area or areas they are likely to teach.

Partington (1997) notes that many university courses are narrow in scope and geared towards the particular research interests of teaching staff, rather than on likely broader requirements of future teachers. He suggests that colleges of education and universities might profitably consider whether and how university programmes might be better aligned with the requirements of future teachers.

However, the understanding of subjects sufficient for the purpose of satisfying university markers is different in kind (and certainly in depth) from the understanding required to enable the teacher to present it in a comprehensible way to young minds. A great teacher, said Lee Shulman, is:

... someone who really understands the subject deeply and understands how exquisitely complex it is to make your knowledge accessible to the knowing processes of those who do not yet understand. (Shulman 1989, emphasis in original)

Universities would need to be careful that, in seeking to accommodate the concerns of teacher educators, they do not allow their academic mission to be undermined. The best guarantors of intellectual honesty and quality are academics who are free to develop courses that are academically rigorous, even when this runs counter to the wishes of some 'client' group. Arguably one reason for the extent of 'political correctness' in the teachers' colleges is their proximity to teacher and other pressure groups and the colleges' perceived need to satisfy their demands.

The disparagement of knowledge seen widely in the education establishment and official documents is deplorable, and New Zealanders are paying a heavy price for it. Not all the innovation in the world (understood in the Green Paper - but not by the Education Forum - as "the key to progress", p. 22) will render Plato or Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Gibbon or Tacitus redundant, or indeed Newton or Einstein. Nor will all the information technology (IT) (p. 31) in the world render such knowledge otiose. Unless and until individual students have a basis of knowledge, they will not be able to use IT for anything other than mindless surfing, porn and computer games (see chapter 6.7).

Further, knowledge in one's mind is never static. It is static when it lies in a computer (or a book) unaccessed, unread and unused. But who, apart from the educated, can use it? And it is only well educated teachers who can protect schools and their students from the inevitable swings in education fashion. As Diane Ravitch (Ravitch 1985) said of teachers in the United States, the commitment of teachers and their students to knowledge moderates and blunts pedagogical fashions that are not solidly grounded in good educational practice.

6.5 Teaching methods

In addition to being knowledgeable in the subjects they are to teach, 'quality' teachers must be able to communicate and teach their subjects.

6.5.1 The Green Paper's perspective

The Green Paper affirms (p. 19) the following dimensions of quality teaching identified in an OECD study (OECD 1994):

o knowledge of substantive curriculum areas and content;

o pedagogic skill, including the acquisition and ability to use a repertoire of teaching and assessment strategies;

o reflection and the ability to be self-critical, the hallmark of teacher professionalism;

o empathy and commitment to acknowledging the dignity of others (students, parents and colleagues) in the pursuit of effective as well as cognitive outcomes; and

o managerial competence, as teachers assume a range of managerial responsibilities within and outside the classroom.

In addition, the Green Paper affirms the "interactive and dynamic nature of quality teaching" and, as previously noted (chapter 5.2), associates itself with a New Zealand study (Ramsay and Oliver 1993) which found that " 'quality teachers' in New Zealand had strong philosophies of education and used child-centred strategies to encourage children to become independent learners."

The OECD report cited is bland and evasive, and none of its statements advance the argument. For example:

o there is agreement that teachers need knowledge of substantive curriculum areas, but much disagreement on what levels of knowledge in which areas;

o there is agreement that pedagogic skill is needed, but widespread disagreement on what balance between teacher-directed and student-initiated activities in a particular area at a particular level is a hallmark of skillful pedagogy;

o there is agreement that teachers should be reflective and self-critical, but deep concern that many self-proclaimed advocates of reflection and criticism prove to be highly unreflective about their own doctrines and very resistant to any criticisms of them;

o there is agreement about the desirability of empathy, but serious disagreement as to what this entails, especially in respect of highly disruptive students; and

o there is agreement that teachers should be managerially competent rather than incompetent, but much disagreement as to how much time in pre-service teacher education should be devoted to managerial skills which may best be acquired in schools.

The Green Paper itself unreflectively and uncritically accepts the conclusion reached by Ramsay and Oliver's (1993) New Zealand study about the nature of quality in teachers in New Zealand (p. 19). Ramsay and Oliver claim that there is a necessary link between success as a teacher and several key capacities apparently possessed by five female teachers considered to be of highest quality. These women were all "able to think clearly and rationally at a high order level", had high tertiary qualifications, and displayed "warmth and compassion", "determination" and a "sense of humour". In each case "issues relating to class, race and gender were well to the fore of their essential concerns, and were reflected in their social and community actions". In addition, "all of the teachers were aware of and understood the text of the Treaty of Waitangi".

These five women are no doubt very good teachers, but it does not necessarily follow that there is a correlation between their ideological convictions and their success as teachers. To generalise from the study of five female teachers across the whole body of teachers is an incredible extension. Should we also conclude that the sex of the teachers was relevant and thus exclude all male teachers from any possibility of achieving 'quality' ?

It almost beggars belief that the Green Paper considers that the New Zealand study cited proved that 'quality teachers' in New Zealand use "child-centred strategies to encourage children to become independent learners". The Green Paper claims that these "child-centred strategies" should become a necessary component of any definition of teacher quality applied by New Zealand governments as part of their prescriptions for education (p. 19). It is a special irony that 'child-centred strategies' conflict with traditional Maori methods of upbringing, which require adherence to long-established traditional beliefs and practices, even though the Green Paper purports to respect Maori custom. The main point is, however, that the Green Paper seeks to impose uniformity in matters in which there is legitimate contention among equally intelligent, empathetic and experienced people.

According to the Green Paper, 'quality teachers' use child-centred strategies and facilitate and mediate students' learning (p. 19). In this respect, the Green Paper draws from Ramsay and Oliver, who observed that "[c]ritically [the five quality teachers they observed] saw themselves not as 'teachers' but as facilitators for children" (Ramsay and Oliver 1993, p. 55). The Green Paper also considers that quality teachers emphasise flexibility rather than "one static set of skills and knowledge" (p. 20).

6.5.2 An alternative view

A very different approach to that of the New Zealand education establishment, and one which the Education Forum considers should be given attention, is recommended by Professor Brian Simon, one of the most influential Marxist educationalists in Britain (Simon 1981):

The main thrust of the argument ... is this: that to start from the standpoint of individual differences is to start from the wrong position. To develop effective pedagogic means involves starting from the standpoint of what children have in common as members of the human species; to establish the general principles of teaching and, in the light of these, to determine what modifications of practice are necessary to meet specific individual needs. If all children are to be assisted to learn, to master increasingly complex cognitive tasks, to develop increasingly complex skills and abilities or mental operations, then this is an objective that schools have in common; their task becomes the deliberate development of such skills and abilities in all their children. And this involves imparting a definite structure into the teaching, and so into the learning experiences provided for the pupils. ...

This approach, I am arguing, is the opposite of basing the educational process on the child, on his immediate interests and spontaneous activity, and providing, in theory, for a total differentiation of the learning process in the case of each individual child. This latter approach is not only undesirable in principle, it is impossible of achievement in practice.

This approach looks for what is common rather than what is unique. It concentrates on the group rather than the individual student, while allowing for modifications in pedagogy to meet specific individual needs. One practical outcome of this structured group approach would be a greater concern to consider where there might be advantages in grouping students by aptitude and level of attainment, so that the instruction can be more effective. The focus on achieving mastery of skills and cognitive tasks and their deliberate development is also in sharp contrast with approaches, common in New Zealand teacher education, based on the view that knowledge is individually constructed, largely leaving the teacher as facilitator and emphasising group activity rather than whole class instruction.

It seems unlikely that the best schools in New Zealand pursue child-centred strategies at the expense of large tracts of authoritative and didactic teaching. Certainly this doesn't appear to be the case in Germany, Switzerland or the Far East. Phillips (1996, p. 52, drawing on research by Bierhoff and Prais 1995) contrasts the child-centred approach in England with that in Swiss schools, noting that a survey showed that, in spite of spending less time on maths, science and technology, Swiss children were "years ahead of their English counterparts" in these subjects. She also noted that the child-centred approach observed by the researchers in English schools turned out to be anything but that:

For most of the time pupils are left to their own resources. The teacher's role is mainly to help individual pupils when there are difficulties and to check their work. Pupils are addressed by the teacher usually only if they request it. Often several pupils need the teachers' help at the same time; ... The pressure on teachers means that checking of pupils' work is often cursory; many pupils do not receive adequate support from the teacher to carry out their work successfully, and poor understanding by pupils frequently goes unnoticed. Average pupils, and even more so those who are below average, consequently suffer.

The didactic approach of the Swiss schools, however, "paid dividends":

Half to two-thirds of the lesson was devoted to continuous interaction between the teacher and the whole class. The teacher started with a problem and developed solutions and concepts through graded questions addressed to the whole class. Pupils were thus guided towards discovering solutions themselves. Virtually the whole class was mentally engaged and the teacher could see from the responses who was weaker and needed individual help during written exercises. "To English teachers familiar with the long tail of under-achieving pupils in their mathematics classes who have trouble in understanding what they are expected to do, the degree of evenness amongst Swiss Realschule pupils in their attainment comes as a considerable revelation as to what lies within the realms of possibility" [Bierhoff and Prais 1995].

Robin Alexander's (1991) study of primary practice in Leeds led to the conclusion that group work (with children working in groups on different projects), thematic curriculum planning and delivery based on children's inquiry methods could all lead to problems subversive of children's learning - particularly in the hands of inexperienced or uncommitted teachers - and tended to be wasteful of time and effort. He argued especially against any single model of 'good primary practice' being laid down as an absolute, and against the pretence that there was a consensus in this area. He also argued for far less emphasis on surface aspects like display and resources and for more emphasis on the precise nature and purposes of the tasks children were given (Alexander 1991).

It is possible that much of what is said above about schools in England could also be said of New Zealand schools. Arguably our woeful failures at primary and junior level are due to schools being staffed largely by teachers ignorant of "static" knowledge, against which the Green Paper warns (p. 20), though filled with all kinds of notions of child-centredness, leading to excessive reliance on group activity, discovery methods, mediation and facilitation. Such trends in Britain have led, we understand, to many of those who can afford to shifting their children out of state primary schools as fast as they can. There may be a similar shift to private and integrated schools in New Zealand.

We should be suspicious of the emphasis in the OECD report, endorsed by the authors of the Green Paper, on self-criticality in teacher quality. This is another fine-sounding term that means very little. Of course, all good teachers are thoughtful and self critical, and so are good doctors, drainlayers, policy analysts and shop attendants. Self-criticality need not be explicit. Explicit self-criticism (as in the 'reflective practitioner') all too often means the importation of dubious and irrelevant psychological and sociological perspectives into one's work (see Partington 1997, pp. 101-108).

There is little hard evidence of what New Zealand teachers actually do (which might contrast with what they are asked to do or are thought to be doing) and where their ideas come from. But there is a vast literature on unsuccessful attempts, such as that by Neville Bennett (1976), to link 'progressive' child-centred teaching strategies with successful student learning. The work during the 1980s in the United States of James S Coleman and his associates suggested that structured rather than child-centred methods were more likely to foster good learning among students (Coleman et al. 1982). They found six distinguishing features of schools which showed above average student performance after all background factors (income, class, etc.) were allowed for. These were:

o they set high standards of personal conduct;

o they maintained strong and consistent discipline;

o they assigned regular homework and ensured that it was marked regularly;

o they demanded regular school attendance;

o they offered a rigorous and demanding curriculum; and

o they were staffed by dedicated teachers.

As we have already noted in this submission (chapter 5.3), similar findings were made in the United Kingdom and in other US studies.

Teaching is primarily a practical skill (as all teachers and learners will admit), learned primarily by doing it. Advice from old hands and demonstration lessons can be most helpful, and there are no doubt a few rules of thumb which can be taught explicitly. But, in the end, it is a matter of practice. While there will be some generally applicable processes, good teaching is teaching rooted in the subject matter. Thus knowledge and pedagogy are inextricably linked in Shulman's "pedagogy of substance" (Shulman 1989) (see chapter 6.4). This is a far cry from the 'facilitation' approach of some New Zealand education academics and endorsed by the government in its Green Paper.

6.5.3 The content of pre-service teacher education courses

The authors of the Green Paper appear to favour a return to centralised control over the content of teacher education programmes, through the setting of standards, as a means of ensuring their 'quality'. However, the four paragraphs and sub-heading under the above title in the Green Paper scarcely address the topic.

Many other subjects covered in teacher education programmes are less important to the beginning teacher than the "pedagogy of substance" discussed above (see chapters 6.4 and 6.5.2). A student teacher may know all about the psychology of child development or the theory of social stratification and still be a bad teacher. Conversely, many good teachers will be thoroughly bored by psychology and sociology, finding such studies irrelevant to the classroom - perhaps partly because they recognise that these are areas characterised more by fashion, ideology and prejudice than by any steady accumulation of well attested knowledge which can be helpfully applied in practice.

What is true of psychology and sociology can also apply to educational theory. Educational theories are often particularly value-laden and contested (as Partington 1997 shows) and derive from fundamental assumptions about ethics and the nature both of humankind and 'the good'. As we all know, in modern society there is no consensus on such matters. This emphasises the danger in putting education in the hands of a monopoly supplier (the state or its agent) and the preparation of teachers in the hands of an establishment dominated by one particular view. In New Zealand's colleges of education and university departments of education, most teaching staff are committed to child-centred and reconstructionist views of education and would be hostile to the vision of education just sketched - despite the fact that it is probably closer to the view of most citizens and even of politicians.

In the context of standards (see chapter 8.4), we argue that the content of courses should not be prescribed. We express a preference, however, for student teachers to be introduced to the educational disciplines during pre-service teacher education and for serious engagement with those disciplines to come later after practical experience of the classroom.

Underlying the slimness of the Green Paper's comments on the issue of pedagogy is, perhaps, the assumption that the child-centred approach adopted by the New Zealand education establishment is set in concrete for all time. The approach is exemplified by the New Zealand Curriculum Framework, which states that the principles giving direction to the curriculum in New Zealand schools are based on two premises, one of which is that "the individual student is at the centre of all teaching and learning ... " (Ministry of Education 1993, p. 6). However this view has been challenged (e.g. Irwin 1994), and is likely to come under further challenges as weaknesses in the curriculum framework and related curriculum statements are recognised (Irwin 1996b) and as New Zealand slips further down the international rankings for educational achievement.

6.5.4 Different pedagogies for different groups

The Green Paper has a brief reference to pedagogy in the context of the teaching of Maori children (p. 36), perhaps implying that the authors consider that there are different pedagogies for different ethnic groups - a view that is problematic (see chapter 10.3). But the Green Paper does not address teaching problems associated with different abilities within a school, which is a much less problematic issue. Howson (1994) raised this important issue in the context of the new maths curriculum for New Zealand schools.

If the current wide variation in student achievement between schools is to be narrowed, it is particularly important that a pedagogy is developed that suits the interests and abilities of those in the lower achieving groups. Luxton (1993), writing for a local education authority in the United Kingdom, has expressed concern that students over 14 years of age, particularly in the practical, technical and vocational areas, have been offered the pedagogy that is least suited to their abilities and aptitudes. He advocates less emphasis on experiential and activity-based approaches and on group work, and considers that for many young people 'direct instruction' is preferred.

Just as teachers need a variety of assessment methods, they also need a variety of teaching methods and the professional competence to know what 'works' best for each curricular activity and in relation to students' ages, interests and attainment levels. Asian teachers are reported to successfully employ a variety of teaching techniques within each lesson (Stevenson 1992; Stevenson and Stigler 1992). The problem with the curriculum framework and some of the curriculum statements is that they point excessively to one approach and not to other approaches for which there are positive research findings and for which teachers should be equipped to use. Instead, the curriculum framework and curriculum statements focus on sensitivity to the needs of individuals rather than on what is to be taught.

Recent history has shown the dangers of highly centralised decision making on curricular and pedagogical issues, not least those of ideological capture (Partington 1997; Irwin 1997b). There is a tendency inherent in all bureaucracies to give far too much weight in their decisions to the demands of articulate and well organised lobby groups. To the extent that the state has to be involved in education, it should contrive a situation in which parents can choose from genuinely different types of school, in the light of the ethos of the schools and the needs of their children.

6.5.5 Teachers as skilled instructors or friendly facilitators - or both

In the United Kingdom child-centred approaches to teaching, similar to those advocated in the Green Paper, are increasingly seen as unhelpful. The Chief Inspector of Schools in England, Christopher Woodhead, has been to the fore in challenging the current orthodoxy and in raising the issue of what to do about incompetent teachers. Both the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and the Department of Education and Science (DES) have been involved in producing discussion papers on curriculum organisation and classroom practice in primary schools, some drawing on Ofsted's findings from school inspections (Ofsted 1993 and 1994; DES 1992). One of these reports (Ofsted 1994) identifies factors found to be associated with high and poor standards of pupil achievement. The three most important factors associated with high achievement were:

(i) In virtually all the lessons with high standards teachers had satisfactory or good knowledge of the subject they were teaching.

(ii) In more than half (58 percent) of lessons where pupils achieved high standards teachers demonstrated good questioning skills to assess pupils' knowledge and challenge their thinking.

(iii) In 54 percent of the better lessons teachers used a good balance of grouping strategies including whole class, small group or individual work as appropriate.

The four prominent factors in over a quarter of the lessons judged to be unsatisfactory or poor were:

(i) no actual teaching was done by the teacher. The teacher acted mainly as a supervisor or servicer of individuals or groups;

(ii) poor management and use of time in the lessons, often with no deadlines being set and/or wastage at the beginning and ends of sessions;

(iii) an overuse of undifferentiated worksheets; and

(iv) unchallenging or dull tasks were set for pupils.

We are not aware of any similar broad-based data from New Zealand schools. However, there are some obvious points of contrast between these findings from research in England and current official thinking in New Zealand. For example, in the latter, group work is officially encouraged. Also, of the four factors associated in the English study with poor learning, the first sounds like the 'facilitation' approach of constructivism, various forms of which dominate New Zealand's education establishment (and which is endorsed in the Green Paper ), and the fourth immediately evokes the new social studies curriculum (Ministry of Education 1997a; Education Forum 1995 and 1996).

Pedagogy seems to be a 'Cinderella' subject in New Zealand's educational establishment, reflecting the strength with which child-centred approaches have been enforced and accepted, the ideological baggage associated with it, and perhaps the reluctance of educators to express any doubts they may hold for fear of academic and personal repercussions. Such research into pedagogy as there is avoids a 'first principles' approach - an approach which might lead to the questioning of current orthodoxy and a more open methodology for finding out what works for which children and what does not.

6.6 The practicum

The Green Paper sensibly holds that "teacher trainees [should] participate in practical school-based experience" (p. 31). This is a proposition no one appears ever to have denied, but it is quite another matter to argue that any particular mode of providing such practical school-based experience is so superior to others that it should become the basis for prescription and uniformity.

The Green Paper advises that the school based experiences have to be in "a range of classroom settings" and in a diversity of schools (p. 38). However, the aim should be to prepare student teachers to effect learning within a range of settings and situations, and this requires exposing them to role models who can demonstrate the necessary skills. Diversity for the sake of diversity is unlikely to do much good.

The decision on the proportion of time to be spent during pre-service training on the practicum is obviously very important. As the allocation of time on practicum increases, the system comes closer to one of internship. Trials with internship should be encouraged, though the interests of some training providers might impede such experimentation.

6.7 Information technology skills

The Green Paper states that "advances" in information technology (IT) "are changing the nature, practice and philosophies of teaching and learning" (p. 31). This is an astonishing assertion (no analysis or references are provided). What are these changes, and are they for the better? It looks as if the authors of the Green Paper assume that because IT is pervasive and developing very fast, schooling must adapt to it in some fundamental (but unspecified) ways. Is the computer industry really to determine fundamental issues to do with the "nature, practice and philosophies" of schooling?

For the uneducated (and may be for the educated), IT is the great delusion of our age. Certainly IT offers some advantages, and it is probably necessary for pupils to know how to use IT in an elementary way, but it is not clear that it should go further than that. We are not aware of any evidence that IT is more than of marginal assistance in learning. There is plenty of evidence to believe that it is a distraction and worse (see chapter 6.4). Above all, it should not be used as a pretext for teachers not teaching and for learners not learning.

6.8 Some funding issues

6.8.1 Funding the practicum

We agree with the proposals in the Green Paper for the funding of practicums (p. 38). This would implement the MRG's recommendations that the funding of the functions currently provided by normal and model schools should be transferred to education providers, to enable the education providers to purchase the most suitable school-based practical training for their students. It is one means of moving toward a level playing field.

6.8.2 The pre-registration period

The Green Paper's proposals (p. 39-40) place further reporting requirements on schools as to the training programmes of beginning teachers, rather than leaving it as a matter for negotiation between schools as the employers and those beginning teachers who lack appropriate training. This addition to central imposition on employers should be avoided.

6.8.3 Funding of in-service teacher education

The Green Paper proposes "greater devolution of decision making about professional development, by providing funding for in-service development directly to schools" (pp. 7, 44-45), although the government also intends "to retain some central funding in the Ministry of Education for professional development" (pp. 8, 44-45).

Much of this is sensible. However, in view of the range of government interventions that already exist and the proposals in the Green Paper to increase central control still further, we doubt if the overall effect of these changes will be significant. The proposed professional body would determine the requirements of in-service training, and the established providers of pre-service education will continue to dominate its provision. A distinct market is unlikely to develop, just as the market in other forms of service to schools has been weak due to the power of central institutions and exposure to ministry directives. Moreover, we argue that if schools can be trusted to make most of the decisions about in-service training needs, why should they not be trusted in the first place to choose the teachers they need from a variety of forms of pre-service teacher education? This implication applies equally to Maori-medium schools.

The proposed change in the funding for in-service training will only be meaningful if combined with deregulation and decentralisation of the market for pre-service teacher education.

6.9 The importance of assessment data

The Green Paper is rightly concerned with raising educational achievement levels. However, it doesn't address the issue of how we know whether levels in the various subject areas at various ages or stages are going up, down or remaining static. Without good assessment data on achievement levels we do not know which schools and teachers are doing well, and which are doing poorly. Nor, as already noted (chapter 6.5.2), do we have the data about the quality of classroom lessons available in England from Ofsted inspection reports. Boards, principals and other senior school staff will have little data on which to assess the extent to which their teachers are actually teaching, in the sense of causing learning to take place (see chapter 3.3), and on which to base judgments about how well the various colleges of education prepare their student teachers to teach.

Another point to note from the experience in England is the cascading effect of national examinations. For example, when secondary school students were examined and schools rated on the basis of performance, the secondary head teachers put pressure on primary schools to lift their standards. Naturally, secondary schools did not want to be held responsible for the poor performance of students who had not been well taught at the primary level. Thus measuring in one part of the system led to pressure for accountability in other parts.

While there might be an argument for the state laying down a minimal curriculum (say, about half of the core subjects at the junior secondary level, as recommended by Irwin 1994), the most useful thing the state can do in school education is to insist that schools enter pupils for public examinations and publish the results. In England, league tables have been the greatest, and perhaps the only, lever for raising standards in the past decade. Everything else tends to be beset with jargon, vacuity, ideological capture and bureaucratic inertia, leading to coagulation around an undemanding and mediocre consensus, which satisfies no one .

The value of having publicly available, basic information about the average levels of achievement in each school of students at key ages has been accepted by the Blair Labour Government in the United Kingdom. The Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, seems more determined than the previous Conservative administration to ensure that students, parents and public, as well as teachers, are fully aware of how schools in similar circumstances carry out their tasks. Since most of the schools with the worst performances have been in Labour strongholds in old working-class areas, it is natural that sincere Labour Party people should be determined to know which schools are most helping disadvantaged children. There is, after all, little point in rhetorical denunciations of poverty and deprivation if the speakers take no interest in the effectiveness of teaching methods, organisational systems or curricula in terms of students' learning, or, for that matter, as regards their health, self-esteem, willingness to obey the law, or other relevant outcomes.

New Zealand is developing banks of assessment resources, and they could be very important for assessing schools' and students' performances. At present schools' use of these resources is voluntary. In our view use of these resources should be made compulsory, and the results published, at certain stages of schooling.

6.10 Conclusions and recommendations

In the Green Paper the issue of teacher quality is rightly given very high priority. However, the Green Paper's treatment is inadequate and relies far too heavily on a bland OECD report and a very small scale New Zealand study. Nowhere does the Green Paper discuss the issue of quality within the wider context of the school environment (see chapter 5.3 of this submission).

In our view the key attributes of a 'quality' teacher are:

- substantive knowledge of the subject or subjects to covered;

- an infectious enthusiasm for the subject as important in its own right;

- the skill to transmit the knowledge to, and to develop the skills in, children; and

- good moral character and attitude.

Other educational subjects such as educational history and philosophy are important, and, while they may be usefully introduced at the pre-service stage of teacher training, they are best studied in-depth after some years of practical experience in the classroom.

While the Green Paper refers to the importance of knowledge, its treatment of it is inadequate and problematical. Its treatment of pedagogy is far worse, reinforcing unhelpful attitudes and approaches which are contrary to those adopted in countries with high levels of educational achievement. Nonetheless, we do not consider that the current orthodoxy of the education establishment should be changed by government fiat. Instead the government should encourage a diversity of views and focus on results by insisting on objective assessment of student learning and the publication of assessment results. Replacing one orthodoxy with another should not be the aim of reform in the education sector. Rather the aim should be to ensure ongoing, open, probing, sceptical debate, well informed by high quality, objective empirical data.

The government could usefully initiate research into quality issues and open up this area for much needed dispassionate debate from a 'first principles' basis. Teacher education providers, schools and teachers should have information derived from empirical and theoretical research with which to determine their own best strategies for educating teachers. Any notion of enshrining a 'one best' method of teaching in compulsory standards or professional codes should be rejected.

Parents should be able to choose which school is best for their children. At present this is largely only an option for better-off families. To achieve equity and a better match of child and school, it is necessary to free up the supply side of schooling by equalising taxpayer funding for state and private schools.

Recommendations:

o The highest priority in teacher education should be given to a trainee's substantive knowledge in the subject or subjects to be taught by the trainee, and the trainee's ability to convey it to, and develop associated skills within, students. The other educational sciences are important but best studied in-depth after some years of practical experience in the classroom.

o The government should not impose any particular pedagogical approach or approaches on New Zealand schools and teachers, whether through curriculum statements, professional standards or other means.

o The government should review the already extensive international research into teaching methods, including approaches adopted in continental Europe and Asia. It should take the lead in opening up this vital area for objective, dispassionate debate in New Zealand.

o The government should reject any notion of enshrining a 'one best' system of teacher education and training. Providers should be able, within broad parameters, to determine their own teacher training programmes and mix of content, pedagogical emphases and such like.

o The most useful government intervention in the education sector is for the state to require all school children to sit, at certain stages, national examinations in core subjects (say, English, maths, science, history and geography) and to publish the results. The publication of this information and a more open and rigorous debate about teaching methodologies will help schools and teachers to decide their own best strategies for and approaches to teacher training. It will also help parents to decide which schools are best for their children.

o To enable parents to use school-based information and to take decisions about which schools best suit their own children, the supply side of schooling must be opened up by equalising funding of state and private schools.

o On resourcing issues, the best policy approach is to provide funds for teacher development, as far as is practical, directly to schools, coupled with making data on schooling, in terms of the educational achievement of pupils, widely available.

CHAPTER 7

THE STATUS OF TEACHING AND TEACHERS

7.1 Introduction

Status cannot be mandated. The status of a profession reflects respect for that profession, which has to be earned and maintained. The status of teaching and teachers depends both on how well teachers are judged to perform their task and how teaching is judged in relation to other occupations. The first factor is complicated by the strong connections between teaching and other education institutions, including colleges of education, university departments of education and the education bureaucracies. Thus, how teachers are perceived is part of a wider issue about how the education sector as a whole is perceived. The second issue is no doubt linked to the first one, but to some degree it is exogenous and relates to how important New Zealanders deem education to be.

The issue of status and the process of professionalisation are clearly related to each other and to the government's "central theme ... for education reform [of] lifting educational attainment" (p. 5). What needs to be examined, however, is what professionalisation involves and whether the government's proposals in the Green Paper (p. 19ff) are consistent with the process.

7.2 Perceptions about the performance of the school system

The prevailing view within the education sector in New Zealand has long been that we enjoy a world class schooling system with world class teachers. In reference to a report on the achievement of New Zealand school students in an international context, the president of the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) said:

And the news is good. There is still room for improvement in the area of mathematics, but overall it is clear that the available evidence points to levels of achievement amongst the best in the world. (Foreword to Elley 1991)

Such views have long been disputed by a minority of commentators, and recent international surveys of educational achievement suggest that their concerns have some foundation. Perhaps our schools and their teachers are not achieving at the levels hitherto supposed.

In reading literacy, in which New Zealand scores highly internationally, there are worrying trends as indicated, for example, in the long tail of low achievers shown up in the latest International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) study (Wagemaker 1993) and in Tom Nicholson's 'Struggletown' research (Nicholson 1996b). The recent study of adult literacy found a "high concentration of adults with very poor literacy skills (around 1 in 5 New Zealanders)" (Walker et al. 1997; Benseman 1997). New Zealand is regarded as "a centre for the whole language approach to the teaching of reading" (Nicholson 1996a), but the ministry's promotion of this approach is under criticism by academics such as Bill Tunmer and Nicholson - and seen by some as an example of the damage that can be inflicted on the education of children by closed bureaucratic minds wielding great power. In this context also, the Education Forum is very concerned at the prospect of the Green Paper enforcing these unhelpful approaches even more strongly, and reinforcing barriers to criticism, under the superficially attractive banner of 'professional standards'.

The IEA's Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) confirmed widely and long-held concerns that our teachers are weak in maths and science. Form 2 and Form 3 children were in the lower half of the 40 or so participating countries, with the exception that Form 3 children were slightly above half way in science. The Green Paper itself notes the TIMSS report's finding "that teachers' lack of knowledge in mathematics and science contributed to the relatively poor performance of New Zealand school pupils in the study. Many current teacher education programmes have very little ('worryingly low') study of these subjects beyond the study of the curriculum" (p. 32). As revealed in a research study (Buzeika 1993), Michael Matthews (Matthews 1995) draws attention to the appallingly low standard of arithmetical ability of entrants to the primary programme at the Auckland College of Education.

What the ministry might also have noted from the TIMSS report is that several of the countries which achieved at the highest levels were either Asian (Singapore, Korea, Japan and Hong Kong ) or ex-Soviet bloc countries (Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Bulgaria and the Russian Federation). We suspect a common feature of these countries is a lack of commitment to child-centrism and other aspects of the educational progressivism that dominates the education establishment in New Zealand. Certainly teachers in the Asian countries (China, Taiwan and Japan) included in the survey by Stevenson and Stigler (1992) had quite different views about the most important characteristics of a good instructor, compared with those of their American counterparts. "Clarity" was the most common response of the Asians. "Sensitivity to the needs of individuals" was the most common American response, and one which would, presumably, be greeted with approbation by the authors of the Green Paper in view of their support of "child-centred strategies" (p. 19), "pastoral skills to meet the individual learning needs of all children" (p. 5) and "empathy" (p. 19).

Stevenson (1992) notes that the stereotypical view of the Asian school as one in which children are burdened by excessive rote learning and repeated drill is wrong. Knowledge is not forced, and there are extensive amounts of recess and a positive attitude to academics. Moreover, Stevenson's study found nothing mysterious about Asian teaching styles and techniques - they embodied many of the ideals found in the United States, but were applied in an interesting and productive way that makes learning enjoyable. Stevenson said that the comparative research showed "how far Americans have strayed from the effective application of well-known teaching methods".

According to Stevenson, Asian teachers see themselves as well informed, well prepared guides, who consult one another and who take children as active participants in a structured way through the curriculum. The skill found in Asian teachers was not acquired in colleges of education.

The pattern for training teachers resembles that provided to other professionals: in-service training under the supervision of skilled models. Colleges are assumed to provide basic knowledge about subject matter, as well as about child development and theories of learning. But Asian instructors believe the art of teaching can be accomplished better in classrooms of elementary schools than in lecture halls in colleges. This approach stands in marked contrast to that taken in the U.S., where teaching skill is generally thought to be best acquired through several specialised courses in teaching methods.

It was suggested earlier in this submission (see chapter 5.2) that low morale among New Zealand teachers might be explained in part by uncertainty about their role - as pastor and social reformer as well as teacher - and uncertainty about what teaching actually involves (guides to destinations determined by the child or skilled instructors in the mastery of knowledge). Stevenson and Stigler (1992, p. 165) report that pleas for professional status, such as those made by teachers in the United States, would be "inconceivable" in Taiwan and Japan. They go on to report:

There is no question that teachers [in Taiwan and Japan] are professionals. Although in China these days teachers may suffer kinds of inequities in salary that other Chinese intellectuals face, they still retain their admired status.

Clearly too, a Green Paper such as the one we are now addressing would be inconceivable in those countries.

We suspect that the self-confidence and high status of Asian and European teachers (cf. also Swiss teachers, see chapter 6.5.2) has much to do with a more clearly defined role and purpose. It seems doubtful, therefore, whether the status of teaching in New Zealand can be significantly improved while such fundamental uncertainties and ambiguities are widespread in the educational establishment. Schools can do some things to highlight the instructional role of teachers, for example, by hiring more teacher assistants for tasks such as the supervision of playgrounds and sport.

7.3 Perceptions about the wider education system in New Zealand

Given the success of Asian teachers and schools in maths and science, it is surprising that the Ministry of Education has not sought to discover the reasons for their success rather than to rely on the bland OECD report and a limited New Zealand study. This relative lack of interest indicates other unhealthy features of the New Zealand education establishment: its insularity and insecurity. The ministry does not appear to use overseas consultants regularly, even though in a very small country we cannot hope to have world class experts in many areas of interest.

When the Education Forum uses overseas experts their reports are often criticised not because of their actual content but because of the national origin or assumed ideology of the authors. Defensive reactions often involving ad hominem devices such as ideological 'labelling' and accusations of 'conspiracy' are used to denigrate critics and marginalise their views. These devices evade the hard business of seeking the truth and the humbling business of being open to refutation.

Much of what purports to be research about education in New Zealand does little to help children learn or to add to our knowledge about the world, and is more concerned with the pursuit of the common enemy - the 'New Right' - whose identity is often not revealed and whose words are rarely cited. Fortunately there are exceptions, but they are rare.

It is little wonder that the study of education as a subject at the academic and college of education levels and in the bureaucracy is not generally well regarded. Snook (1992) notes the low esteem of teacher education in American universities. While being (perhaps charitably) uncertain whether the same situation applies in New Zealand, Snook "was shocked to read that scholastic success at school was abandoned as a criterion for selection into teacher education on the bizarre grounds that it (allegedly) did not correlate with teaching performance (Batchelor 1986, p. 119)." However, if knowledge is downgraded and other factors such as empathy are elevated, this state of affairs should cause no surprise, especially if there are few incentives anywhere in the system for teaching academic knowledge and skills.

Barcan (1995, p. 51) reports that courses in Australian teacher training institutions, clinging to progressive and/or radical ideologies, often alienated trainee teachers from their profession. Partington (1997) found some evidence of the same in New Zealand institutions during his visit here in 1996. He notes, for example:

Several young teachers ... considered that too many lecturers were concerned to propagate their own personal views and idiosyncrasies (p. 124);

Ideological indoctrination of a reconstructionist character, with a special focus on feminist and Treaty of Waitangi issues, is not merely a danger but a living reality in many teacher education institutions (p. 150);

The principals of some Auckland secondary schools ... condemn much in current teacher education as a mixture of unfocused child-centred methodology and ideological radicalism (p. 47);

Indoctrination, it was suggested, took place chiefly by the presentation of something which is in essence very controversial as though it were undisputed and accepted by all thinking people (p. 51);

The ideological fix of some ACE staff was shown when one young women asked to be called 'Mrs', since she had just been married. She was told with disdain by an academic 'Ms' that only women with no self-esteem who were dependent on men called themselves 'Mrs' (p. 51); and

In particular, these young teachers emphasised the almost total absence in their courses of any genuinely critical or reflective thought, even though these terms were frequently used by their lecturers. The young teachers considered some college lecturers positively anti-intellectual and hostile to university culture. They claimed that one leading figure in primary teacher education advised them that it was a waste of talent for a really able graduate to enter primary teaching (p. 55).

The Partington report (1997) on teacher education and training drew, as the author himself emphasises, from a very limited sample. However, his observations merely confirm the narrow ideological range of views found in much of the education sector, and the defensiveness of many within it to criticism. Again it must be emphasised that there are exceptions, but overall we do not have a healthy, vigorous, intellectually open educational community.

The state of the education bureaucracy is another part of the education system whose reputation affects the general climate of opinion about education and indirectly people's perceptions about teachers. In the view of the Education Forum, in recent years the quality of the Ministry of Education's policy advice has been poor. It is not that the ministry has reached unwelcome conclusions, but rather that policy papers have lacked rigor, have avoided working from 'first principles' and therefore have not identified problems and their causes, and show little command of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. The current three Green Papers (on national qualifications, tertiary education and the subject of this submission, teacher education) illustrate these failings.

If our view of the ministry's policy performance is not a widely held view within the education community at large, it is probably because most of the ministry consultants and members of its advisory groups are from the same 'education family' and share very similar educational backgrounds and outlook. For example, the new school curricula have been drawn up mostly (perhaps entirely) by New Zealand consultants with the advice of advisory groups largely made up of New Zealand academics, tutors and teachers. However, overseas developments have clearly been influential in some New Zealand developments. When expert outsiders are brought in to review the ministry's work - whether these people are New Zealanders who are not members of the 'education family' like Professor Karl Stead, or overseas experts - the ministry's work is often found to be seriously wanting (for example, see Education Forum 1995 and 1996; Howson 1994; Kelly 1995). However, the ministry has an astonishing capacity to ignore critical findings and to go on doing what it was going to do anyway - illustrated perhaps best by the development of the social studies curriculum for schools.

One recent development, which has caused considerable damage to the reputation of education in New Zealand, has been the ill-conceived National Qualifications Framework (NQF). This was very vigorously promoted, partly for ideological reasons, by a militant educational bureaucracy, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), under its previous chief executive. It has caused - and still causes - widespread resentment among some secondary and tertiary institutions. After some five years of growing criticism - on both theoretical and practical grounds - the government decided to make radical changesto the NQF. However, in its Green Paper on the issue (1997b), the Ministry of Education (until recently not a very public participant in the debate) appears set to divert the development of the NQF from one cul-de-sac to another (Irwin 1997a; Smithers 1997).

7.4 Perceptions about the relative attractiveness of teaching and the role of the teacher

The attractiveness of the teaching profession inevitably rises and falls with rates of unemployment for tertiary educated young people and with the growth or decline in the demand in other sectors for staff with tertiary qualifications. Over the last several decades, changes in the employment market and in perceptions about family (including the use of child care services) have led to considerable growth in employment opportunities for women outside the more traditional occupations of teaching and nursing. Also, the opening up of the economy from the 1980s has resulted in a much more diversified labour force and a wider range of employment opportunities for both men and women, especially for those with higher qualifications. Thus teaching has to compete much more vigorously than in the past for recruits. To the extent that status is a zero sum game, any raising of the status of teachers must also involve a lowering of the status of other occupations.

At the same time as developments outside teaching have reduced the relative attractiveness of teaching, developments within the sector have made teaching more difficult and problematic. Teacher organisations and individual teachers are often equivocal about some of the changes. For example, many teachers seek to have a more extensive pastoral and counselling role so that they can deal with 'the whole child', but also complain about any increase in non-teaching duties. Others believe that the advocacy and embodiment of moral standards should be no more demanded of teachers than of accountants or driving instructors, but also wish to impose on students beliefs about race or gender which only make sense within a broader context of moral judgments. Many teachers wish to be facilitators rather than to be seen by their students as instructors, but are also often disturbed when they are no longer regarded as figures of authority. For some teachers, dealing with unruly students is a challenge to be welcomed, but for many it is often draining and, if the teacher is unsupported, demoralising. All these considerations also influence people's thinking about becoming teachers.

If we consider the two sets of ideas, the child-centred and the reconstructionist, which, in various combinations, have dominated education over the last quarter of a century, we find that they pose problems, as well as opportunities, for teachers. Moderate forms of child-centred philosophy simply require that students' work should be made as interesting and lively as possible and should be related, within reason, to their existing interests and experiences. However, in teacher training in New Zealand, a more intense form of this philosophy has been influential: radical constructivism, which asserts that knowledge cannot be transmitted and that each learner actively constructs his or her own meaning. This limitation on the right of teachers to engage in direct teaching proves a sore restriction even for some of those who believe in the doctrine. Because the doctrine is, to some degree, endorsed and pushed by teacher education institutions and the Ministry of Education, it takes some courage for teachers to reject it publicly.

Until the 1970s the main reconstructionist theories, with 'classical' Marxism as their most influential variant, placed their main emphasis on the need for the best knowledge, previously confined to too small a portion of the population, to be made fully available to all. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Makerenko and Gramsci were all 'materialists' in epistemology and held that there is a real external world about which we can gain objective knowledge. Nevertheless, they were well aware that knowledge can be distorted for various reasons, mainly for religious, political or other ideological purposes. Indeed, some of these theorists were experts in some types of ideological distortion themselves when in power. In the 1970s most reconstructionist opinion followed Marx in holding that human history is broadly progressive and that significant advances have usually been made when one type of social formation makes way for another, although some changes have been retrogressive, whilst even generally beneficial changes have often had some negative consequences. An alternative tradition, associated particularly with Rousseau, is nostalgia for earlier social formations on the ground that these are more natural to our species. However, sentiments which idealise the 'noble savage' and condemn the global intrusions of Europeans into prairies, tundra, jungles and bush are found more often on the political right rather than on the left.

The 1970s saw a weakening in the left's confidence in concepts of progress. This crisis of confidence arose in part as a result of the discrediting of communist regimes, in part from fears that further rapid industrial and economic development would create environmental degradation and global catastrophe and in part from the growing influence of cultural relativism. Claims, first popularised by Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, that values are purely internal to societies, and thus no society should be considered better than any other, easily slipped into the belief that societies previously belittled as primitive were superior to those of the belittlers.

The reconstructionist educational ideas that became dominant during the 1970s were advanced by people who describe themselves as neo-Marxist, critical theorists and reflective thinkers. Their epistemology is relativist or subjectivist or, in other words, they do not consider there is any basic difference between knowledge and belief. They state that it is mainly because of power (of the rich over the poor, men over women, whites over non-whites, and so on), not because of evidence or reason, that some beliefs become 'privileged' as 'knowledge'. Far from thinking that all children should have full access to the cultural heritage of the human race previously confined to a minority, the newer reconstructionist views reject the concept of an objectively valuable cultural heritage. 'Whose knowledge?' and 'In whose interests is this claimed to be culturally valuable?' are the central questions asked first by 'critical theorists' and then by radical feminists and advocates of a host of special ethnic or cultural interests, including Maori interests.

Whatever merits the new reconstructionism possesses, it has the signal defect of rejecting the idea basic to earlier radical ideas, as well as to liberal ones, that there is a common core of knowledge, understandings and skills which have almost universal value and relevance, even though further experience and study will in time reveal inadequacies in our current ideas and practices. Unless teachers have genuine confidence that they have something true and valuable to impart, and that this is in principle of potential value to all learners, irrespective of class, race or gender, they are unlikely to achieve deep satisfaction from their work, and their occupation is unlikely, and unworthy, to be esteemed as a true profession or vocation.

However, it must be emphasised here, as elsewhere in this submission, that the pronouncements of education academics and bureaucrats do not necessarily affect what goes on in the schools and classrooms of New Zealand, although due to a lack of hard data on schools, we cannot be sure about the extent of this influence. A powerful counterweight to the more extreme notions of academics and bureaucrats is the commonsense of ordinary student teachers, teachers and principals, most of whom know that the business of teaching is to effect learning. Similarly, students and their parents will demand that students learn. But it is also the case that, over time, the notions discussed above will tend to change the task of teaching and the image it presents to the rest of society.

7.5 Is teaching a 'profession'?

As part of its strategy to raise the status of teaching, the government wants the teaching profession to operate like other professions in all ways that it can (p. 6). The Green Paper provides no analysis to indicate what this might mean. In what ways do other 'professions' operate, and to what extent can teaching follow suit? The Green Paper sees professionalisation as involving the establishment of "nationally agreed professional standards" and a body to promulgate and enforce the standards, but it is silent about other criteria (except for the attributes of a 'quality' teacher which were discussed earlier in this submission; see chapters 6.2 and 6.5.1).

Professionalisation is normally understood to refer to the process whereby an occupation increasingly meets the criteria attributed to a profession (Hoyle 1987; Benderson 1986). Most commentators would probably agree that the process includes the following:

o the profession has relatively high academic entry requirements;

o practitioners undergo a longer and more specialised training than for other occupations, involving the acquisition of a considerable body of knowledge widely accepted as essential to the practice of the profession;

o the bodies of knowledge and related skills are applied by the practitioner in a non-routine manner in the interests of the ultimate client - all other interests are secondary;

o when practitioners have gained sufficient experience, most work relatively independently, with little supervision; and

o the profession, in return for control over entry into the profession, polices its own members, including dismissal proceedings, from the perspective of the clients' interests.

Obviously, the sheer number of teachers compared with, say doctors and dentists, means that teaching can never require the very high entry requirements demanded of entrants to, say, medical schools, and cannot award the same pay. Of course, we are not arguing here that current pay levels are satisfactory, but simply that because large numbers are required, teaching is not going to attract many of the most able to its ranks and is not going to command the premiums attached to many of those with rare abilities and skills in high demand.

As to the first characteristic of a profession (the profession has relatively high academic entry requirements), most teachers have had tertiary education, either gaining a teaching diploma or a university degree. The trend to make teaching an all-graduate occupation has been seen as necessarily raising the status of teaching as a profession. To this extent the great majority of teachers will have met a reasonably high entry requirement, though not as demanding as for entry to programmes aimed at other occupations such as law and medicine. Entry requirements to some teacher education programmes are depressingly low. A survey conducted at Auckland College of Education (see chapter 7.2) found that almost half the entrants to the primary school teaching course had little understanding of percentages or fractions (Buzeika 1993; Matthews 1995, pp. 57-64). The Green Paper could have asked why this situation exists and, in particular, whether current funding arrangements encourage institutions to concentrate on the number of student teachers that it can accept in each intake, rather than on high entry requirements and the rigorous preparation of well qualified student teachers. The teaching occupation will not have the high status it seeks as long as the public perceives that significant numbers of its members have not achieved at the school level and thus are likely to perpetuate ignorance and transmit unhelpful attitudes to the next generation.

As to the second characteristic of a profession (the specialised training and acquisition of a considerable body of essential knowledge), traditionally it was axiomatic that there are large bodies of specific and generally accepted knowledge (demarcated by subject areas and the educational sciences) regarded as essential to the practice of teaching. This is no longer so straightforward for two reasons. First, it is often disputed that teachers teach in the sense of passing on useful knowledge and skills. Instead teachers are seen as facilitators and guides to child-chosen destinations, while students (rarely 'pupils' or 'children') construct their own knowledge (see chapters 6.5 and 7.4).

Secondly, to the extent that there is a body of knowledge to be acquired by practitioners, there may be little agreement about what constitutes that knowledge. Much that previously, in 'unenlightened' times, went unchallenged, must now be deconstructed according to the power structures of society (see chapter 7.4). The tendency of many educationalists is, understandably, to view teacher development in an unproblematic way, to see it in terms of steady improvement through the application of increasingly sophisticated technology and informed by more enlightened pedagogy and sociology. The outcome of this development is often presented as a triumph of high ideals over inertia and myopia. Already it will be evident that this submission views teacher education as highly problematic. Thus, it is difficult to say that the teaching occupation now unambiguously displays the second characteristic of a profession.

A further point to note is that the school curriculum is substantially determined by central authorities. In fact, this trend to centralisation has increased significantly with the introduction of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Education 1993) and the related curriculum statements to cover the whole school curriculum at all levels. The NQF endeavours to reduce the many achievement objectives in the curriculum statements to clear learning outcomes and related performance criteria for assessment purposes. Thus the role of teachers in determining their essential business has been much reduced, and this reduction in teacher autonomy views the teacher more as a technician than a professional. It is hard to reconcile the ministry's determination to control the total school curriculum and its continued endorsement of unit standards for school subjects with its desire to enhance the professional status of teachers. If the ministry is serious about the latter it needs to reduce significantly its control over the former.

The third characteristic of a profession (knowledge and skills are applied in a non-routine matter in the interests of the client) raises the issue of who is the client. Traditionally the answer was unambiguous - initially parents as agents of their children, and later the children themselves as they reach more mature years. However, concerns about equity, the structures of society, social justice and such like mean that teachers have many clients - certainly the local community (whatever that means), but why stop there? Perhaps it should be the whole population of New Zealand, or even of the world. The ministry reflects this wider view when it states that the professional body for teachers should be "charged with taking into account the interests of employers, government, teachers and the wider community" (p. 26). By contrast, there is no uncertainty about who is the client of, say, a doctor, dentist or lawyer. In this respect it is difficult to understand how the proposed professional body for teachers can act like those administering other professions.

A problem similarly related to the scope of teaching's interests is whether the 'reconstructionist' or wider political role of teaching is compatible with an occupation gaining professional status. For some educationalists, particularly in universities and colleges of education, this political role is not simply about improving the pay and conditions of teachers but about reconstructing society, that is, using schooling as a means of transforming society from what it is now to a society of a radically different character (see chapter 5.2; Partington 1997, p. 1). Members of other professions enter local government or national politics directly if they want to contribute to wider societal issues. They usually either leave their profession or keep their professional activities separate from their political life. Some educators think that teachers can and should do both at the same time - indeed the one, schooling, is an instrument for the other, that is changing the structures of society. Certainly the government has shamefully endorsed the use of the school curriculum for political reasons, that is, indoctrination. The question in the context of teacher status is whether politicisation is compatible with professionalisation. In our view it is not. If the government wants to enhance the professional status of teachers it must not seek to use teachers for its own political ends.

Another feature of teaching affecting its image as a profession is the high degree of unionisation of its workforce, reflecting the centralised nature of salary bargaining. The practices of the unions are not normally associated with professional bodies. For example, calling for go-slows, working to rule, refusing to participate in the implementation of reforms and making threats against schools opting for salary bulk funding are the results of militant industrial unionism negotiating for better terms and conditions for members. This behaviour is not indicative of a professional body seeking to protect and improve the quality of its members' services in the exclusive interests of its clients, that is, school pupils. Such union activity tends to portray a 'cloth cap' image of the occupation, and this will limit any improvement in public perceptions and the status of teachers.

Teachers do by and large meet the fourth characteristic of a profession, that of working relatively independently. Unlike other 'professionals', however, they work with a large group of clients (the children in their classes) rather than on a confidential, one-to-one basis as, for example, between doctor and patient or solicitor and client. As for the introduction of a professional body for regulating the profession, the Green Paper is unclear on the degree of control and the closeness of that control that the body would exercise with regard to its members. As a general rule, the more and closer the external control, the more the teachers will be functionaries carrying out pre-ordained tasks in a pre-ordained way, and the less they will act as professionals exercising independent judgment in the way they apply their knowledge and skills to particular children at a particular time. The proposed application of unit standards as a means of specifying the functional competencies of teachers (pp. 30-31) raises some concerns in this regard and is discussed later in this submission (chapter 8.2).

The fifth characteristic, that of an occupation policing its own members, would be a troublesome one for teachers. Schools have not been inclined to get rid of incompetent and unsuitable teachers. This has inevitable consequences for the morale and status of teachers. Poorly performing teachers are quickly identified by pupils and their parents, as well as by their fellow teachers, and several poor performers in a school will tend to drag down the reputation of the particular school and of the profession as a whole. Further, it is demoralising for able, conscientious teachers to take over a class poorly taught the year before or to know that their pupils will be taken over the next year by an incompetent teacher who may undo much of their hard work.

The professionalisation of teaching would require the establishment of a code in teaching governing the relationship between teacher and pupil, in the same way that the New Zealand Medical Council provides for the relationship between doctor and patient. However, in the context of teaching, there are two main sources of difficulty and a faulty underlying assumption with this model. The first difficulty is the diffuse range of teacher/pupil relationships involving classroom practice, pastoral care, conduct of schools and general teacher behaviour. As argued earlier (chapter 5.2), the range of relationships has increased substantially in recent times and, as Peter Gordon has noted with regard to the United Kingdom, it might be difficult to know where these relationships stop (Gordon 1983).

The second difficulty is that, even if all parties agreed on the coverage of the code, it seems exceedingly unlikely that any sort of widespread agreement could be reached on behaviours that were contrary to the code - apart from those which would be subject to criminal prosecution anyway. Yet the Green Paper states that the proposed professional body "will take a leadership role in influencing teaching practice" (p. 27), which certainly leaves considerable room for dispute. For example, would a teacher be allowed to:

- emphasise phonemic awareness when teaching reading;

- to raise the possibility that New Zealand was formed more by settlement than cession and that its foundation of institutions, laws and customs owed little to the Treaty;

- deny that "the ontological status of the literary work is largely determined by the gonads of author and reader"; and

- regard child-centrism as unhelpful nonsense?

Clearly, given the range of possible views on these and many other matters, such agreement is simply not possible.

Another source of difficulty with a code in teaching is the potential for the proposed professional body, on the one hand, and school boards and principals, on the other hand, to disagree on issues to do with teacher practice and performance. For example, what happens if the school principal has a quite different view to that propagated by the professional body on the balance between group work and whole class instruction, or on issues to do with streaming? Again, if the professional body is to lay down standards for promotion and re-registration, what will happen if the school and the professional body disagree on a teacher's performance? These issues highlight another difference between the present circumstances of most school teachers and members of most other professions. The former are invariably employees, whereas the latter are usually independent practitioners running their own businesses or are members of a business partnership.

Any code for teachers that did secure widespread agreement would be largely meaningless and liable to be ridiculed as such. It is doubtful whether much of the code could actually be specified non-vacuously or used for objective assessment of teacher quality. Thus, as interpreter of the code, the professional body holds great influence over the education sector. The professional body may try to enforce still further what many teachers find highly objectionable and already disregard. Codification of professional teaching practice would be a powerful weapon in the hands of a burgeoning and imperialistic bureaucracy with a desire to impose its own ideology on a whole profession.

The underlying assumption of concern arises in the identification of "the main problem" as being the lack of a "nationally consistent means of defining or identifying quality teaching" (p. 25). The assumption here is that there is just one model of quality teaching. We do not accept this. There may be several very successful models and, short of criminal or immoral behaviour, they should all be allowed to exist under the direction of school principals and boards and to flourish or decline as informed parental choice determines. The Green Paper's proposals could well drive out many excellent teachers who are too old or young or clever or wise to conform. They also point in quite the wrong direction - towards teacher inputs and not student achievement. What is needed are quality results. So we are back with the need for reliable national testing and the publication of results (see chapter 6.9) and parental choice of schooling.

7.6 Conclusions and recommendations

Status - high or low - cannot simply be mandated. In teaching, status depends on a variety of factors including public perceptions about the performance of schools and of the wider educational system, and the relative attractiveness of teaching compared with other occupations. Problems for the professionalisation of teaching exist in all these areas.

Empirical research including international surveys suggests New Zealand has been complacent about its educational performance and that all is not, in fact, well with our schools and our teachers. However, the education sector is generally defensive about criticism and closed to refutation and correction. It is not open, intellectually rigorous, sceptical and enquiring. A blinkered Ministry of Education appears to follow the tramlines of political correctness, uncaring or unconscious of where they may lead. The distinction between education and indoctrination has become blurred, yet few have drawn attention to this development - such is the narrowness of the permitted limits of the debate about education in New Zealand.

There have been major actual or potential educational disasters arising from the all-powerful, paternalistic central planning approach - the National Qualifications Framework in particular, but other top-down requirements, such as whole language reading and the loss of English grammar, are being increasingly questioned by commentators and critics. Yet the ministry has persisted with a highly centralised, all-embracing school curriculum, and it now proposes to establish a statutory professional body, controlling who can teach and how teachers will teach, that may turn into a bureaucratic nightmare. Much of what the Education Forum considers unhelpful in existing government approaches to teaching could well become mandatory or enforced through the interpretation of a teaching code by this government agency. The shifting sands of educational discourse have led to some unpromising developments. Reconstructionist impulses tend to merge education and politics with unhelpful downstream consequences for the morale and status of teachers.

The status of teaching suffers from the diffuseness of the teacher's role and the sector's uncertainty about the purpose of schooling. Also, teachers face problems originating elsewhere in society, including low regard for authority, traditional morality and academic achievement, although some aspects of current educational theory and practice in New Zealand also encourage these same trends.

Will professionalisation improve the quality and status of teachers and lift student performance? It could, but not via the process envisaged in the Green Paper. In fact, several of the Green Paper's proposals are likely to reinforce unhelpful practices and attitudes and thus compound, rather than resolve, problems. They will create further difficulty for the recruitment and retention of able people wanting to teach. A major obstacle for the government is the difficulty of enforcing uniformity on a very large body of people on matters which are intrinsically contestable. To this extent, 'professionalisation' for teachers as a whole may turn out to be a chimera.

Recommendations:

o It should be noted that the issue of teacher status cannot be addressed in isolation from several other factors. Some of these factors lie outside the education sector and include long-term societal changes and the degree of importance attached to education by the general public. Other factors are within the control of the education establishment and influence how education generally, including schools and their teachers, are perceived. These factors include:

- the extent to which leading educators and education academics are open to searching debate, criticism and refutation;

- whether the role of the teacher is well defined or diffuse;

- the willingness or otherwise of educators to seek and publish objective measures of student performance; and

- the willingness or otherwise of the Ministry of Education and other state education agencies to take part in open debate, to work from 'first principles' in developing policy issues, to identify and expose their assumptions, to revisit long-held orthodoxies and, where external advice is sought, to seek the best possible advice whether found locally or overseas.

o We recommend that the government commissions an objective, quality appraisal of current performance levels of New Zealand school students and the factors that influence their performance.

o The government should not proceed with the proposals in the Green Paper for establishing a professional body and professional standards. These proposals are unlikely to improve teacher quality, the status of teachers or student learning.

CHAPTER 8

STANDARDS FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION AND TEACHERS

8.1 Introduction

The Green Paper advises that "the Government sees a need for a common set of minimum standards for teacher competency at the end of pre-service teacher education, so that it can be assured that taxpayer funds appropriated for pre-service teacher education are producing well-trained beginning teachers" (p. 29).

Certainly, the government needs to ensure that taxpayer funding for teacher education is appropriately disbursed. The immediate question is whether the standard setting and monitoring involved in pre-service teacher education need be more rigorous or more complex than for other areas of tertiary training eligible for government funding. There are, for example, no common standards for economists and historians at the end of their undergraduate courses. Should the detailed content of teacher education courses be determined by the government or by providers competing in an open market place? If the professional status of teachers is to be enhanced, will the process proposed in the Green Paper be conducive to future practitioners acquiring, and improving on, the knowledge and skill required for effective professional practice?

8.2 Functional competencies in pre-service teacher education

Over the last several decades the idea of competency in education and training has found intermittent popularity. On the face of it, the functional competencies proposed in the Green Paper (pp. 30-31), which are based on the unit titles developed by the Teacher Education Advisory Group (TEAG) and registered by the NZQA, seem to provide a sensible enough overview of aspects of professional practice which can reasonably be expected of a beginning teacher. However, it is hard to see in what ways these competencies can validate standards or ensure teacher quality. This is because the unit standards consist of general descriptions of activities in which teachers are bound to engage, whether well or badly. Dimensions of a subject which require the attention of teachers may be identified within the framework or matrix provided by unit standards, but the main task of evaluating quality of thought or performance achieved by teachers is not made any easier by their application.

Robyn Baker and Dugald Scott of the Wellington College of Education recently examined the core standard for teacher education: Facilitate learning through lessons and lesson sequences (Baker and Scott 1996, p. 202). This unit standard has six elements or learning outcomes:

o organise settings for lessons and lesson sequences;

o organise students for lessons and lesson sequences;

o implement actions to intuit and sustain motivation in students during lessons and lesson sequences;

o implement instruction (direct/indirect) in lessons and lesson sequences;

o interact with students in lessons and lesson sequences; and

o evaluate lessons and lesson sequences.

All these outcomes are important, but Baker and Scott ask pertinently what evidence would be required of teachers to determine whether the outcomes have been achieved. Every teacher has to organise settings for lessons and lesson sequences, since even apparent or real disorganisation may be defended as an open-ended form of organisation. Similar limitations affect almost all the unit standards, and adverbs such as 'effectively' or 'adequately' still beg vital questions.

Competency-based approaches in teacher education have already been established in recent years in several countries with similar educational worries and similar social and political systems to those of New Zealand. The work in England and Wales of the Ofsted and the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) has been perhaps the most thorough and well developed, and there seems little doubt that their checklists for the assessment of teacher and student teacher performance have already contributed to some reduction in the number of woefully weak schools and classrooms by increasing the attention teachers must pay to their basic professional responsibilities. However, it would appear that the TTA is to take on extensive responsibilities in teacher training and professional development with all the risks of centralised control (see chapter 11.4).

The benefits achieved in England and Wales have, however, been gained at some cost in flexibility and diversity among the relevant educational institutions, and critics claim that the assessment procedures take up considerable time and effort which might be better devoted to actual teaching. Desperate situations may well require desperate remedies, but detailed prescription is certainly a vote of no confidence in standard educational practice, so that it seems incongruous that many whose past efforts led to lack of confidence in the education system may well be among those drawing up and administering the prescriptions.

In Australia, too, some interest has developed in using functional competencies in teacher preparation. In 1992 the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning commissioned three investigations - in Western Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania. The September 1993 issue of Unicorn (journal of the Australian College of Education) discussed this matter. The journal noted that identifying work-related general skills appealed to employers of teachers. Yet scepticism about the usefulness of competencies was expressed across a range of ideological stances and for a variety of reasons. The researchers themselves were sometimes initially dubious or encountered professional hostility (Unicorn, pp. 13, 24). Regarding the implementation of competencies there is, at the one extreme, a danger of producing a series of checklists of value-free skills (Unicorn, p. 14). At the other extreme, any general policy is likely to be framed in rather broad flexible terms, thus reducing its value. There may be some minimal advantage, of course, in reminding lecturers and trainee teachers of the range of skills inherent in teaching. Yet surely such skills have already been identified, or can be identified fairly easily.

Whether or not teaching is successful depends ultimately on whether and at what rate students learn. Competence as a teacher and characteristics such as conscientiousness are sufficiently related for us to seek to foster conscientiousness on instrumental grounds, as well as because such virtues are intrinsically valuable. Yet actual correlations between teachers' characteristics and competence in the classroom are often only weak. Of course, it is necessary to take into account all contextual conditions that affect students' learning, many of which are completely outside the control of teachers. However, even when differing contexts are taken into account, many teachers and would-be teachers diverge sharply from expectations based on general correlations between teaching methods and student progress. Although it is true that, all other things being equal, the diligent and punctual teacher is generally more effective than the lazy and unpunctual one, and so on, some diligent and punctual teachers are not very competent and some lazy and unpunctual teachers are very competent once they are in the classroom and put their minds to the job.

8.3 Knowledge requirements for student teachers

This submission has already commented on the primacy of knowledge as a requirement for teachers (see chapter 6.4). The Green Paper distinguishes between the knowledge requirements of those who are to teach younger children and those who are to teach older children (p. 32). The former, it argues, must be equipped to teach across all seven essential learning areas of the New Zealand school curriculum with a clear requirement for breadth of subject knowledge. The latter need to specialise in one or a few subjects, and for them the requirement is depth of knowledge (emphases in original).

Many early childhood and primary teachers are weak in mathematics and science and thus are unlikely to be able to teach these subjects well. Furthermore many teachers have inadequate knowledge of the structure of language. Although established providers of teacher education devote adequate time to curriculum knowledge in language, mathematics and science, there are good grounds for fearing that some courses compound rather than cure inadequacies in trainees' subject knowledge. In particular, some forms of constructivism, which are influential among teacher educators, may lead some student teachers to doubt whether they can, or should, impart knowledge to school students, who, it is maintained, should create their own knowledge, if indeed there is such a thing as 'knowledge' at all.

However, even if teacher educators were all very wise and sensible, a fundamental problem facing primary, particularly intermediate level, education is that many prospective teachers are incapable of quality teaching across the curriculum, if quality is taken to mean the minimum mastery of the requirements of the National Curriculum in each prescribed subject within a given range of levels. Instead of uncritically endorsing generalism among primary teachers, the Green Paper should have considered seriously recent moves in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe to strengthen teacher specialisation, a decision with clear implications for teacher education. In the case of small early childhood centres and primary schools there is, of course, no alternative to each teacher teaching across the curriculum, but this is not the case in large urban schools. Teacher education institutions should be encouraged to provide some degree of specialisation in primary education as well as generalist courses.

Unfortunately, the Green Paper moves farther away from specialisation and uncritically accepts that "students with special educational needs have a right to take their place in normal classrooms", so that "all teachers now need the skills to deal with a range of special needs students in mainstream settings" (p. 14). This is an arguable case as there is at least as much sense and morality in claiming that students with special educational needs have a right to be taught by teachers with special knowledge of those needs, whether those needs relate to physical or intellectual handicaps or to an incapacity to accept the rules and conventions of normal classroom behaviour.

It may be that 'mainstreaming' will prove superior to special provision for students with exceptional needs, but it is at least as likely that the opposite will prove to be the case. A combination of normal and special experience is most probably the optimal solution for such students. The point is that the imposition of a uniform view in advance of adequate evidence on such matters is gravely mistaken. Far better to allow different teacher education institutions to adopt different policies, so that schools have a choice of teachers prepared in different ways, one or more of which may be particularly congruent with their own policies and practices and local conditions.

Although there is good reason to give the highest priority in teacher education to substantive subject knowledge and teaching methods (see chapters 6.4 and 6.5), student teachers should also engage with fundamental issues concerning educational ends and purposes. However, we do question the time and the depth at which these subjects should be addressed. Our preference is for student teachers to be introduced to them at the pre-service stage and for serious engagement to come after some years of experience which can form a basis for serious reflection. Such matters should not, however, be prescribed. Many intending teachers will benefit significantly from considering some fundamental questions about teaching and learning before they settle into classroom routines. Without a proper introduction into basic issues in the philosophy of education, it is all too easy for students and teachers to embrace policy conclusions without ever realising that they are based on premises which need to be examined carefully. A practical problem is finding lecturers who can teach the philosophy of education competently.

The range of information, knowledge, understandings and skills which are valuable candidates for inclusion in teacher education training is far more extensive than could ever practicably be included. Every institution is constantly faced with difficult choices between breadth and depth, both between subjects or activities and within them. But it would be extremely retrograde for the government to signal to teacher educators, or to schools in respect of school-based teacher education, that the only knowledge needed by teachers is the best way to teach a curriculum nationally determined by others.

Mathematics teachers must first be competent mathematicians, but it is also desirable that they consider what relationship exists between different mathematical ideas and processes, and how mathematics relates to other subject areas. Moreover, they need to understand such matters in sufficient depth and clarity to be able to introduce them to those who do not yet understand (see chapters 6.4 and 6.5.2). The more general the role of the teacher, and the more 'integrated' or 'inter-disciplinary' the curriculum, the greater the need to consider links between different aspects of a subject and the relationship between different sorts of knowledge. It is in this sense that it can be seriously argued that the preparation of early childhood and primary teachers is an even more demanding undertaking than that of specialist teachers in secondary schools.

In his Foreword to the Green Paper, the Minister of Education unintentionally highlights the value of educational theory when he writes that "[s]chools of the future will need to be increasingly responsive to the needs of individual students and local communities" (p. 3). Yet the basic issues in education include fundamental disagreements about what constitutes the needs of individual students, and how these relate to national needs, however those may be defined, and questions about what knowledge is of most worth ultimately. Further, it is possible to argue that there is no limit to the needs of the individual student.

8.4 Standards for practising teachers

The Green Paper says that the review of teacher education is intended to provide "solutions [which] must ensure that New Zealand has a world class teaching profession capable of serving our country's needs into the future" (p. 6). To achieve this end, the main means proposed by the Green Paper is establishing a professional body. An important role of this body will be developing and imposing "professional standards" at student teachers' entry point into the profession and at several later stages of teaching.

This submission welcomes some simplification of the current variety of official standards and standard-setting bodies. However, we identify great dangers from over-specification of standards by a single, monopolistic standard setter. As the Green Paper itself points out, "[d]efining teacher quality is difficult and contentious" (p. 19). However, the Green Paper immediately proceeds to endorse the OECD's working definition of the dimensions of teacher quality, supplemented by findings in a New Zealand case study. The assumption must be that the ministry proposes, through the professional body, to expand on these dimensions, to interpret and apply them through the promulgation of professional standards for teachers and to control entry to, and progression within, the profession.

Raising quality by raising standards for teachers is an attractive nostrum, but attempts to do so may have the reverse effect. It raises entry barriers to the teaching profession, to the benefit of existing teachers. Roger Scruton, in his foreword to Partington's recent report, argues that the best qualification for teaching is "the knowledge and love of a subject" and that in the United Kingdom:

Knowledge was driven out of the system and replaced by professional criteria designed to prevent the competent, the enthusiastic, the politically incorrect - in short, anyone who might threaten the complacent mediocrity of the state system - from entering the profession. (Partington 1997, p. xv)

Occupational regulation usually leads to restricted choice. Higher standards may benefit the members of the occupation, rather than its clients. As another writer on the teaching profession puts it:

"... professions, like all conscious occupational groupings, are best thought of as teams for the mobilisation of resources in the pursuit of status and income ... . If property is the right to specific flows of income, and rent a flow of unearned income from control of a scarce resource, the profession which succeeds in creating an artificial scarcity in a vital service and so raising its price above the free market level is in effect charging a rent and thus creating property ... ." (Perkin 1985, p. 12-15)

Therefore, any body overseeing occupational standards needs careful scrutiny and limitations placed on its power. The main issues arising were set out by the Government Working Group on Occupational Regulation and were raised in the context of the Teacher Registration Bill. Indeed, we note current parliamentary moves to wind back some regulation in other occupational areas such as conveyancing, and we understand that the regulation of the health service professions is also under review by the Ministry of Health. The Green Paper overlooks these issues.

Given the emphasis in the Green Paper on "professionalism", on "quality", on "promulgating professional standards" and on the body having "a leadership role in influencing teaching practice", there is little likelihood that the standard-setting body will set a simple framework of competencies and be driven by the requirements of employers and students. Instead, the idea is to raise standards by fiat from the centre - by saying that they will be raised - by reinforcing existing practices and approaches which have led to current concerns. This is precisely the danger to which Scruton alerts us.

Another important issue sadly neglected in the Green Paper concerns the concept of 'value-added' teaching. Ultimately the test of teacher quality is the extent of student learning. Of course, some children are much harder to teach than others, and many influences teachers have on their students take time to show, while there can also be 'Hawthorn' effects that rely only on novelty and soon fade away. These limitations have to be considered especially in respect of student teachers, who spend only short periods with classes. Yet if we were quite unable to detect what influence teachers have on their students, there would be no point in discussing quality controls of any sort, or of teachers asking for smaller classes and better facilities, since no evidence could be garnered to demonstrate the effects of these changes. The ministry ought to fund research in New Zealand to help refine ways of estimating just what differences in students' learning do result from the policies pursued by schools and by individual teachers.

8.5 Standards in England and Wales

We acknowledge that in England and Wales the standards system administered by the TTA has contributed to educational improvement by increasing the attention teachers must pay to their basic professional responsibilities. The Labour government led by Tony Blair has not only endorsed this approach but made it more rigorous.

Our concern that standards will provide only general descriptions and do little by themselves to raise teaching standards in schools has also been expressed extensively in Britain, especially on the Left and by educational professionals, rather than on the Centre or Right. The most telling argument against the standards system is the danger that specified competencies may be regarded as sufficient to ensure good teaching, whereas true education is a much more subtle process which cannot be confined to quantitative measurement or advance specification. These arguments, however, often merge into less defensible claims that no relevant competencies can be identified or that, if they could be, identifying them might detract from higher order educational values. This second stance fails to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions. If that distinction were made adequately, and if the unit standards system simply provided a matrix within which finer distinctions of achievement could be made by those capable of reliable professional judgment, many of our fears on this count would be met. The Green Paper, however, does nothing to allay our fears. In fact, it fails to present or analyse key arguments for and against a competency/standards approach to teacher education.

Our concern that bodies responsible for setting standards will pursue their own agendas has been partly satisfied in England and Wales. The bodies in control of standards inspection, the TTA and Ofsted, a non-ministerial governmental department, are conspicuously independent of teacher unions and the educational establishment as a whole and were, indeed, initially bitterly attacked by those groups for that very reason. Nonetheless the system is very much open to partisan political directives to the TTA, although in practice so far there has been non-partisan continuity between the Conservative and Labour governments. In New Zealand, unfortunately, continuity has been of a different character: the groups most hostile to open and public assessment of educational achievement have maintained influence with the Ministry of Education and its advisory committees and bodies.

8.6 Conclusions and recommendations

In education, as in other matters, one thing tends to lead to another. Since the government owns and funds nearly all schools, it is not surprising that it should want to control what happens inside them - hence the national curriculum and the curriculum statements. The government, again naturally enough, wants to define how to measure students' learning - hence the multiplicity of elements and performance criteria in unit standards and the National Qualifications Framework. But why stop there? What about the education and training of teachers and their entry and progression within the profession?

It brings to mind Andrew Lang's Bramah:

I am the batsman and the bat,

I am the bowler and the ball,

The umpire, the pavilion cat,

The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all.

The state and its agencies have found that there are still a few parts of the educational cricket match that it does not control and acts accordingly. Will it stop there? Perhaps there is still a bail or two that has so far escaped their grasp. Since they wish to control teacher education, it would be logical also to control who is accepted for training and hence to establish criteria for student teacher selection. And what about the appointment of teacher educators in colleges and universities, and research projects undertaken by education academics? Why should they be exempt from official scrutiny?

This process of ever-widening state control is very understandable and, no doubt, undertaken with the best of intentions. Unfortunately it simply does not work. The government has failed to consider the policy package as a whole, nor has it stated clearly the objectives and assumptions of its policy or assessed the best way of achieving its objectives.

In other spheres, decentralising and divestment have led to enormous improvements in efficiency and consumer satisfaction. And we have seen the consequences in education of moves in the other direction - most obviously, the costly, elaborate and deeply flawed National Qualifications Framework. There have been heavy costs in other areas where the state has dominated education: in its strictures about the teaching of reading; its endorsement of some kinds of constructivism; and its new curriculum framework and statements which will, we suspect, come under growing criticism in the years ahead as their inadequacies are more widely recognised (Irwin 1996b).

Are there good grounds for thinking that establishing standards for pre-service teacher education and for teachers should be an exception to the general rule that applies in other sectors? There are no such grounds. Perhaps, as suggested is the case in England and Wales, we have a desperate situation which requires desperate measures. Certainly there are deep problems in New Zealand education, though the Green Paper only acknowledges a few of the symptoms. But even if our diagnosis of some of the problems were accepted, the government would find that to impose desperate, that is, draconian, solutions, it would have to rely on those who perpetrated the problems in the first place. The arsonists would become the firefighters.

The teacher unions have strong incentives to guide standard setting so that standards erect barriers to entry for new members but do not unduly disturb existing members (more of less regardless of their competence). Those educational professionals with strong ideological commitments also want to ensure that their views are replicated and possible challenges rejected. Partington (1997) has noted the ideological capture at some of our universities and colleges (see chapter 7.3 of this submission). The incentives on bureaucrats - and politicians - to challenge this system may be weak. Successive governments' lack of significant progress with bulk funding of teacher salaries gives little reason to back politicians and bureaucrats against the vested interests in the educational sector (see chapter 9.3 in the context of a professional body).

More fundamentally, for the government to seek to control teacher education and teaching in the ways outlined in the Green Paper is to misunderstand the nature of knowledge and of the engagement of teacher and child. It is clearly right to insist on some prerequisites for teaching - that teachers can demonstrate that they have acquired a substantial command of the subject or subjects they are expected to teach and are suitable people to have responsibility for children. But we doubt whether it is beneficial to proceed with regulation of teachers and teacher education much further.

It is unfortunately necessary to recognise not only the shortcomings of existing elaborate structures designed to establish and enforce standards, but also the unlikelihood of alternative bureaucratic systems doing any better. More reliance should be placed instead on the dissemination of accurate and pertinent information which picks out significant differences between educational programmes and courses. If prospective student teachers are informed simply yet accurately about available programmes and about the reasons behind each programmes' structure, the student teachers can make informed choices about their own education and, indeed, begin to think about what in education is most important and why. More penetrating information of this character would also help schools choosing beginning teachers. Information on children's school performance, based on external national testing, should provide parents with information about the performance of schools and of the teachers in them (see chapter 6.9).

Recommendations:

o The unit standards developed by the Teacher Education Advisory Group (TEAG) may provide a broad and useful overview of the ground and activities to be covered, but it would be most unwise to rely on their detailed application for assessing the quality of thought or performance of student teachers.

o The government should reject the notion that all primary teachers must be generalists, able to cover all the essential learning areas of the school curriculum and teach all children (including those with special needs). Instead, the Ministry of Education should investigate moves in other countries towards greater primary teacher specialisation. It should make its findings available to teacher educators in New Zealand.

o The government should note that the principle that special needs children have the right to take their place in the normal class is simplistic. Such children may have a prior right to special facilities and special expertise. There may also be a conflict of rights - between those of special needs children and those of other children.

o The government should reject the view that teacher education requires more or different supervision and monitoring than other forms of tertiary education. As outlined in the Green Paper, establishing and enforcing standards for pre-service education are likely to reduce innovation and lower the quality of these programmes by reinforcing what is already unhelpful. Instead, the quality of teacher education programmes is more reliably regulated by the publication of full information about programmes and courses to assist prospective student trainees in choosing a programme that suits them and to assist schools in recruiting suitable new staff members.

o Similarly, the government should not establish or enforce standards for entry into, and progression within, the teaching profession. Decisions on the recruitment and promotion of teaching staff are properly matters for principals and boards of trustees.

CHAPTER 9

A PROFESSIONAL BODY FOR TEACHERS

9.1 Introduction

The Green Paper proposes that the standards for pre-service teacher education and teachers, discussed in the previous chapter of this submission, would be promulgated by a professional body for teachers (pp. 26-27, 34). Our concerns about the notion of compulsory standards are not diminished by the proposals for the professional body.

The proposed body would certainly have very considerable powers. These have not been elaborated in any detail in the Green Paper, but would seem to include:

o control over entry into, and progression within, the teaching profession through the promulgation of standards for teachers at entry and later levels;

o determining, through powers of registration (initial and renewal), who can enter the teaching profession and, presumably, who must leave the profession on grounds of failing to meet the standards for re-registration;

o deciding, through accreditation processes, which providers can offer teacher education;

o deciding which qualifications can be accepted for entry to the profession, through endorsement for registration on the National Qualifications Framework;

o determining what does and does not constitute 'quality' teaching; and

o informing the government on strategic issues such as changes in teaching practice.

It is also envisaged that the professional body would have a role in developing and enforcing a code of ethics.

The Green Paper says that the form and governance of the body would "be decided following consultation" (p. 26). It might be a "modified Teacher Registration Board (TRB) or a National Standards Body (NSB) or a completely new body."

9.2 What sort of professional body?

Having come up with a number of major (but only partially worked through) proposals for professional standards, the Ministry of Education has had to decide who will develop, promulgate and implement them. Clearly the answer is a professional body.

But it is a curious sort of professional body for two reasons. First, unlike other professional bodies, it would not exist to control the practice of the profession in the interests of the ultimate clients - in this case school children. As noted already (chapter 7.5), the body is to take "into account the interests of employers, government, teachers and the wider community" (p. 26). The range of those with an interest is vast - potentially every one in the country and perhaps beyond. How is the body to determine priorities between these interests when, as is often the case, they conflict? Almost invariably bodies in such a situation bow to the interest groups which are best organised and most articulate, which, in the present context, means the teacher unions and large state-owned providers of teacher education. Parents, as the agents of the ultimate clients, are not organised at all on a national basis. Moreover, as the proposed body would clearly be part of the central political process, it will incline towards the interests of the main state provider institutions, and the major concern of these institutions is to maintain enrolments rather than raise standards. Vague and conflicting objectives will make it difficult to hold the body accountable.

Secondly, the body will have substantial government involvement. The reasons given in the Green Paper are the compulsory nature of schooling and government's interest in the outcomes of education. The authors of the Green Paper claim "[i]n this context, it is vital that government is involved in the body that will undertake a leadership role in influencing teaching practice" (p. 27). We take the opposite view: it is vital that the government does not take this role. In the past, the ministry's leadership in influencing teaching practice has been very poor and often retrograde: the new school curricula are of very poor quality; the ministry has been an accomplice in the development of the National Qualifications Framework; and its adherence to child-centrism, social engineering and their various manifestations has been very harmful. We do not wish the ministry to play any part in "influencing teaching practice" much beyond establishing a limited, core curriculum, making available the results of quality research on matters such as school effectiveness and pedagogy, and publishing objective information about pupil performance obtained by an independent agency or agencies.

The ministry does signal the possibility that its involvement might lessen eventually:

If the profession, at a later date, indicated a willingness and an ability to take more ownership of its professional body and professional standards, the government could amend the nature of its relationship with the body (p. 27).

Here of course is the rub. The ministry wants a professional body, but does not quite trust it not to go against government wishes - or, perhaps, to erode the ministry's own power and responsibilities. The stated reasons for government involvement are such that the idea of the government slackening its hold must be an illusion - unless the government really envisages the possibility that it will make schooling non-compulsory or that it may decide at some future date that it has little or no interest in educational outcomes.

Will this be an organisation that can in any real sense be called a professional body? The diffuse role of teaching, the sheer number of teachers and the contested nature of many issues within teaching make the possibility of establishing a genuine profession difficult enough. To place a body at the head of the profession, charged with taking into account very wide interests extending well beyond its immediate clients and dominated by the government, is an extension of central government bureaucracy with minimal potential for any real sense of ownership of the body by teachers. The body's role could well cut across the legitimate employer responsibilities of school boards and principals.

9.3 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

It is a common temptation, when faced with a difficult set of issues, to establish a committee, or in this case a professional body, and to tell it to resolve the problem. However, Juvenal's words ('But who will guard the guards themselves?') remind us that it is inadvisable to place enormous powers in a body in a situation with considerable possibilities for wrong doing and, we add, bureaucratic bungling and empire building.

In this case the chances of bungling by the professional body are enhanced by the absence of any serious discussion about the problems it is supposed to address. Even so, the education sector provides a lot of free-floating 'solutions' which are mostly of the 'feel good' variety employing words such as 'quality' and 'professionalism'.

The Green Paper states that "... it is vital that the government is involved in the body". But the incentives on teacher union interests and on the ideologically driven to influence the body's work will be much stronger than the incentives on government bureaucrats. The government seems committed to a top-down method of improving quality, and the unions and main teacher education providers are by far the best placed to tell it what the centrally determined standards should be. Control of the standards-setting body, with its leadership role for occupational practice, will be a vital prize for ideologues and the unions. Those missing out in the struggle for power at the centre, including the clients of the teaching profession, the school children, will be marginalised.

Hence, the proposed body is liable to reinforce centralism and occupational control of schooling at the expense of employer and student interests, flexibility, diversity and innovation. Central control by occupational interests is likely to mean that the discretionary 'gates' for entry to the teaching occupation will become narrower.

As the Green Paper does not discuss what problems the new body will address, we cannot know whether the particular arrangements proposed constitute the best possible solution to them. For example, many in the education sector would agree that removing incompetent teachers is far too difficult at present. However, the cause of the difficulty may lie in the national award system, the collective contract and the Employment Court, in which case the solution lies in reforming those areas rather than trying to improve quality through a system of national standards.

Our fears are not diminished by the statement that "... the professional body could regulate flexible arrangements for entry and reentry into the teaching profession, at a range of points (p. 6, emphasis added)." Flexibility doesn't require regulation, indeed, it is constrained by it. As a major regulator in the economy, the ministry will know that the task of the regulator is to regulate - to operate within firm guidelines, especially when it comes to dispensing public moneys or allocating occupational licences. The exercise of wide discretion in such matters is not natural or advisable for state servants.

At a number of points in this submission we have expressed serious concern about a professional body reinforcing unhelpful educational theories, practices and attitudes, and limiting still further the scope for experimentation and innovation in teaching (for example, see chapter 7.2 regarding 'whole language' reading, chapter 7.5 for the code of ethics, and chapter 8.4 for standards). Given the government's willingness to use the school curriculum for social engineering (see chapter 7.5), we can expect the ministry to use the professional standards, set by a professional body which it leads, to complement its control over the school curriculum in its pursuit to transform New Zealand society according to its own concerns. The appointment of non-educators to the body may be seen as a counterweight to any excess of ideological zeal among educationalists, but the history of the NZQA does not encourage such a view. The NZQA's business is essentially about assessment, and the absence of any assessment expertise among the members of the NZQA did not prevent it from developing and enthusiastically promoting a deeply flawed qualifications system.

Even if the danger of interest group capture were averted and the best qualified people available formed a central regulatory body, the differences between the different sectors into which education is divided are far too great to justify the imposition on any one section of the policies determined by a majority in another section.

The Green Paper has nothing to say about the costs of the proposals, which would be considerable. The development of standards for teachers (at entry and at other levels), the promulgation and enforcement of standards, accreditation of providers, and the endorsement of qualifications for NQF registration would require substantial resourcing by both the professional body and those seeking to meet, or prove they already meet, the standards or other requirements. Initial registration and re-registration of teachers (every three years is suggested) would require a great deal of work by principals and other senior school staff. Elaborate and costly appeal procedures would presumably be required. Judicial appeals against administrative decisions would seem probable, leading to more costs and uncertainties. However, a system of voluntary registration could provide some protection against the employment of unsuitable people as teachers, operate at much less cost, and uphold the accountability of boards and principals for staff appointments.

The TRB would presumably be absorbed into the new body. The Green Paper is not clear on what overlaps there might be with the Education Review Office (ERO).

9.4 Existing arrangements for quality control

Quality must be assured in two key areas of education: the production of highly trained teachers and the maintenance and development of professional standards during a teacher's career.

9.4.1 Teacher education

Every teacher education institution has an elaborate range of publications attesting to its concern for quality control. No doubt considerable time, effort and resources have been spent on such processes. Nonetheless, the establishment of elaborate bureaucracies to ensure quality control has done little to prevent major weaknesses in several institutions appearing and being perpetuated. For example, for a lengthy period serious faults in the Wellington College of Education-Victoria University of Wellington and the Auckland College of Education-University of Auckland relationships appear not to have been identified by the committees and boards responsible for quality control, or, if they were, no information about them was made public.

Moreover, although each institution has academic audit systems in place, these systems seem to have been misdirected. Instead of monitoring areas which have been identified as seriously defective - such as course content (Partington 1977) - they tend to concentrate on administrative weaknesses. This means that more serious problems, such as an ideological takeover amounting to indoctrination, are not tackled, and perhaps are not even identified.

There is little reason to believe that an elaborate national body would be more successful than existing quality control mechanisms in identifying and exposing weaknesses in teacher education. It would be more effective to combine greater transparency about course content, and about the standards of knowledge achieved in them, with a greater diversity of provision. This would make effective choice more feasible.

This brings us to a fundamental misconception which bedevils existing quality control: that there is a single, 'best' way of doing things. This search for uniformity should be abandoned. Not all teaching is the same, and not all student teachers are the same. Consequently, there is no one best system for all. The Minister of Education is mistaken when he suggests in his Foreword to the Green Paper that "hopefully, it will be possible to reach a broad consensus" about teacher education (p. 3). Although all would agree that beginning teachers should have adequate knowledge about what they are to teach and about the range of suitable teaching methods available, views would differ on the best balance in teacher education courses, whether in terms of balance between time spent in school and in tertiary education, or between time spent on curriculum content, methodology and the disciplines of education. Effective quality control systems must incorporate just such flexibility in setting its criteria and making its assessments.

9.4.2 Teacher registration

The other area crucial to quality control is maintaining high professional standards throughout a teacher's career. The Teacher Registration Act 1996 aimed to do this by reintroducing compulsory teacher registration. Media reports endorsed this view. According to a report in The Dominion (23 August 1996), the passing of the legislation was greeted by the primary teachers' union as a triumph for raising the quality of educational services, and Professor John Codd of the Department of Education at Massey University said compulsory registration endorsed the professionalism of teachers.

But is this indeed so? Certainly, before embarking on further statutory moves to control teaching, it would seem sensible to assess the effects of the existing legislation. What differences has the 1996 legislation made? Have there been any effects on the quality of teaching and learning? If so, are they positive or negative, and what has been the net result?

9.5 Conclusions and recommendations

Obviously a body could be required to develop and administer such standards, and to operate the accreditation and qualification endorsement functions proposed in the Green Paper.

The organisation proposed would be a curious form of professional body and would be liable to be seen as an extension of the educational bureaucracy. As such, it is not one likely to command any wide respect among teachers. Moreover, it is open to capture by the best organised interest groups, to the detriment of the interests of the profession's clients - school children.

The costs of establishing and maintaining a burgeoning bureaucracy to develop and implement the functions will be considerable. Costs will include the development and monitoring costs incurred by the professional body and its staff, and the compliance costs of all schools, teachers and teacher-training providers. There is also likely to be confusion between the roles of the professional body and other educational agencies and inter-agency rivalry. Further costs would arise from disputes between school boards and principals on one hand and the professional body on the other on matters to do with teaching practice and teacher performance (see chapter 7.5).

The concept of a single statutory body to command the whole system of teacher education and the practice of teaching is deeply misconceived and should be abandoned. If the body is to be effective in influencing the quality of teachers and teaching practice, it will, at best, do so at a considerable cost to innovation and flexibility. At worst, it will enshrine the worst features of existing practice by issuing highly questionable pedagogical directives, failing to address existing problems in teacher education, and exacerbating problems in the recruitment and retention of able people by turning teachers more into technicians subject to even further centralised control and direction.

Recommendations:

o The government should recognise that the Ministry of Education's role in influencing teaching practice has not been useful, and that its role in this area should be largely restricted to establishing a core curriculum and publishing information on student performance.

o The government should not proceed with the establishment of a professional body as proposed in the Green Paper. The resource and educational costs would be considerable and the benefits very doubtful.

o The government should review the efficacy of existing controls over teaching and teacher education before introducing further controls.

CHAPTER 10

MAORI TEACHER EDUCATION

10.1 Introduction

The disparity in educational achievement levels between Maori and non-Maori has rightly been of considerable concern for a long time.

According to the latest annual report on Maori education issued recently by the ministry of education, Maori language learning and general teaching in the Maori language has been the prime initiative in Maori education in the last decade. However, "while the numbers of people learning and working in the Maori language had significantly increased, the disparity between Maoris and non-Maoris in educational achievement has remained 'largely unchanged'". In the face of such evidence, the Green Paper continues to connect improving Maori educational outcomes with efforts to improve teaching in the Maori language.

Issues to do with Maori language and culture are particularly beset by internationally modish ideas which dominate, or perhaps substitute for, much thinking within the education sector, thus reducing the chances of coming to sensible, realistic policies for the advancement of Maori education.

10.2 Resourcing options for Maori-medium, pre-service teacher education

Although the Green Paper treats Maori education separately, it applies the same 'top-down' principle, which is as misguided in Maori teacher education as it is in mainstream education. It says that "[s]hortages of a critical mass of expertise for Maori-medium pre-service teacher education have put special pressures on this area of pre-service training" and that "some provider co-ordination may assist in" addressing the problem (p. 36).

Two options for "provider co-ordination" are put forward (pp. 36-37). One extends current arrangements by establishing an "advisory group of Maori educators to advise government on the type of Maori-medium teacher-education the Government should be purchasing or funding". The other goes further by combining the resources of Maori-medium teacher education in one of three ways:

- the creation of "a single centralised training institution"; or

- establishing "a separate council for Maori-medium teacher education" that would distribute funding "to Maori-medium providers that chose to be part of the system"; or

- networking existing Maori-medium providers "to enable them to share teaching responsibilities and professional expertise".

As is the case with teacher education as a whole, there is nothing desirable in seeking a uniform system for Maori teacher education. There is no case for the compulsory establishment of a single, centralised training institution for Maori or the development of a separate council which could control funding from the government. Diversity of provision should be encouraged. Both existing and new providers, Maori-medium and mainstream, should be encouraged to cooperate in the exchange of experiences and the results of different strategies in influencing actual learning.

10.3 The underlying assumption

An underlying assumption in the Green Paper's proposals is that the teaching of children in the medium of Maori should be officially encouraged. We are do not share the confidence of the authors of the Green Paper that this is in the best educational interests of Maori children, and are uncertain whether such a policy is consistent with the government's concern to close the gap between the achievement levels of Maori and non-Maori. It could be an excellent way of keeping Maori teacher education and Maori children ghettoised. The reasons to query the wisdom of such an approach are not simply that the Maori language faces an enormous uphill battle with English - the nearest to a universal language since Latin in medieval Europe - nor that the pool of fluent Maori speakers from which teachers could be drawn is very small relative to the perceived demand. Rather it is that promotion of Maori-medium teaching does not directly address what causes the gap.

In our understanding, the achievement level of Maori children depends essentially on the same factors affecting all other children in New Zealand, including aptitude, determination, hard work, family and community resources, parental expectations, effective schools and good teaching. According to Nash (1993, p. 199) "the bulk of available research" indicates that Maori children underachieved compared with non-Maori because of differences in family resources, especially literary resources. Such things as the availability of books, conversation, interest in the world about them, opportunities for quiet study in the home make up the 'cultural capital' which is so helpful for educational success. When such 'capital' is not available or very limited the task of the school is even more important. But nothing is more likely to increase educational disparities than for teachers to believe that knowledge which is not valued in a particular group, or interests which are only weakly represented within it, are by that fact irrelevant to the intellectual and cultural development of its children.

Emphasis on the Maori language may encourage a greater concern for, and involvement in, education among some Maori parents and thus be very positive for the education of their children. However, against any such advantages would have to be put the opportunity cost of time spent in learning another language and the loss of time spent on English, maths, science and so on.

We are not aware of any specific pedagogies that apply particularly to Maori children and not to other New Zealand children. It was noted earlier in this submission (chapter 7.2) that the teaching methods that were so successfully employed in parts of Asia had been first developed in the West, and that the superior educational achievement in Asian schools was because Asian teachers tended to employ them more effectively (Stevenson and Stigler 1992). This should be a warning against the uncritical acceptance of the notion that Maori and non-Maori need different teaching methods and that Maori children are therefore likely to fail in mainstream schools. What is required for all children are sound pedagogies, effectively employed.

Far from eliminating the disparity between Maori and non Maori educational outcomes, Maori-medium schooling and what is being proposed in the Green Paper may widen it. The Green Paper's proposals may lead to calls for other forms of specifically Maori-type education and qualifications which might appeal to Maori politicians and activists but disadvantage Maori children and New Zealand society more generally. In the absence of a sound research basis, the ministry, in promoting Maori-medium teaching, may be indulging in wishful thinking and taking an irresponsible gamble with the education of some of our most educationally disadvantaged children. If the government considers that the interests of Maori language and culture always trump those of educational attainment, then it should say so explicitly and not conflate the two sets of issues.

Current policy is presumably based, in part at least, on the assumption that poor relative Maori educational performance is due to the perceived suppression of Maori language and culture, and that linguistic and cultural restoration must, therefore, be the solution or a major part of it. Another interpretation is in terms of the inevitable adjustment of an isolated tribal culture to a technologically advanced one, and the conscious choice of many Maori to favour English as the more useful cultural artefact and therefore a superior route to advancement for them and their children. But wherever the truth of the matter lies, there is no short-cut to educational success for Maori - nor for anyone else. The recipe is much the same for all, and includes having books in homes, parents reading to their children and turning off the television and insisting that they do their homework. Compared with these ingredients, the proposals in the Green Paper, in so far as they aim at reducing the attainment gap, are on a par with rearranging the deck chairs on the ill-fated Titanic.

A problem with having a 'Maori education policy' is that it diverts attention away from the hard, uncomfortable truth about what is involved in successful educational endeavour and suggests that there is some special form of pedagogy applicable only or mainly to Maori and which, if it could only be found, would lead to instant success. Moreover, it encourages the notion that relatively painless alterations in the system will, as inferred in the title of a recent official publication, succeed in Making Education Work for Maori. This is unhelpful nonsense - learning is always hard - and will, no doubt be seen as such by many Maori. It goes along with the whole grievance industry which perpetuates the condescending view of Maori as victims and dependent, and it ignores the many cases of Maori educational success. It is totally alien to the view that determination, hard work and high expectations are needed by everyone who wishes to achieve educationally and in other socially useful ways.

10.4 Conclusions and recommendations

Notwithstanding our uncertainly about the educational usefulness of Maori-medium instruction for children, we consider that the government should fund Maori-medium teacher education in the same way and on the same basis as it funds other teacher education. In an open system of teacher education and teaching, which is flexible and encourages diversity and innovation, there is no reason for special treatment of Maori-medium pre-service teacher education.

If there is a shortage of Maori-medium teachers this should be reflected both in wages for such teachers and the demand and supply of appropriate teacher education. Those with expertise in Maori language, but without formal teaching qualifications, should be able to be deployed at the discretion of employers. The current mandatory teacher registration may be a barrier to such arrangements, however. In short, Maori-medium teaching need be treated no differently from any other sub-sector of any other occupation.

However, with the complex and centralised control of teacher education and teaching, and with the likelihood of higher entry barriers to teaching, significant problems for Maori are likely to arise, with the market unable to adjust to their particular needs. With a struggle for control of the powerful central institutions and the associated ideology, we would have every sympathy with a separatist approach for Maori teacher education. We would equally have sympathy with a separatist approach by other groups, such as Christian schools and Christian teacher education providers.

Maori cultural and linguistic ambitions are not necessarily commensurate with high educational attainment and reducing the achievement gap. The government should encourage and fund quality research into the effectiveness of various forms of education, including Maori-medium education, at various stages of education, and make the results widely known so Maori parents can make up their own minds where the balance of advantage lies for their own children. If there is a trade-off to be made between the educational achievement of Maori children and the preservation of the Maori language then this should be made known, and Maori parents and communities provided with the information on which to make decisions for their own children.



Recommendations:

o The government should treat Maori-medium teacher education in the same way as other forms of teacher education.

o The government should encourage the sharing of knowledge and experience of different educational strategies among all teacher education providers.

o The government can usefully fund quality research into the outcomes of various education strategies, including Maori-medium schooling, and publish the results so that Maori parents can decide for themselves about the balance of advantage for their own children between Maori-medium schooling and other forms of schooling.

CHAPTER 11

SOME OVERALL CONCLUSIONS

AND A DIFFERENT APPROACH

11.1 Introduction

Thus far, this submission has been quite negative about many of the Green Paper proposals. We have found the implied terms of reference confused and the proposals either uncontroversial, because banal, or unlikely to achieve what they purport to achieve. Because many of the proposals have not been adequately analysed, it has been difficult at times to know quite what is being proposed and why. Yet we are also deeply concerned about the quality of teacher preparation and the quality and status of teaching, and share the government's concern that these be improved. The question is 'By what means?'

Proposals are put forward in the Green Paper (pp. 6-8) in four main areas:

- a professional body and professional standards;

- resourcing pre-service teacher education;

- the pre-registration/induction period; and

- resourcing in-service teacher education.

The creation of a professional body to devise and promote standards in quality and ethics for the nominated four categories of teachers offers an uncertain perspective. The scheme risks being ineffective, because of the yet-to-be-determined structure of this body, or because such a body's inability to devise any meaningful solution to its purposes. It may, indeed, simply cause confusion amongst teachers, especially if too much is made of 'competencies' and 'standards'. It may well also lead to an unhealthy increase in central control with minimal benefit.

In discussing the resourcing of pre-service teacher education, the Green Paper emphasises that the teaching profession should reflect the cultural diversity of New Zealand. We agree, but would wish the teaching profession also to be aware of the elements of cultural homogeneity which serve to make New Zealand one society and to distinguish it from other societies. We endorse the Green Paper's emphasis on practical school-based experience, but would wish this to include demonstration (observation) lessons and provision for school-based teacher training, i.e. the availability of an internship (apprenticeship) option.

We applaud the proposals for the pre-service induction period. As to the resourcing of in-service education, much depends on how the money is spent. We agree that greater responsibility for in-service education should be devolved to the schools. This may ensure that less money is wasted and that the training provided is relevant. However, schools must exercise caution in deciding what are the changing needs of their pupils. As the headmistress of a Sydney school recently wrote, education is subject to fads, and reforms are often introduced with great fanfare only to be abandoned when the next educational or political trend comes along.

Such changes bring little lasting improvement yet they make great demands on the most enthusiastic of our teachers, using up their time in in-servicing and rewriting programs and reorganising classrooms and ultimately, as it becomes apparent that little has been gained for all the work, using up their idealism and commitment as well, leaving a generation of cynical and jaundiced teachers to take care of young minds (Jo Karaolis 1998).

We provide below a sketch, no more, of the issues we think should be addressed and indicate the way ahead as we see it. Much of what follows has been presaged by our earlier comments on the proposals put forward in the Green Paper.

Our basic concern is that many current problems in teaching and teacher education are due to the very high level of government intervention in virtually all aspects of schooling. Hence, we view with alarm the Green Paper's proposals to introduce still more government control. This is not just a general misgiving applied without thought to particulars - our analysis of the various proposals only confirmed our apprehensions.

11.2 The school environment

We expect teachers to work as professionals in schools. Yet the government controls virtually every significant aspect of state schools which cater for over 95 percent of school children. The total school curriculum is prescribed, the pay and conditions of teaching staff are centrally determined, there is compulsory teacher registration, and so on. For bulk funded schools there is some small room for manoeuvre in resource allocation, but even this is bitterly contested. There is an interlocking web of relationships between schools, colleges, the education departments of the universities, the ministry of education and the several government education agencies. This results in a small education 'family' which is resistant to external critique, and in which innovation beyond strict limits and discussion beyond the margins are actively discouraged. Moreover, as we have seen, there is considerable confusion about the role of schools and therefore of teachers (see chapter 5.2).

In addition, competition between schools is seen by virtually all leading educators as a great potential evil hanging over the system like a dark cloud which has thus far only been successfully averted by the most vigilant action by all right-thinking educators. The only rival school system of any consequence, the Catholic system, has been absorbed into the state system. Thus we have an introverted system which is getting into deeper difficulties but which is substantially protected from any competitors which might show up weaknesses. Moreover, the system is protected still further by the lack of any reliable statistics on school performance, and it is not a coincidence that assessment, like competition, is a dirty word among many influential educators.

We do not think that this is the kind of environment in which we can expect high-quality teaching to flourish and to which many of our more able young people will be attracted. In fact the opposite is the case. The teaching workforce is ageing. To the extent that good teachers and good teaching still exist in our schools, it is largely in spite of the 'system'. Society owes them a considerable debt.

No significant quality improvements will take place within our schools unless existing problems in the school environment are addressed. Thus many of the Green Paper's proposals are simply beside the point - more than that, they follow the same mind set that has got us into difficulties in the first place, and will indeed compound those difficulties.

Some of the more important directions for future policy, therefore, are as follows:

o There should be much less state control over the school curriculum. The government should revisit the New Zealand Curriculum Framework and the curriculum statements with a view to confining state control to a core within some key subjects from school entry up to and including year 10 (Form 4) leaving the rest to be determined by schools. From year 11 (Form 5), prescriptions for qualifications should determine the curriculum. Outside education, we expect 'professionals' to apply a body of knowledge and their skills to the needs of their clients in situations of relative independence, and we see no reason why we should treat teachers differently. For teachers who consider that they need guidance, a series of alternative syllabuses should be devised.

o Annual assessment data on all children at certain stages or ages should be published. Talk about the accountability of schools and of the professional accountability of teachers to their clients is useless unless we know what is actually being achieved in terms of their pupils' learning. Of course cognitive development is not everything - the affective domain is also very important, if much more difficult to measure - but it is important. National assessment should be undertaken by independent agencies: the tests should not be under the control of teachers. There could be competition between independent testing agencies - universities, for example, might wish to conduct their own testing. If parents can choose which school they can send their children to (see final item below) there would be no need to tie funding to test performance.

o A range of rigorously assessed national school qualifications should be developed, and these should employ a substantial degree of external assessment. Smithers (1997) has sketched the way ahead on this issue.

o The establishment of pay levels and conditions should be devolved to schools within a bulk funded, formula driven constraint.

o The supply side of schooling should be freed up by funding private schools on an equal basis with state schools.

In our view these steps are all necessary, as they mutually reinforce one another and interlock. Therefore they must be undertaken together.

11.3 Status and professionalism

We doubt if the government's deliberate pursuit of higher status and professionalisation for teachers is useful. Indeed, it could well be counter-productive. In fact, it smacks of insecurity and the avoidance of more constructive, but more difficult or contentious policies. One cannot simply crank up status by legislative or administrative fiat. Status is conferred on those who are perceived to deserve it. To deliberately seek it is to admit something is wrong which one cannot, or does not want to, do anything serious about - it is tackling symptoms not causes, and seeking palliatives not cures.

To the Asian teachers surveyed by Stevenson and Stigler (1992) much of the Green Paper would seem nonsensical if applied to their own school contexts because they already are widely recognised as professionals, are secure in their well-defined role, and are confident in their ability and expertise in carrying out their responsibilities. The professional status of teachers in New Zealand would similarly be recognised if there were greater clarity about the extent and nature of their job, and objective data showing that they are indeed doing it well.

It would be wrong to seek to slavishly follow other professions in all respects. Teachers may learn from other professions, but must ultimately define their own view of what being a professional and acting professionally means, and then pursue that vision vigorously. This may involve departing in some significant ways from the practices of other professions, and if there is some loss in relative status, then so be it. For example, the pursuit by colleges of education of academic respectability for its own sake may win some scholarly approbation but may not assist the professionalisation of teachers who carry out their professional practice in a very concrete, immediate world remote from academic detachment and scepticism.

Schools of education will not assist the professionalization of teachers and teaching if they sacrifice a healthy respect for practice to a single-minded pursuit of scholarship for its own sake. Nor, ironically, will they purchase with that sacrifice the respect of their peers - a favour they have sought for so long with no great success. They will flourish by being scholarly, to be sure, but their scholarship must be related to the improvement of practice in schools (Judge 1980, cited in Hoyle 1987).

In fact, even though the balance between theory and practice is too heavily weighted towards the former in New Zealand colleges of education, we doubt if much scholarly respect has thereby been gained. What has been lost is an emphasis on teaching as a practice. In New Zealand generally, pedagogy is largely a series of ideological 'givens' about which real debate is severely discouraged. Certainly, state colleges of education could not be described as 'colleges of pedagogy'.

In New Zealand the role of teachers is confused, and adding to the confusion is government-sanctioned social engineering. Such matters cannot be addressed overnight. The government should certainly reconsider as a matter of urgency its use of the school curricula for indoctrination: in our view this is a disgraceful matter undermining education and bringing New Zealand schooling into disrepute . Neither should it engage in counter-indoctrination. Nonetheless, the government can and should require government-subsidised teacher education providers to publish details of coverage of their courses and programmes, including reading lists. As already recommended, the government should fund private providers and state providers on an equal basis and thus encourage diversity in provision.

Devolution of real responsibility to schools for curricula and staffing, combined with the publication of assessment data and the opening-up of the supply of schooling, would do much to redefine the role of teachers and bring back into the debating arena important issues of pedagogy and school structures. Parents, as agents for the clients of the schools, would have a much greater say. They would be able to knowledgeably 'vote with their feet' in deciding which schools best suit their children - an ability at present largely restricted to the better-off - and exercise real influence on school decisions. The best form of 'status' for teachers will come about when parents have chosen to send their children to their schools rather than doing so because there is no other choice. Similarly 'quality' is determined by "the actions of professionals in their day-to-day work with their clients" (Ross 1990, p. 143).

11.4 A professional body?

We view with alarm the proposal to set up a government-run professional body in New Zealand. This concern is partly because of the present government's willingness to use the school curriculum for indoctrination and the ministry's present analytical weakness and ideological inclinations on specific educational issues such as curriculum and pedagogy. But even if the present situation were otherwise, the problem of changes in policy towards schooling and teaching following changes of governments and ministers would remain. For this reason we consider that a body concerned with the professional practice of teaching should be established from within the profession itself and thus be able to stand apart from (and if need be against) the government of the day. It would also enable teachers to stand apart from the collective image of teachers as presented by the teacher unions.

Experience with overseas government-established models is not encouraging. The Scottish General Teaching Council is widely seen as controlled by the teacher unions, and the same outcome can be expected in New Zealand if the Green Paper's proposals are adopted. The problem here is that the client for teacher unions is, quite properly, the teacher, whereas the client of a professional body for teachers must be the pupil. The interests of teachers and pupils cannot always be reconciled, notably in the case of incompetent teachers. In any clash of interests a union-dominated body can be expected to give priority to those of teachers.

There have been repeated attempts by UK governments to set up a professional structure for teachers in England and Wales, but thus far none have succeeded. The present Labour government is proceeding, we understand, with the establishment of a General Teaching Council to speak for and raise standards in the profession. However, it is quite unclear to us (and possibly to everyone else) how it is to operate and how it is to fit in with other agencies, particularly the Teacher Training Agency (TAA). As present UK government policy seems to envisage an extensive managerial, 'top-down' role for the TAA, considerable difficulties can be anticipated. It does not appear to be a model which New Zealand might usefully follow.

Because so much in schooling is contestable, we doubt if one body could cater for all teachers. Membership should be voluntary and monopoly status should not be conferred on any one such body. The government should not subsidise any particular body since such a body could soon become dependent on such funding and thus lose its independence. However, if suitably staffed, a professional body could be awarded contracts by the government for research and administrative tasks.

11.5 Teacher supply and remuneration

Clearly there are supply problems in particular domains, such as mathematics and science, and in some more remote areas, which need to be addressed. There is also the wider problem of providing recognition of all able teachers, thereby keeping them in the classroom and avoiding promotion into administration as the only avenue for advancement. So long as the government is a major owner of schools (and therefore guarantor of adequate teacher supply) it needs to address these issues. However, the problem areas need to be carefully identified and the solutions, including where necessary substantial pay increases, need to be directed at the problems. Generalised, system-wide solutions, such as a unified pay system, may well overlook these problems and make it more difficult to address such issues.

A voluntary professional body which developed and implemented a strict set of criteria for high quality teaching could have its membership accepted for the purposes of signalling to employers a possible reason for higher pay. The criteria relevant to such a purpose would be a very high degree of substantive knowledge and pedagogical excellence.

11.6 Recommendations for a way ahead

Our recommendations for a general approach to teacher quality and supply issues are as follows:

o The government should address the issue of quality teaching on a broad policy front which involves:

- less state control over the school curriculum,

- publication of assessment data,

- rigorous national qualifications at the secondary level,

- devolving decisions regarding pay and conditions to schools, and

- the equal funding of state and private schools.

o Pursuing status per se is probably unhelpful as a policy objective. The aim should be to establish an environment in which teachers can redefine their role and establish their own benchmarks for excellence.

o The government should encourage the establishment of voluntary bodies by groups of teachers instead of establishing a government dominated and directed professional body. Such a body or bodies should not be subsidised by the government, although they could be awarded contracts for research and administrative tasks if suitably equipped.

o Membership of a voluntary professional body with suitable entry criteria could be used as a basis for higher pay.

o Supply and quality problems should be identified and addressed directly.

APPENDIX A

Crown Interests in Teacher Education

Crown interest Differences between the education sector and other sectors Differences within education sector

1. Funder of EFTS places for teacher training. Teacher EFTS distinct. No other occupationally specific EFTS, outside high-priced health ones. Pre-school and primary teacher EFTS distinct from secondary EFTS. No EFTS for tertiary teacher training.

2. Negotiator of central employment contracts for primary and secondary teachers and thus of terms and conditions for entering teachers and of performance standards for all teachers. Teacher CECs are only large scale, cross-employer contracts remaining in state sector. Unified pay system is stated goal for primary and secondary. Pre-school not covered (kindergartens removed from coverage in 1997). No role for Crown as negotiator of tertiary contracts.

3. Funder and risk holder for primary and secondary teacher wages in public sector. Decisions on funding formulae for schools can also directly effect promotion prospects, e.g. the number of positions of responsibility available. In no other sector outside government departments does the Crown directly fund the payroll of most providers or determine funding formulae and thus (in combination with its negotiator role) hold the risk from changes in wages and supply and demand. Funding applies to pre-school, primary and secondary. Risk holding to primary and secondary only as the Crown is not the owner of pre-school providers.

4. Perceived guarantor of the availability of appropriate education and thus of teacher supply (stems from risk holder role and from compulsory nature of schooling). In no other sector outside government departments does the Crown directly fund the payroll of most providers or determine funding formulae and thus (in combination with its negotiator role) hold the risk from changes in wages and supply and demand. Primary and secondary only.

5. Effective purchaser of teacher education outputs, as 90%+ of teachers work in state schools. Crown may have similar exposure to training for other predominantly public sector occupations. However, its purchase interests in other cases are expressed through normal employer and labour market mechanisms. Primary and secondary only.

6. Owner of colleges of education and most other teacher education providers. Crown owns many tertiary institutes. However, because of the distinct nature of 1, 3, 4 and 7, the relationship is less "arms length" with teacher education. Pre-school, primary and secondary.

7. Regulator and standard setter for quantity and quality of teacher education provision. Through the agency of the NZQA, the Crown sets standards in various areas. However, control of teacher EFTS numbers and detail (e.g. length of course) and specific legislation on colleges of education is atypical of other areas. Relates to provision of teacher education for pre-school, primary and secondary schooling.

8. Regulator of standards for teachers through Teacher Registration Board. Various occupations are regulated by statute, though generally the body responsible is an independent, professional one. For teachers, the combination with 2, 7 and 9 provides effective central control. For primary and secondary schools and kindergartens only. Implied or explicit requirements of 7, 8 and 9 may not cohere.

9. Standard setter and enforcer of standards for employers of teachers (school boards of trustees) via Ministry of Education requirements and performance management system and via Education Review Office. No equivalent for other occupations. For primary and secondary schools and kindergartens only. Implied or explicit requirements of 7, 8 and 9 may not cohere.

APPENDIX B

Education Forum

The Education Forum has been formed to contribute to education policy through research and debate on the current issues, structures and expectations at all levels of New Zealand education.

The Education Forum believes that New Zealand education requires an approach to learning and achieving which encourages all individuals to reach their full potential, and which will take New Zealand to the leading edge of international performance and achievement.

The Education Forum is an association of individuals who have a common concern for the future direction of New Zealand education. The membership is drawn from primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of education, together with leaders of industry and commerce.

The principles incorporated in the above statements include the following:

- a commitment to excellence and high expectation in all human endeavour, based on a lifelong desire for learning;

- the belief that the community and government should ensure that all young New Zealanders have access to quality education;

- the teaching of values and life skills which will preserve the dignity of the individual and the integrity of the family;

- the acceptance of healthy competition for both individuals and the education sector;

- the encouragement of cooperation, creativity, adaptability and enterprise;

- the encouragement and recognition of personal responsibility, goal setting and achievement in all endeavours, through self-discipline and hard work;

- the acceptance of a compulsory core curriculum in primary and secondary schools;

- the necessity for high standards of assessment of student performance and of accountability of teachers and institutions;

- the promotion of a New Zealand cultural identity;

- the key involvement and responsibility of parents in their children's education;

- the emphasis on the value of parental choice and the self-management of education institutions; and

s the development of closer links between education institutions and industry.

PO Box 38-218, Auckland 1730

Telephone: 09-273-1860 Facsimile: 09-273-1861

APPENDIX C

Members of the Education Forum

Mr John Boyens

Principal

Meadowbank School

Mr John Fleming

Principal

Pt Chevalier School

Mrs Alison Gernhoefer

Principal

Westlake Girls' High School

Professor Peter Gluckman

School of Medicine

University of Auckland

Dr John Hinchcliff

President

Auckland Institute of Technology

Ms Jan Kerr

Executive Director

Independent Schools Council

Mr Roger Kerr

Executive Director

New Zealand Business Roundtable

Brother Pat Lynch

Executive Director

New Zealand Catholic Education Office

Mr John Morris

Headmaster

Auckland Grammar School

Mr Phil Raffills

Principal

Avondale College

Mr John Taylor

Headmaster

King's College

Auckland

Ms Claudia Wysocki

Headmistress

St Margaret's College

Christchurch

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