The Great New Zealand Education Experiment and the Issue of Teachers as Professionals[0][1]
Keith Sullivan
Setting the Educational Context: An Introduction to Aotearoa/New Zealand
New Zealand is a small island nation (with two main islands, the North and South, and a number of small islands) in the Southwest Pacific at the southern tip of the triangle that makes up Polynesia. Aotearoa, meaning land of the long white cloud, is New Zealand’s Maori name. New Zealand has 3.6 million people, the majority (79%) of European origin and British descent (referred to as Pakeha). The indigenous Maori population make up 13% of the population, 5% are of Pacific Island Polynesian descent and 3% are Asian. English and Maori are New Zealand’s two official languages. The Maori and Pacific Island populations are younger (concentrated in the 5 to 29 age range) than their Pakeha counterparts; 20% of the school population are Maori and 7% are Pacific Island Polynesian. New Zealand provides free education in its 2,667 state primary and secondary schools. School is compulsory between the ages of 6 and 16, and most children start school on their fifth birthday.[2]
Economically, New Zealand is heavily dependent on overseas trade, and over the past 20 years has moved away from its traditional exports of dairy, meat and wool towards forestry, horticulture, fishing, manufacturing, tourism and, increasingly, education. Further to this, over the past ten years New Zealand has changed from being one of the most heavily regulated countries in the world to having one of the most deregulated and open economies. This has coincided with the development of the Asia-Pacific region as an economic powerhouse which has enabled New Zealand more easily to explore potential trade links within the area and, more specifically, to develop products to supply niche markets.[3] Education is considered a sphere with great potential for New Zealand’s relatively small economy, as the Asian market in particular is massive and foreign students pay full fees. As a result, universities and schools are starting seriously to market themselves. For a long time New Zealand has provided educational opportunities for students from emerging Pacific and Asian nations in the form of overseas aid, but in recent years since education has been regarded as a commodity rather than a public good, it has begun developing an educational market in Asia. For instance, in recent years at Victoria University of Wellington, there have been numerous partnerships established with Asian universities, and the Prime Minister of Malaysia recently established a chair in Malay Studies at the University.
This economic re-focus has also coincided with a Maori Renaissance, a resurgence of Maori empowerment in all areas, particularly cultural, economic and educational, and a growing sense of a distinct and vibrant identity amongst Pakeha (European) New Zealanders. For all New Zealanders this has meant a re-evaluation of their identities and an emerging sense of being a multiethnic South Pacific nation rather than a pale European reflection in the South Seas.
Over the past ten years New Zealand education has undergone extensive change. The reform of education, which began in the area of administration in the primary and secondary sectors, spread throughout the entire system: its practice, its ideology and its infrastructure. Many of the first reforms have now been reformed, and the central themes of accountability, decentralisation and the establishment of a quasi-free market of education in which education itself has become a commodity,[4] teachers providers and students customers are entrenched. Like other reforms occurring throughout the public sector in New Zealand, those imposed on education focused on performance objectives, standardisation, competition, marketability and decentralisation.
As the 1997 school year approached, there was a shortage of approximately 1,800 teachers. When school started, 1,200 teachers had been recruited from overseas (a large proportion from Canada) leaving 600 positions still unfilled (Ministry of Education, May 1996 and June 1996). It is clear that fluctuations in population and poor government projections are not sufficient to account for such a shortfall in the number of teachers. These figures alone are testimony to a probable decline in teachers' job satisfaction and are arguably also an indication of a loss of morale amongst teachers.
This chapter focuses on a fundamental and crucial educational concern, the current crisis in teaching. It examines the state of teaching from the point of view of the socio-historical context, the recent educational reforms and teachers' own perspectives on teaching as a profession.
Section 1: The socio-historical development of teaching and teacher professionalism
Several scholars have developed our understanding of the power relationship between the state and teachers through identifying the themes of ideology, social and cultural reproduction, and social control in education (Sharp and Green, 1975; Pratte, 1977; Grace, 1979; Green, 1980; Bowles and Gintis, 1986; and Harker, 1990, for example). Grace (1979) describes how the job of teaching was formalised and constructed in Victorian England to uphold and reflect the status quo and deflect potential radicalism into social responsibility. In order to control working class teachers, they were sold the idea that teaching was a vocation, a mission. To help them accept this fully, teachers were given a sense of responsibility and professionalism, but they could never be true professionals like the learned professions; they were demi-professionals. The purpose of this socially assigned role was to control the politicisation of teachers and their potential to reform, to question, to take people beyond their social limits. Rather than being the radicals they had the potential to be, they were the agents of middle class social and cultural transmission and of symbolic control.
Grace describes the two main mechanisms for controlling and steering teachers away from a radical course as "a missionary ideology" and "the ideology of respectability and professionalism".[5] As "missionaries", teachers could sustain themselves with "a Christian and humanitarian concern for amelioration and rescue"; they were also filled "with notions of vocation and humility and relative unconcern for political, economic and social status questions" (p 13). However, if teachers did have unfulfilled expectations in terms of social mobility, status, acceptance into the respectable ranks of Victorian society and acknowledgement for the job done, there was a danger that they would become radicalised, and thus it was important to assign them an "intermediate social position ... to which would be attached aspirations and expectations both individually and collectively for increased respectability. These expectations might, of course, be very delayed in their realisations, but while they existed they would provide a powerful means of attachment to the existing order" (pp 13-14). This was far more preferable than either opposition to that order, or equality with it.
In New Zealand, the position of teachers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was undergoing different processes but achieving similar outcomes. Whereas in Britain social dynamics were completely controlled by the class system, in New Zealand only a diluted version of this was imported and a strong egalitarian ideology evolved. However, teachers in nineteenth century New Zealand brought with them a strong sense of vocation and missionary zeal, and were loosely accorded respectability and an implied professional status.
The New Zealand Education Institute (NZEI) was formed shortly after the 1877 Education Act to “provide a professional organisation for the swelling ranks of teachers across the whole country, in particular, initially, to ensure that wide regional disparities in pay rates for teachers were removed” (Gordon, 1991, p 1). It is arguable, therefore, that from the beginning it was unclear whether teachers needed a professional body to represent them or a union. This is reflected in the fact that the teachers union is not called a ‘union’, but an ‘institute’.
In the New Zealand context, professionalism was seen as elitist and unionism was seen as oppositional, and there has therefore been a less easily defined division between social ranks and status. In fact, New Zealand teachers became partners in the development and implementation of education policy, working with the government rather than being kept outside it, i.e., acting professionally but not being ‘officially’ recognised as professionals. Until 1979 and 1980 when NZEI protested against the loss of pay parity between the secondary and primary sectors, NZEI had a record of 99 years with no industrial action.
After the Second World War, things started to change. The Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) was formed in 1952 and created better pay conditions for secondary teachers and was generally both more militant and more effective than NZEI. The relationship between the unions and government gradually worsened and reached a low during the early 1980s when the National Government's Minister of Education initiated a process of teacher-bashing and teacher-exclusion from policy development, and a move towards a return-to-the basics philosophy which by implication criticised the educational status quo.
Essentially, however, up until this point, the underlying ideologies of the teachers were as Grace describes. In terms of the missionary ideology, there was a sense of importance attached to the job of teaching that meant teaching and education were outside politics and that the job needed to be got on with. In terms of an ideology of respectability and professionalism, the teachers had this status in that they were party through the NZEI to the process of policy development and implementation. Part of the notion of respectability also deemed that as certain core areas form the backbone of society (the police, hospital staff, the armed forces and teachers), then it would be inappropriate for their members to initiate industrial action or to take political stances. The position of teachers in a hypothetical professional league table at this time could be described as middling or intermediate, largely receiving the respect and acknowledgement of society at large for the importance of the job they did, a reflection of the positive attitude that most New Zealanders had towards their education system as a whole.
Section 2: Recent educational reform in New Zealand and its effect upon conditions of service, status and morale within teaching
When the Fourth Labour Government was elected in 1984 it inherited a massive debt due to the financial mismanagement of the previous government and its series of disastrous ‘think big’ projects. What the people of New Zealand did not expect was that this traditionally socialist party would bring in neo-liberal reforms that would all but sweep away their most important cornerstone, the welfare state. During Labour's first term, public sector reforms focused on the areas of health and social welfare. In 1987, when the Government was elected to a second term, the Treasury presented it with a substantial two-volume report, the second volume of which was devoted entirely to education. The education portfolio was given particular importance and was taken over by the Prime Minister, David Lange. Both barrels were firmly aimed at education. The trends set by this Government would outlast them and more or less continue through two terms of National (Conservative) government as well.
In its report on education, Treasury was very critical of what it called the inefficiency of education and its failure to cater to the contemporary needs of the New Zealand economy. The report was also very critical of teachers. Gordon (1991) locates the Treasury’s attack on teachers in three areas:
i.that teachers and their unions are primarily self-interested;
ii. that teachers (as providers of education) have captured the benefits for themselves; and
iii. that “the salaries of teachers are too high, and that their working conditions are unrealistically good; that teaching is an easy job” (p 3).
These accusations were unsupported by any evidence and were ideologically at odds with all that teachers had stood for both in terms of their systems of belief and in their practice. Nonetheless, to a large extent, the accusations seem to have stuck.
The Government set up a taskforce to investigate educational administration. Their report, Administering for Excellence (1988), better known as the Picot Report, acknowledged the teachers as professionals but criticised educational administration for being over-centralised and inefficient. Taking up the Treasury’s theme, however, Picot criticised the NZEI for having too much influence: "Within this perspective, it is difficult for policy advisers to maintain a detached stance; there is a tendency for them to become significantly influenced by the interests of teachers and to lose sight of the interest of learners" (1988, pp 23-24).
Tomorrow's Schools (1988) was the government response to Picot and it supported nearly all of the Picot recommendations. Essentially, these centred around breaking up the old Department of Education and the regional and local boards, and creating a policy-driven and much smaller Ministry of Education. To work in tandem with the new Ministry there would also be several other smaller agencies with clearly articulated briefs, the most significant being the Education Review Office (ERO) responsible for academic audit, and what would become the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) responsible for curriculum and examinations. A major feature of these reforms was that many formerly centrally-funded areas of activity would be required to earn their incomes and become independent. The curriculum development area (which became Learning Media) and the Special Education Services (SES) were in this category. Functions that were previously carried out by local education boards such as providing basic supplies and accounting services were privatised and then by necessity had to be bought in from school-controlled budgets.
Schools became the central unit. Locally elected boards of trustees would become the employers of teachers, the principal would become the manager of the school and teachers would be the employees. Teachers would be more accountable through performance reviews and ERO visits, and each school would develop its own charter which would become a contract between the school and the community on the one hand and the school and the government on the other. Schools would control their own budgets (except for salaries) and, with the removal of zoning, all schools would compete for pupils in an educational quasi- free market.
However, Picot and Tomorrow’s Schools essentially contained a fundamental contradiction. They appeared to encapsulate two parallel and quite different settlements. On the one hand, teachers were regarded as professionals and partners in the educational enterprise. It was clearly stated that the problems in the old structures lay in the structures themselves, not the teachers or administrators. On the other hand, in a market-driven decentralised education system of high accountability, they would need to be redefined as employees in a traditional management structure to be set up within the schools. What was to happen over the next few years was the gradual undermining of the first settlement in favour of the second.
Because of the notion of teacher capture of education, teachers were largely excluded from the research and recommendations that led to the Picot report. However, after Tomorrow’s Schools was released, teachers were able to generate enough support to participate in the subsequent implementation processes of the reforms.
At the same time, the idealogues behind the reforms were uneasy about the involvement of teachers in the policy process. In their opinion, teachers who had been promoted to positions in the Ministry and the ERO, and rank and file teachers, had worked together to subvert the reforms. What followed was a series of reports which aimed to set things back on course. Today's Schools (the Lough Report) was the first of these and brought into sharp focus what Codd (1994) refers to as the "cult of managerialism", arguing for its implementation throughout the school system
Another attack on teachers came from the other major public service player (along with Treasury), the State Services Commission (1990): “For the SSC ... the ‘failure’ of the education reforms, in particular to reduce the size of the central bureaucracy, is laid almost solely in the lap of teachers: teacher unions; teachers as bureaucrats; teachers as reviewers and teachers as teachers” (Gordon, 1991, p 8).
The next attack came from Stewart Sexton who made a flying visit to New Zealand to report on education for the Business Roundtable. Sexton also held the teachers responsible for subverting the reform process and suggested that their one representative on boards of trustees be removed; he also suggested replacing parents with business people, basically so that the free market concept and all that this entailed could properly take off. This report proved influential with the National Government which was elected in 1990. National Education Minister, Lockwood Smith, took up its themes and echoed them in his own reform document, Education Policy: Investing in People Our Greatest Asset (1991).