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Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

The BulletinMarch 24, 2023

National’s ‘back to basics’ plan to address the literacy crisis

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

Christopher Luxon says the policy is what’s needed to address serious issues with reading, writing and maths in primary schools. Others aren’t so sure, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

Back to basics – and a lot more tests

In December 2021, two weeks after becoming National Party leader, Christopher Luxon told Businessdesk (paywalled) that New Zealand’s poor educational achievement rate was “without doubt the most startling and worrying” discovery of his political career so far. Yesterday he unveiled his turnaround plan: under a National government all primary and intermediate students will learn reading, writing and maths for at least an hour a day, and will undergo “standardised, robust assessment” in those subjects every six months. In many respects, the Teaching the Basics Brilliantly policy echoes the arguments of education expert Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the NZ Initiative thinktank. The current curriculum, he argued in the NZ Herald, “offers teachers little guidance on the specific knowledge that they should teach, and almost none on how to sequence learning so that children proceed on firm foundations”. Last Friday the Ministry of Education itself released the first phase of its new common-practice model for maths and English pedagogy, part of a wider refresh of the New Zealand curriculum and how subjects are taught.

Testing times for literacy rates

When it comes to literacy, nearly everyone agrees there’s an urgent need for improvement. A report last year by Dr Nina Hood of Education Hub noted that just 35% of students in year eight are achieving at or above the curriculum level for writing, while reading ability at both primary and secondary school levels is steadily declining. “Only 60% of 15-year-olds in New Zealand are achieving above the most basic level of reading, meaning a staggering 40% are struggling to read and write,” wrote Hood. The decline in writing ability appears to be of particular concern. When the Ministry of Education piloted its new NCEA Level 1 literacy and numeracy standards, only one in three students passed the writing component, while around two-thirds passed reading and numeracy tests, reported the NZ Herald (paywalled). “Even more concerningly, just 2% of students in decile 1 schools passed the writing assessment, compared with 62% in decile 10 schools.”

National Standards by another name?

National’s proposal for two standardised tests a year for all primary and intermediate school children attracted immediate pushback from the NZEI, the union that represents primary school teachers. The policy was the return of National Standards by stealth, said NZEI president Mark Potter who said it promised “an even more intensive form” of the testing system introduced by the National government in 2010 and scrapped by Labour in 2017. “National Standards narrowed the curriculum, put undue pressure on children, increased teacher workload and weren’t even an accurate measure of a child’s progress,” then NZEI president Lynda Stuart said at the time. Defining the curriculum year-by-year was an “old and unsatisfactory” policy that wasn’t suitable for Aotearoa, Potter told TVNZ Breakfast yesterday. “Children don’t come in a lovely production line all operating at the same time, at the same level. What we do know about learning, that’s evidence-based, is that they all learn at different times and different rates,” he said.

An alternative to testing

Not every country believes regular standardised testing is the best way to help children learn. The poster child for the standardised testing-free system is Finland, the country with the world’s best education system according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). In Finland, “all children… are graded on an individualised basis and grading system set by their teacher” says the WEF, while its education system is “grounded on equal opportunities for all, equitable distribution of resources rather than competition, intensive early interventions for prevention, and building gradual trust among education practitioners, especially teachers”, wrote one policy analyst.

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New Zealand joins countries around the world by banning TikTok from government issued devices
New Zealand joins countries around the world by banning TikTok from government issued devices

The BulletinMarch 23, 2023

Why governments are banning TikTok from phones

New Zealand joins countries around the world by banning TikTok from government issued devices
New Zealand joins countries around the world by banning TikTok from government issued devices

New Zealand joins countries around the world by banning TikTok on government-issued devices as the US threatens an outright ban on the popular social media app, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

 

Australia and New Zealand move to ban TikTok on government phones

It’s a strange contrast in some ways. Australia just signed a deal that may cost them up to $368b for nuclear-powered submarines as part of the Aukus alliance, while also deeming the social media app TikTok to be too dangerous to be on the phones of government politicians and officials. After much speculation, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Albanese government will announce a ban on the use of TikTok on government-provided devices this week. An email from Parliamentary Service chief executive Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, leaked last week, has informed New Zealand MPs that similar moves would be made here.

China’s response to our ban has “echoes of” the response to the Huawei ban

BusinessDesk’s Ben Moore reports (paywalled) that while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade doesn’t expect the ban to impact our trading relationship with China, China has taken note of the ban, based on a response by a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry. Moore writes that it had echoes of the “it’s not fair” stance Huawei proponents took when it was the subject of bans last decade. In a great overview of the delicate balancing act foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta will be undertaking in China at the moment that covers a range of issues, Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva reminds us that bilateral relations with China were considered to be at “their lowest ebb” when Chinese-owned Huawei was shut out of our country’s 5G network.

Why TikTok?

TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. Last year, it temporarily dethroned Google as the most visited website in the world. It is touted as the most downloaded app of 2022. To the average user, it’s a place to create and watch short videos. The United States has been leading the charge on banning TikTok, with the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission warning that ByteDance could share TikTok user data with the Chinese government. This is a good explainer from The Guardian but concerns are driven by a law implemented in China in 2017 that requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to the country’s national security. There’s no evidence TikTok has turned over such data, but like all social media apps, TikTok collects a vast amount of user data.

US threatening outright ban, urging Australia to so the same

The US is now threatening an outright ban on TikTok unless the social media company’s Chinese owners divest their stakes in it. It’s not unprecedented. Axios has a breakdown of the full or partial bans on TikTok currently in place across the globe. A top US technology regulator is now urging Australia to completely ban TikTok, describing the ban on it being on government phones as the “lowest of the low-hanging fruit”. While New Zealand hasn’t yet been asked to consider an outright ban by the US, prime minister Chris Hipkins and New Zealand officials had to hose down talk of a new “cutting edge technology” initiative with the US on Tuesday, after a visiting senior White House official talked it up. Rae Hodge of Salon writes that banning TikTok outright in the US is pointless political theatre. If nothing else, TikTok bans, partial or outright, are a clear sign that geo-political battlegrounds have extended beyond what lies beneath the water and into what we’ve got in our pockets.

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