Editorial: Just let Tolley get on with her job

OPINION: Let's play "pretend" for a moment. Let's imagine that the Labour Party has just won office, that it campaigned to benefit trade unions at employers' expense, and that employers decided to actively frustrate the measure's implementation.

Members of the Council of Trade Unions would be apoplectic, and rightly so.

A government is entitled – nay, is obliged – to enact policy on which it went to the country and which voters tacitly endorsed when they chose it to take over the Treasury benches.

Yet school teachers and principals seem hellbent on undermining what Education Minister Anne Tolley, strongly backed by Prime Minister John Key and Finance Minister Bill English, told New Zealanders last year the Government wanted to enact – national standards at primary school. For months, the primary teachers' union, the NZEI, and the Principals Federation have joined forces to try to derail Mrs Tolley's plans. She refuses to budge.

Now the NZEI is preparing members to strike over the issue, though they can't do so without penalty until their employment contracts expire in July. Such action would be outrageous.

Little wonder the State Services Commission wants to include these state servants – most educators are paid by taxpayers – in its Standards of Integrity and Conduct Code, which says it is unacceptable for employees to publicly comment on government policy if it constitutes a "personal attack" on a minister, colleague or other state servants. The commission move has incensed teacher and principal representatives. It might unsettle free-speech advocates, too.

But given the educators' arrogant stance on national standards, State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie would be forgiven if he believed the code should cover teachers sooner rather than later.

Agree with the Government's education policy or not – and this newspaper happens to believe that parents should be able to get plain-English reports about their children's progress, and that the wider community, which funds state schools, should be able to tell which among them are best equipping young citizens for life – Mrs Tolley must be allowed to enact the policy on which National campaigned.

Perhaps one of this row's most disturbing aspects is the intimidation some teachers and principals who back national standards are feeling from those who don't. One 20-year veteran, in an email to the minister, said, for example, it was important she knew that not all principals "support the present frenzy against national standards ... Colleagues ... feel the same way but raising your head above the parapet in these times is a risky act".

Teachers obviously need reminding that it is a government's prerogative – not a trade union's – to determine education policy. Mrs Tolley – admirably – wants to stop one in five children who leave school poorly equipped for tomorrow. Teachers are behaving like the worst of their pupils who can't get their own way. They should grow up.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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Rixter   #1   12:02 pm Dec 15 2009

Brillant article. My girls are year 5 and 8, the last two weeks they have been in wind-down mode at school, or stuffing around. The school has put in new fancy projectors in all classrooms, well the kids watch movies all the time. Teachers have "non contact time" each week, so a day a week they have a temp. teacher. There is no standards or expections, so why are our kids not preforming, no standards or expections to meet. The teachers and principals are scared of standards, because it will expose their own standard and ability. Just like they hated bulk funding, it exposed the teachers who were not up to the job.

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