Suchergebnisse

The Labour-led government elected in 2017 quickly decided to get rid of National Standards and set up a Curriculum, Progress, and Achievement Ministerial Advisory Group in 2018. That group reported in 2019 and a related Ministry of Education work programme has begun. This provocation from May 2020 provides some background to the MAG, considers its organisation and membership, and briefly mentions some features of the report and the early response of government. The use of data and the struggle for researchers to keep up with multiple reviews are also discussed.

New Zealand's National Standards policy has been deeply controversial in the education sector, especially amongst primary teachers and principals. This article provides a view of the National Standards from their introduction up until 2016, nearly a decade after they were first mooted. The issues covered: (i) offer retrospective insights, (ii) acknowledge continuing uncertainties, or (iii) ask questions that had become newly relevant by 2016. They include processes within the Ministry of Education, the role of advisory groups, the public release of National Standards data, and the origins and impact of the National Standards. They also include whether teachers and principals have been gradually won over to the National Standards, use of the National Standards in 'social investment', the Progress and Consistency Tool and possible wider political purposes of headline policies like the National Standards. A theme that connects the issues is concern about policy processes. The article concludes by calling for a more genuine commitment by Government to evidence-informed policy.

In this short article, I consider how teachers might judge the National Standards system these days and also how the policy might be understood more generally. These are important questions coming up to the 2017 election because the National Standards system has been such a central feature of the current Government's approach to education. Teachers will be aware of teacher and principal colleagues who are supportive of National Standards while others are much less so. Conflicting views amongst teachers and principals about the value of the National Standards is also apparent from a recent New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) national survey (Bonne, 2016). School websites indicate diverse views as well. There are some primary school websites that reflect enthusiasm about National Standards and some that barely mention them.

It is a pleasure to guest-edit this special issue on 'Nine Years of National-led Education Policy'. As the journal of the faculty where I have worked for much of my career, I am rather fond of the Waikato Journal of Education. One of my earliest papers was published in the very first issue. That article was on the politics of scapegoating schools and teachers for wider socio-economic problems (Thrupp, 1995). It has been a theme that my work has come back to repeatedly and is mentioned in this introduction as well.

This article discusses school level education policy developments over 2009, during National's first year in office. National was elected amidst a growing sense of recession and quickly made cuts to a range of programmes, claiming these were necessary to rein in government spending. However there was a hollow ring to these claims given the nature of what was cut and given new spending on private schools. A stronger privatisation agenda was signalled in other areas as well and in its first year National also introduced National Standards, a nationwide form of assessment for primary and intermediate school children. This article discusses these developments and their contestation by some in the sector. It concludes that if the contested ideology of neoliberalism comes to further dominate New Zealand education policy in the next few years, research could have an important role to play in providing some light amidst the heat of reform. However, New Zealand's capacity to undertake research into the impact of education policy is becoming quite limited. This is making it increasingly important to tap into academic analyses of neo-liberal policies in other national settings where research and scholarship is often better funded and more able to be searching than its New Zealand counterpart.

In recent years, there have been increasing demands, particularly from governments, for better information about the performance of schools. Performance indicators have been identified and adopted in many countries as a potential solution to the challenge of providing information which demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of schools and other education institutions. This article examines the notion of performance indicators, discusses their benefits and limitations, and identifies the characteristics of effective indicator systems. It describes and critically appraises the information and measurement systems that are currently used to assess the performance of New Zealand schools. Finally it considers whether indicators could be utilised more effectively not only to measure, but also to improve the performance of New Zealand schools.

Introduction -- Part 1: Politics, policy, teachers and edu-business -- Municipal governance of comprehensive education: The emergence of local universalisms -- Finland's ministry of education and culture in the light of its working groups -- A progressive force in Finnish schooling?: Finland's education union, OAJ and its influence on school-level education policy -- Finnish quality evaluation discourse: Swimming against the global tide? -- Ecological sustainability and steering of Finnish comprehensive schools -- Unmentioned challenges of Finnish teacher education: Decontextualisation, scientification and the rhetoric of the research-based agenda -- Teachers' expectations and expectations of teachers: Understanding teachers' societal role -- Businessing around comprehensive schooling -- Co-operation of edu-business and public schooling: Is the governance of education in Finland shifting from the public sector to networks?- Part 2: Equity, inequality, and the challenges of diversity, language and inclusion -- "Three bedrooms and a nice school" — Residential choices, school choices and vicious circles of segregation in the education landscape of Finnish cities -- Pupil selection and enrolment in comprehensive schools in urban Finland -- Everyday life in schools in disadvantaged areas -- Divided cities — Divided schools? School segregation and the role of needs-based resource allocation in Finland -- The significance of socioeconomic background for the educational dispositions and aspirations of Finnish school leavers -- Controversies and challenges in the history of gender discourses in education in Finland -- Rainbow paradise? Sexualities and gender diversity in Finnish schools -- Racism in Finnish school textbooks: Developments and discussions -- Saami language online education outside the Saami homeland — New pathways to social justice -- Education of pupils with migrant backgrounds: A systemic failure in the Finnish system? -- Negotiated, given and self-made paths: Immigrant origin girls and post-compulsory educational transition in Finland -- Language education for everyone? Busting access myths -- Rethinking Finland's official bilingualism in education -- Religions and worldviews as "the problem" in Finnish schools -- Inclusion in Finland: Myths and realities -- Exclusively included? Finland's inclusion success story and hidden dual system of mainstream and special needs education -- Student disengagement in Finnish comprehensive schooling -- Part 3: Epilogue -- The Foundations of Critical Studies in Education in Finland.

This open access book provides academic insights and serves as a platform for research-informed discussion about education in Finland. Bringing together the work of more than 50 authors across 28 chapters, it presents a major collection of critical views of the Finnish education system and topics that cohere around social justice concerns. It questions rhetoric, myths, and commonly held assumptions surrounding Finnish schooling. This book draws on the fields of sociology of education, education policy, urban studies, and policy sociology. It makes use of a range of research methodologies including ethnography, case study and discourse analysis, and references the work of relevant theorists, including Bourdieu and Foucault. This book aims to provide a critical, updated and astute analysis of the strengths and challenges of the Finnish education system.