SteveMcCabe.net...

Although Schadenfreude isn’t the most attractive of emotions, it is very, very good to see John Key catching some flak of late, remarks of his from 2005 coming to light and reminding us that Mr. Key is, or at least was nine years ago, a fan of small classes in schools. That, apparently, was among the reasons why he has chosen to send his children to private schools.

Now who would be responsible, do we think, for class sizes? That would be, one would imagine, the government — and, for better or worse, the government of New Zealand has been, for the last six of the nine years since Mr. Key shared with the world his views on class sizes, a National government, led by the very same Mr. Key himself. So we’ve got John Key the champion of small classes on the one hand, John Key the prime minister and head of government on the other. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that, given the absolute mandate Mr. Key clearly believes he has (Don’t believe me? Count the state-owned asset sales and then we’ll talk), he’d take the opportunity to do something about the size of classes in New Zealand’s schools. Like, for example, reducing it.

You’d think. But he’s not. Of course he hasn’t. Class sizes almost, in fact, increased under Mr. Key’s tenure as prime minister. This would be a good thing for anyone involved in education. Students — the very reason we have an education system in the first place, let us not forget — will not benefit from being in large classes. I’ve taught large and small groups, and I know the difference. When I’m teaching a smaller class, I can get to know every single child in the room personally, learn about them and their interests, explore their strengths and weaknesses, build a learning relationship with them and find creative ways to help them. But the larger the class grows, the more impossible this becomes. When I have thirty or more children sitting in front of me, then — no matter how hard I try — they’ll be little more than a list of names, ethnicities and test scores in my markbook; the larger the class, the harder it is for me to recognise individuals and their individual needs. Oh, I’ll do it, but it’ll take me a lot longer, and even once it’s happened, the amount of time I can spend on each individual student is inevitably diminished.

Perhaps Mr. Key saw the light. Perhaps he realised that even his party could manage to share the wealth around — a little National socialism, if you will — or perhaps he realised that this was not a vote-winner. Whatever the reason, he had Hekia Parata, less and less a minister of the crown and increasingly a human shield to protect the prime minister when an unpalatable policy needs pulling, announce that the proposed class-size increase was being taken off the table.

We still have, sadly, the highly misguided Investing in Educational Success programme, which is simply performance pay and favouritism dressed up as career opportunities. It will see hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at a very small number of teachers and principals to pay them either to do nothing new or to spend less time at their current job. Watching the ministers, prime and of education, chasing their tails has been somewhere between hilarious and agonising — we can’t find a penny more for teachers, but wait, yes we can, but we’ll pay a handful, picked essentially through favouritism, a large extra sum per year to teach less.

It’s pretty bloody obvious, then, that a National government is not fit to run education in this country, and, in particular, the current minister has little or no (personally I’ll go with “no,” but I’ll let you make your own mind up) idea of how to develop educational policy. Labour have something more of an idea, and it’s encouraging to see an understanding that increasing funding to low-decile schools to account for the fact that the “contributions” that are a de facto school fee in many of the higher-decile schools simply widen the achievement gap even further.

But in the end, none of it matters. Schools like Auckland Grammar — a school considered so desirable that parents will spend tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars extra on their mortgages just to get their boys in — can afford all the equipment they want, but that’s not why their results are as good as they are. What matters is parents. It’s as simple as that. I see a child for an hour a day at most, and even when you add up the total time my colleagues and I, together, actually spend with any one student, you’ll see that it’s almost trivial compared to the time a child spends with his parents. And not simply on a day-to-day basis — parents are the continuous, ongoing, lasting strand that threads its way through a child’s life. And if a child’s parents value that child’s education, that child is so very much more likely to enjoy positive educational outcomes. Parents who don’t promote education, who don’t value school and learning, who don’t encourage their children to study and learn — these are the parents whose children will disengage at school, who will truant, who will drop out, and, worse, will, when they do attend, distract and disrupt and destroy and hold back their classmates’ learning. It’s the fact that parents are willing to invest huge sums in their children’s education that is behind high achievement at the highly-achieving schools, not simply funding (although the money never hurts…).

At a recent parents’ evening, I saw, in three hours, the parents of seven students. Seven, out of nearly fifty. Seven, about one in seven. Which means that among the nearly fifty students in the Year 11 classes I teach, only one in seven had parents who thought that coming to a parents’ evening and meeting their child’s teachers, discussing their child’s progress in school, finding out what they could do to support their child’s learning, was worth making the effort to come to school for half an hour. Or look at it from an altogether sadder and more worrying perspective — six out of seven parents didn’t think their child’s learning was important enough.

And while the message I get from this is very clear, the message my students — their children — hear is equally clear: school’s not that big a deal, kid. If a child’s parents aren’t sending a consistent and unequivocal message to the child that school is something important, something to be valued, something that can make a serious and profound change in a child’s life, then it really doesn’t matter what I say in class — that child is almost certainly going to fail.

I don’t blame some parents for not fronting up to parents’ evening. If I knew, or even if I were reasonably confident, that I’d hear mostly positive, encouraging things about my child, then I’d be willing to get myself down to school. But if I knew — and, let’s face it, there’s plenty of parents who do know — that teacher after teacher after teacher would be offering variations on a theme of “Oh, Mr Smith, you’re little Johnny’s dad? He’s a right little shit, isn’t he?” then I’d be a little less thrilled about the thought of showing up. And so the cycle continues.

We teachers can spend as long as we like planning the most engaging lessons, we can prepare the most exciting learning opportunities, we can keep up with the most up-to-date research, we can follow the very best of best practices. Ministers can double, halve or do whatever else they want with class sizes, they can invent all the new teacher titles they like, they can fling bucketful after bucketful of money at every school in the land. But it doesn’t matter. Until what children do in school is promoted at home, it’s all futile.