Advertisment
Written By: r0b - Date published: 6:18 am, March 22nd, 2010 - 2 comments
Anne Tolley has promised that national standards have been introduced so that “every single child could read, write, and do maths when they left school”.
The depths of arrogance and ignorance in that claim leave me at a loss for words…
Written By: r0b - Date published: 6:15 am, March 20th, 2010 - 41 comments
Education Minister Anne Tolley has made an extraordinary promise: “New Zealand elected a Government that promised to introduce national standards so that every single child could read, write, and do maths when they left school. That is what the country voted for.” We would all love to see National deliver, but they can’t, and they know that they can’t. It’s an empty promise.
Written By: Demeter - Date published: 3:55 pm, March 19th, 2010 - 19 comments
New instalment from John Key impersonater “Plumedekiwi”, in which the PM gets his linguistic knickers in a twist over national standards….
If you haven’t seen the other vids by Plumedekiwi, check him out here
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:23 am, March 18th, 2010 - 27 comments
Which minister will be next to go? Rodney Hide or Anne Tolley?
If competence was a condition of keeping their job, both would be long gone. But doing a good minister has never been a job requirement in John Key’s government. It comes down to which of them makes a spectacular mistake so serious that Key …
Written By: Guest post - Date published: 12:37 pm, March 16th, 2010 - 14 comments
Anne Tolley put out an odd media statement on Friday. She reckons Trevor Mallard, opposition spokesperson for Education, dominated two public meetings in Auckland on her Government’s unpopular national standards policy. Which begs the question, was she actually all there at either meeting?
Written By: Guest post - Date published: 12:22 pm, March 15th, 2010 - 19 comments
Lorraine Kerr, head of the NZ School Trustees Association is one of National’s few supporters on National Standards. She says a survey of boards of trustees gives her a mandate for this position, with only four boards opposing the Standards. Now, she has been forced to admit that only 14 schools were included in the survey result.
Written By: r0b - Date published: 9:54 am, March 13th, 2010 - 30 comments
We keep hearing, from the Key government, statements about education that make no logical or factual sense at all. Here are two examples. Help me choose — which is the stupider statement, and why?
Written By: Guest post - Date published: 11:54 pm, March 11th, 2010 - 56 comments
Let’s face facts. Anne Tolley is a dangerous minister. She is undermining the education system at every turn and the damage will last lifetime. But is National doing the responsible thing and removing her from the portfolio? No. In fact, a guest poster reports they’re so desperate to help her out that they’ve got plants in her audiences to ask patsy questions.
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 4:30 pm, March 11th, 2010 - 20 comments
Have a listen to Education Minister Anne Tolley on Morning Report today trying to explain the $25 million cut to the education budget.
It really was a shocker, even for her.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:12 am, March 11th, 2010 - 21 comments
While other countries have used their strong public sectors to steady the private sector and keep unemployment down during the economic downturn, our government is compounding unemployment by cutting the public sector, throwing people out of jobs and feeding worker insecurity.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:49 am, March 10th, 2010 - 24 comments
“Tolley finds ally in school mum” screams the headline of Audrey Young’s piece today.
When National runs a bus tour the Herald is desperate in its attempts to drum up support, when it’s Labour all they want to talk about is how much the bus is costing the taxpayer.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:10 pm, March 9th, 2010 - 28 comments
So Steven Joyce’s big bright idea for tertiary education (which he recently inherited from the hopeless Anne Tolley) is to punish institutions with low pass rates by cutting their funding. It’s basically the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.It reflects the typical short-term thinking of the capitalist class and its political party.
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:02 am, March 7th, 2010 - 26 comments
A contact at the Ministry of Transport tells me that 15 year old drivers have been involved in only a handful of fatal crashes, 1 to 1.5% of the total, in recent years and they’re not all the 15 year old’s fault. But no, National’s solution is to prevent all 15 year olds from driving. Dumb. It’s a carpet-bombing approach to policy
Written By: The Standard - Date published: 10:55 am, March 5th, 2010 - 10 comments
mickysavage reports on Anne Tolley’s meeting in West Auckland. He relates her complete inability to understand the issues. He concludes that national standards was a dog whistle policy that in action will actually only consist of spending $50 million a year on reports with pretty graphs and standardising grading for writing. Everything else is already standardised. There will be no improvements in education standards.< more>
Written By: r0b - Date published: 7:37 am, March 5th, 2010 - 14 comments
All available evidence and expert opinion suggests that National Standards, as the government intends to introduce them in our primary schools, won’t work. They may even do damage. Will Key and Tolley ever take heed of the evidence, or is this just a blind ideological crusade? Bring on Diane Ravitch…
Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:20 am, March 4th, 2010 - 60 comments
Beloved Leader of People’s Constitutional Monarchy of New Zealand, Honourable John Key, attended glorious opening of school building on Tuesday.
Several youths were overcome by the glory of Honourable Leader’s appearance as were several members of the press corps.
Written By: Guest post - Date published: 12:54 pm, March 2nd, 2010 - 22 comments
A guest contributor reports that if you want your chance to quiz Anne Tolley and you live in West Auckland your chance is on Thursday but it sounds like the Nats would rather you didn’t come. Another guest contributor pans Tolley’s meeting last night.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:00 am, February 24th, 2010 - 27 comments
Success for Opposition frontbenchers largely consists of embarrassing their opposite number by forcing them to answer questions they would rather not. Labour showed both how to do that and how not to do it in the House yesterday.
Written By: r0b - Date published: 8:05 am, February 24th, 2010 - 45 comments
A Price Waterhouse Coopers report has highlighted the huge returns from each dollar spent on Adult and Community Education (ACE). Farrar and other bloggers have attacked the conclusions of the report and the credibility of PWC, but the attack is bizarre…
Written By: all_your_base - Date published: 10:00 am, February 23rd, 2010 - 2 comments
The Post Primary Teachers’ Association have just launched a YouTube video protesting National’s hugely unpopular cuts to night classes.
Click through to check it out.
Written By: r0b - Date published: 3:01 pm, February 19th, 2010 - 40 comments
The letter warning school boards not to speak out over national standards is an outrage, but John Key and his National Party have a long and dishonourable record of trying to shut down those who speak out to oppose them.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:00 am, February 19th, 2010 - 21 comments
While measures to fix problems in investments are good, the best approach is increase financial literacy. However Anne Tolly has already shown she does not understand education. Her idiotic decisions to destroy adult community education has removed the best channel for promoting knowledge amongst current investors. This suggests that the government isn’t serious and we are seeing more PR than substantive measures.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:30 pm, February 18th, 2010 - 19 comments
John Armstrong: “Anne Tolley’s reluctance to explain [national standards] left the distinct impression she was less than 100 per cent sure.” It was a bit more than an impression, and it was a bit less than 100%. Tolley clearly had no clue what she was talking about.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 6:05 pm, February 16th, 2010 - 19 comments
Bill English claimed in the House today that the economy only grew by 0.9% a year in Labour’s last three years in power. Unfortunately for him the problem was his maths, not Labour’s economic policy. English can’t get simple percentages right, can we trust him with the nation’s finances?
Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 1:00 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 37 comments
When the Government came under fire over National Standards John Key was quick to raise the anti-union bogey. The old stereotypes are certainly still strong in National, but they have led Key into a trap. What might have worked for Muldoon or Maggie in the past won’t work now for a number of reasons.
Written By: r0b - Date published: 1:00 pm, February 13th, 2010 - 35 comments
National love to tell us what we want to hear. Among their many pre-election policy lies they waxed lyrical about the value of education, before effectively cutting funding in the budget. On Adult and Community Education (ACE), Bill English was particularly supportive…
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 6:57 am, February 10th, 2010 - 31 comments
You’ll recall that last week National spent $200,000 of taxpayer dollars on a proganda drop defending its national standards. This was a targeted exercise – 350,000 of the pamphlets were produced, enough for the parents of each primary school pupil.
So, how did they know what addresses to send them to? You can’t get information on who …
Written By: r0b - Date published: 1:30 pm, February 8th, 2010 - 29 comments
I don’t recall the date or anything, but I remember the exact moment I decided to get politically active. Rob Muldoon was called by some brave journalist on the fact that National seemed to be ignoring all its election manifesto promises. Muldoon just grunted, and said that manifesto promises were dreamed up by …
Written By: IrishBill - Date published: 4:36 pm, February 7th, 2010 - 71 comments
All teachers are feminist pinkos.
And they’re badly dressed.
And too nice to the kids.
It wasn’t like that in my day.
And didn’t I turn out just fine?
That’s why we need national standards.
Perhaps the most compelling argument against national standards I have read so far.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 4:41 pm, February 6th, 2010 - 43 comments
The Herald reports:
“[Key] also raised the 15 per cent Maori unemployment rate, saying improving education outcomes for Maori children would help address that.”
Improved education sounds good but:
1) how is Key going to actually lift Maori educational achievement? Not by cutting millions from the education budget like he did last year. Not by national standards – …
Comments