A New Commissariat of Education Control

July 31, 2019

By NZB3

It was a weird meeting last night¹. I expected information about Hipkins’ next tactical move. I expected Nikki Kaye and 2 other MPs to be charismatically fanning and converting the audience’s outrage toward support of the National Party in their fight to stop the Minister of Miseducation from creating a Commissariat of Education Control.

Instead there were endless basic platitudes and stock answers from the MP. Not a promising start to a travelling show of some 40 visits. Nikki said she couldn’t go into too much depth because some present would not be smart enough so sorry about that. And she said don’t get too passionate because there might be kids here. And she said she couldn’t be too informative because she had 140 pages to condense into her talk (who asked you to?) Far from direct the (some 300, not 200) audience’s ire toward Hipkins where it belongs it was amazing to behold Nikki and ‘our guy on the inside,’ Cathy, take the heat for whatever it is (we still don’t know) the Government is going to do!

Dr Cathy Wylie herself is an odd duck. Now she’s got her tens of thousands of dollars for being on a State Taskforce why is she now touring with the Nats? She getting paid for this? She kept on saying “we didn’t intend for” when it came to things in the Task Force report and tried to walk them back. Why don’t you put that in writing and why didn’t you get it right the final report you were employed to write?

Fascinating insight that Cathy can’t understand why the audience is fixated on a State quango being in control of communities schools. Don’t we understand it’s only quality control and that’s not a form of control? Don’t we understand that the qualification to be a school principal in New Zealand is simply being a registered teacher and that this on its face is retrograde? Other countries don’t do that. Obviously there should be some licence issued by the state to be a principal, it should be under control here as in other States…and, again, why do you keep accusing my Task Force of trying to exert control??

She really is in a cognitive disjunction jam. There’s nobody in her life who can put this to her and she’s clambering for this revelation. Got a blind spot about what control is and why we don’t want to be subjected to it.

The gist of it is that we, the audience, like our community autonomy not a one-size-fits-all commissariat overseeing ‘Hubs’ in control of our teachers and our resources. But National didn’t even promise to fight this or anything actually. There are 40 more empty meetings like this to come??

But how can National fight let alone object to the proposed ‘Hub’ Commissars? They not only did the same thing but were a long way toward assimilating all schools into their own identical version called Kāhui Ako!

Not a word about the very real Hubbing up of New Zealand’s polytechs either. So much for bringing us information. It wasn’t even good politicking bullshit which I could at least have enjoyed and admired.

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Ref. 2015: Kāhui Ako: A Cluster Schmuck of Learning

Ref. 1870: The University of New Zealand Act

1. I wrote this back in February 2019, before I rebooted NZB3 and was leaving contemporary news to Gekkonomics (who will return soon)

Image ref. Tomorrow’s Schools meeting: Teachers speak out against Bali Haque’s plan to make them ‘numbers in a spreadsheet’; nzherald

Update 12/11/2019: Today the new ‘Tomorrows Schools’ collectivisation campaign was finally announced as being a fizzer. (Thank goodness!)