Iain Rennie

State Services Commissioner

2 The Terrace

Wellington

24 April, 2012

Complaint

Dear Mr Rennie

Please find attached a complaint against the Secretary to the Treasury (also by implication the Secretary for Education).

The complaint is discursive in approach and generally unusual in form.

There were two reasons for that, I wanted the complaint to be a way of helping teachers understand their predicament, little of it their making; and I have assumed that State Service Commission officers share the same prejudices and ignorances as their philosophically similar agency, the Treasury.

In referring to the State Services Commission, John Armstrong wrote: ‘Such is the seeming indifference to the slow politicisation of the public service, it would barely be missed were it to be folded into some other body with a monitoring role such as the Treasury or the Prime Minister’s Department.’ (NZ Herald, 7 April, 2012)

And these are the very agencies (along with the Ministry of Education) my complaint asks you to investigate.

As a result, I wanted to take your officers through the process in which two serious misrepresentations have been developed and used to undermine public schools.

Your officers will, I hope, by the end of their consideration be convinced that New Zealand public schools rather than doing poorly with disadvantaged children are doing very well; and the so-called long tail and the gap are not evidence of New Zealand public schools doing poorly with disadvantaged children – just the reverse.

My complaint is, is that the Treasury was wilfully careless and politically motivated in their pronouncements on these and many other matters.

As for the election rort, the participants in the pre-election meetings will know, from the details I provide, that I had information from a participant in those meetings.

I believe, any fair-minded person, in considering the information, will recognise that these meetings were no ordinary ones and all the participants would have been well aware of this.

So serious is the election rort described, that the public service code of conduct can hardly encompass it.

I, the public school primary teachers of New Zealand, and those concerned for the welfare of New Zealand’s democracy, look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely

Kelvin Smythe

Treasury: election rort and malice against public schools – complaint to SSC

Iain Rennie

State Services Commissioner

State Services Commission

Level 10 Reserve Bank Building

2 The Terrace

Wellington

Complaint about the actions of the Secretary to the Treasury in relation to the public service code of conduct

Dear Mr Rennie

There are two major grounds for this complaint:

1.      Participation by Treasury officials in activity that, given the context, and the shared understandings of the participants, constituted a serious breach of public service principles and an election rort.

2.      A failure by Gabriel Makhlouf, Secretary to the Treasury, in subsequent pronouncements on education to be honest; professional; treat everyone fairly and with respect; maintain political neutrality; use the Treasury’s resources carefully; treat information with care; provide robust and unbiased advice; carry out the functions of his organisation unaffected by his personal beliefs; and work to the best of his abilities. (The above qualities are listed in a State Services Commission release under the heading: Standards of Integrity and Conduct: We must be fair, impartial, responsible, and trustworthy.) As a summary of this, the complaint against Gabriel Makhlouf is that he acted with consciously careless behaviour designed to support ideologically partisan ends.

1.      Participation by Treasury officials in activity that, given the context, and the shared understandings of the participants, constituted a serious breach of public service principles and an election rort.

Since 2008, a working group comprising Treasury and ministry officials, also staff members from the prime minister’s department, along with representatives from the political parties involved in Confidence and Supply Agreements have worked on developing a policy for charter schools. As part of that, Step Change was published in 2010 followed by further meetings.

In late 2011, however, close to the election, a distinct change occurred in the working of this group, in the membership and leadership, the context in which it occurred, the manner in which it was undertaken, the purposes for which it was undertaken, and the shared understandings on which it proceeded.

So unusual were the purposes and shared understandings of this latter-day charter school working group that it needs a layered approach to expose.

The latter-day working group was re-formed at the initiative of the prime minister’s department with the co-operation of Bill English, minister of finance, and Anne Tolley, minister of education. Bill English directed that Makhlouf work with the prime minister’s department and representatives of the ACT political party to produce a charter school policy to be revealed post-election as part of a Confidence and Supply Agreement with ACT.

From the beginning, all those present knew the meetings were designed to produce a school charter policy for a post-election Confidence and Supply Agreement with ACT if that party was represented in the parliament; and, if it wasn’t, for National to introduce the policy on its own behalf, anyway.

 From the beginning, all those present knew that neither ACT nor National had included charter schools in their manifestos.

From the beginning, all those present knew that secrecy was paramount for the election strategy to succeed.

From the beginning, all those present knew charters schools were being promoted under the label of parental choice to advance the idea of teacher contracts, extra pay for designated areas of performance, and increased privatisation of education.

The atmosphere throughout was highly politicised, with consideration, for instance, being given to Bill English becoming minister of education; and how the media might respond to having a charter school policy being unsignalled pre-election then forming the main component of a Confidence and Supply Agreement immediately following it.

The prime minister was later to dismiss complaints about the process as simply part of MMP. An editorialist rationalised that those complaining should have known that charter schools were a logical outcome of the education philosophies of both parties.

This is stretching the election bow beyond breaking point.

MMP does lead to governments accepting, as part of government programmes, through Confidence and Supply Agreements (and other agreements), policies of minor parties – but these policies (if post-election agreements) are always part of manifestos of one of the parties concerned.

The situation is one of electoral anti-democratic trickery by design, in other words, an electoral rort. National and ACT parties did not find themselves in a post-election political situation as a result of electoral circumstances which they then responded to within electoral convention; they designed a situation in advance from which they planned to take advantage of post-election.

My judgement is that this is not how MMP is expected to work. It is how an unscrupulous government works, having made a calculation that anti-democratic and unconventional behaviour wouldn’t have media consequences.

The substance of my complaint, however, is not about the behaviour of ministers, governments, or political parties, that is for others to judge in other circumstances, but about the involvement of agencies of state and public servants in this apparently serious breach of public service guidelines and principles.

At the direction of agency heads, officials from Treasury and the ministry of education were drawn into a situation that was seriously antithetical to the principles of the public service code of conduct.

So antithetical, that existing public service guidelines fail to encompass satisfactorily the enormity.

A Cabinet Manual Guide from the Department of the Prime Minister says ‘State servants need to take particular care how they behave in the lead-up to, during, and immediately after, an election.’

Also, ‘Normally acceptable activities and working relationships could be perceived as inappropriate because of the heightened political environment around election time.’

My claim, however, is that the behaviour of the Treasury (also the ministry of education) went well beyond the idea of what ‘could be perceived’ – that the behaviour directly  constituted a breach of the principles of the public service and something of a risk to the well-being of New Zealand’s democracy.

Leaving aside, as described above, the basis on which the charter school meetings proceeded – using information provided by a participant – a convincing prima facie case can be constructed about the behaviour of the participants and the purposes of the meetings.

A series of meetings were held with the representatives as described above – that is undoubted; the meetings were held during an election period – also undoubted; public servants were involved – also undoubted; the purpose of the meetings was election focused – also undoubted; with only two political parties represented the meetings were clearly party political – also undoubted; and the sensitivities and tactics to do with the post-agreement manoeuvre would have been well appreciated by the Wellington-based public operators concerned.

All this is hugely beyond the public service pale.

This was a dire and highly inappropriate context for public servants to be involved in and I ask that Gabriel Makhlouf be held accountable.

2.   A failure by Gabriel Makhlouf, Secretary to the Treasury, in subsequent pronouncements on education to be honest; professional; treat everyone fairly and with respect; maintain political neutrality; use the Treasury’s resources carefully; treat information with care; provide robust and unbiased advice; carry out the functions of his organisation unaffected by his personal beliefs; and work to the best of his abilities. (The above qualities are listed in a State Services Commission release under the heading: Standards of Integrity and Conduct: We must be fair, impartial, responsible, and trustworthy.) As a summary of this, the complaint against Gabriel Makhlouf is that he acted with consciously careless behaviour designed to support ideologically partisan ends.

This part of the complaint against Gabriel Makhlouf deals with his and Treasury’s subsequent pronouncements on education. The pronouncements have been selected from a New Zealand Listener interview, 30 March, 2012 (Listener); the New Zealand Herald, ‘Treasury tip angers teachers’, 21 March, 2012 (Herald); and ‘Treasury’s advice on lifting achievement in New Zealand: Evidence brief’, March 2012 (Treasury’s advice).

I don’t intend to respond to these pronouncements rebuttively, but to follow the logic of their own narrative to find out what that tells us about Makhlouf’s professionalism, fairness, impartiality, sense of responsibility, and trustworthiness, indeed, his fitness to be head of an agency of state.

The complaint against Makhlouf is that even within the logic of his own arguments he falls far short of what should reasonably be expected of a highly educated head of an agency of state whose first responsibility is to public service principles. His actions will be described as especially egregious in the recognition that the prime function of the agency of state he heads is the examination of research, statistics, and complex argument.

Makhlouf’s and Treasury’s subsequent pronouncements demonstrate consciously careless behaviour designed to support ideologically partisan ends.

The pronouncements selected for examination will be to do with class size and performance pay; the teacher quality issue and how New Zealand public school performance is represented; and some assorted announcements claims by Makhlouf

Class size and performance pay

Makhlouf cites John Hattie as saying smaller classes have little effect on learning outcomes. Hattie was recently invited to make a direct presentation to Treasury on both class size and performance pay. (Listener) He is one of three academics – the others were Eric Hanushek and Peter Blatchford – cited on the matter of class size. (Treasury’s advice)

If Makhlouf, however, had not been consciously careless, he would have examined Hattie’s research and found that it excluded all research investigations concerned with the observed effects of different class sizes on classroom teaching and learning practices as a whole, and which sub-groups are most materially affected by larger or smaller classes.

Hattie acknowledges in his book, Visible Learning, that the research his book is based on has little to do with naturalistic classroom learning, in other words, teaching situations we would recognise as classroom learning. For instance, Hattie’s big education idea of feedback which he ranked highly in effect size is largely drawn from using music as an education reinforcement for children with severe learning difficulties; and another of his  big ideas, providing formative evaluation, which he ranked 3, was based on only two sets of results, both to do with special education children. And on class size, Hattie, by his own admission, acknowledges that the research was mainly drawn from specially constructed teaching situations.

Hattie stated in his conclusions he wasn’t saying class size didn’t bring some beneficial learning effects, just that, in his view, there might be cheaper and better innovations available. Though elsewhere, and not withstanding his message in his presentation to Treasury, another Hattie analysis concluded that increasing class sizes would be bad policy. 

Let us now look at the second academic referred to in Treasury’s advice, Hanushek. Why wasn’t Makhlouf professional enough, or fair-minded enough, to look carefully at Hanushek’s research on class size? If he had been, he would have found that Hanushek had made his meta-analysis research a vote counting exercise based on one study, one vote. This is an academically dishonest way to proceed. Makhlouf should have uncovered this, but didn’t, apparently unwilling to look an ideological gift horse in the mouth.

When Hanushek’s research was accorded its proper weighting (as carried out by another academic) his research finding was reversed: a systematic and beneficial relationship between lower class size and achievement was found.

The third study referred to in Treasury’s advice is Blatchford’s which comprised a number of long-term naturalistic studies (that is classroom- and observation-based) and which is widely accepted as absolute gold standard in class size research. It showed that larger class size has a negative effect on all learning at all levels, but particularly on that of younger, disadvantaged children.

Makhlouf (in Treasury’s advice) slips away from this by saying, Blatchford’s research doesn’t relate to secondary education.

Makhlouf and Treasury then proceed to ignore two relevant New Zealand findings: The education ministry’s Picking up the Pace (focusing on Mangere schools) said that ‘learners with poorly developed literacy in low decile schools should experience a maximum class size of 18 in the first year of schooling …’

And, in a weird example of carelessness: overlooked was a Treasury commissioned Working Paper on the learning outcomes from the Christchurch Health and Development Study which stated that ‘lower class sizes were associated with more completed education as of age 21, lower incidence of unemployment spells …’

On class size, to sum up, we have one academic, on the basis of research that had little to do with classrooms, saying that smaller class size had some beneficial effect on teaching and learning, but was not as good as value as some other innovations, though elsewhere he concluded that increasing class size would be bad policy; we had another academic whose research, using a biased procedure, led him to conclude  that reduced class size had little or no beneficial effect on learning – but when the biased procedure was reversed to a fair one, the finding changed to one of lower class size having a significant beneficial effect; and we have two New Zealand studies (one commissioned by the Treasury itself) stating that lower class size did have beneficial effects – but neither of these studies were even listed by the Treasury, let alone referred to.

It is the contention of my complaint that Makhlouf’s agitation for increased class size is specious, dishonest, and unethical.

But there is one further hugely significant issue to consider.

Makhlouf in various statements repeats the Hattie mantra of smaller class size having some beneficial effects but other innovations having greater value.

And what innovations would they be? Would it be Hattie’s feedback idea drawn largely from a few studies on the benefits of music in the learning of special education children?

The answer is no – not this time around apparently.

The answer is performance pay: of a nature and structure not specified and for which no direct evidence is provided as to its benefits.

There is something strange and underhand  about the whole process.

Why this persistence with the issue of class size?

One conclusion is that in their determination to impose performance pay, the ideological right had to look for a change in a part of the education system that would bring sufficient savings to fund the policy they were set on. Increasing class size cuts the salary bill, which is significantly the largest component of education expenditure.

Then as a scapegoating distraction from the education effects of increasing inequality, and as a necessary linking step to the policy they really wanted – performance pay, the ideological right then settled on the imported issue (from America) of teacher quality as an explanation as to why public schools are ‘failing’.

Performance pay is then presented as the given solution to that issue: being a core expression of the ideological right’s ideas on human motivation and social control.

Taking a positive label like teacher quality and corrupting it for ideological advantage is what has occurred.

The responsibility is on the ideological right to provide the evidence that performance pay improves teacher performance. After all, the two star PISA education systems, Finland and New Zealand, have got where they are without a direct performance pay system, and America, from where the idea came, has got where it is, with one.

Makhlouf deigns to provide any evidence, it is apparently, a given.

To increase class size with its proved negative effect on children’s learning, for an unspecified performance pay system, in the face of very mixed evidence of the success of performance pay generally, is reckless. And that is what Makhlouf has been party to.

But more on the teacher quality issue to follow.

The teacher quality issue and how New Zealand school performance is represented

Makhlouf says: ‘I think all the evidence we’ve got is that actually there is a teacher quality issue.’ (Listener)

Now here we have a Treasury secretary with a highly impressive bureaucratic European record, who, one feels, should have the intelligence and background to ask pertinent questions of evidence brought forward, to be sceptical of such evidence to beyond reasonable doubt, yet, what do we find? Makhlouf finds himself able to say all the evidence points to a teacher quality issue. All of it? Well all of it he thinks.

So here we have in the value-laden field of education, in the particularly contentious area of improving school education, all of the evidence pointing to a teacher quality issue.

But there is something especially tricky and troublesome about this statement.

To what contention is this teacher quality issue being addressed?

The contention it seems is that New Zealand schools are performing unsatisfactorily and that heavy centralised and bureaucratic direction is required for correction.

Makhlouf will deny that he and his agency of state go out of their way to tarnish the reputations of New Zealand public schools, but they do.

Three statements:

‘Socio-economic background’, Treasury says, ‘plays a much larger role in their achievement than in most OECD countries. In other words, New Zealand’s education system does not appear to be very good at enabling students to succeed regardless of their background.’ (Treasury’s advice)

Treasury quotes from a report produced by a globalised English education corporate, McKinsey and Company, which categorised ‘New Zealand’s schooling as “fair to good” similar to “Malaysia, Armenia, and Portugal”.’ (Treasury’s advice)

(If we had performance pay it is implied): ‘We would be trying to equal China’s top ranking for literacy. We would climb to fourth place, behind China, Singapore, and South Korea, for maths, and to second place (behind China) for scientific literacy.’ (Treasury’s advice)

To the last first. Treasury is trying to pull another fast one here, or is being breathtakingly careless: Neither China nor Singapore is in the OECD or PISA – for instance, PISA agreed to test students in China as an act of goodwill, with an agreement that the testing would be in two of China’s wealthiest cities from a selection of students from some of the top schools. Makhlouf and Treasury have demonstrated that they are unable to even read a list of PISA rankings and understand how they work.

Now to return to the first of the quoted pronouncements, the one on the influence of socio-economic background on learning. This pronouncement merits close attention because it demonstrates perfectly the ideological malice that motivates Makhlouf’s approach to public schools. What could be more harmful to the reputation of public schools than claims they are, relative to other systems, and all things being equal, failing children from lower socio-economic backgrounds? What could be more harmful to race relations if that was actually the case?

The claim that public schools are failing children from lower social-economic background has been central to the current government’s anti-public school narrative, and the pretext for a raft of impositions on public schools – from restrictions on professional development, to charter schools, to national standards (and soon to league tables and performance pay).

The claim has, especially during the term of the present government, been used as the basis for the considerable scapegoating of public schools, reaching its nadir when John Key in the final TV debate with Phil Goff made the extraordinary statement that New Zealand public schools were ‘letting New Zealand down’.

It is my contention that Makhlouf, given his apparently pre-existing prejudices, has revelled in the anti-public school sentiment of the government narrative – and in what appears bullying fashion used his position to reinforce that sentiment and his ideology. It ill behoves, in my view, that an Englishman with a public school background should come to New Zealand and make misleading, biased, and careless pronouncements about New Zealand public schools, ones with serious implications for the social cohesiveness of our society.

Makhlouf and Treasury have already been shown to have been dangerously unprofessional, careless, and biased in some of their pronouncements, but if it can be shown that they are seriously wrong in their claims that public schools are failing lower socio-economic children – especially when it is the responsibility of Treasury to get it right, to get the statistics right, to get the figures right – then I consider Makhlouf’s and Treasury’s  position to have become untenable.

Now let’s establish the ground rules. Treasury (in Treasury’s advice) acknowledges that ‘the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school’ but having done this, it is tucked away, out of sight, never to be referred to again – not even indirectly. However, the acknowledgement has been made, with the obvious implication that any education system serving a decidedly unequal society, as is the situation in New Zealand, should be judged in that light.

The question becomes: given the relatively high degree of poverty and inequality, how well do New Zealand public schools do?

I turned to Professor John O’Neill of Massey University on this one.

He writes: ‘The PISA report shows fourteen percent of New Zealand students achieve below Level 2 (the OECD benchmark for life success. The OECD average is 19 percent. Sixty-six percent of New Zealand students achieve at Level 3 or above. The OECD average is around 57 percent. New Zealand has 37 percent of ‘resilient’ students, those who overcome disadvantaged backgrounds. The OECD average is 31 percent.’

In other words, New Zealand is doing very well with children at all levels, including children from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’. And brilliantly, if the degree of poverty and inequality is taken into account

And, New Zealand public schools achieve these very good results with larger classes than most OECD countries; less money per child than most OECD countries; and in the context of one of the least homogenous societies in the OECD.

The idea of New Zealand’s long learning tail is continually referred to by ideologues like Makhlouf, being ludicrously misrepresented: the tail is described as the longest in the OECD, the implication being, once again, that New Zealand is relatively unsuccessful in teaching children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Makhlouf declares that New Zealand has a ‘long tail of low performing students, of whom we have a higher percentage than other high achieving countries’. (Listener) Treasury then picks up the narrative by saying that ‘the socio-economic background exerts a much larger influence on their achievement than most other OECD countries.’ (Treasury’s advice) Now where is this heading? Is Treasury going to say that New Zealand is more unequal that most other OECD countries, or less homogenous – oh no – this is Treasury and Makhlouf, they are about to dump on public schools. ‘In other words,’ Treasury continues, ‘New Zealand’s education system does not appear to be very good at enabling students to succeed, regardless of their background.’

‘Does not appear’, does not appear, what is it with this does not appear? ‘Does not appear’, in such a context, has no place in a Treasury document. Treasury has made a huge call under the mantle of ‘does not appear’: New Zealand public schools appear to be doing a poor job, it says, with disadvantaged children. Well, are they, or aren’t they? Does not appear is not good enough on such a vital issue, with such important policy implications. The fact is, Treasury has found it much easier to just pick up the government narrative on the issue and avoid the possibility of having their prejudices disturbed. Treasury did not care enough about New Zealand’s children, or public schools, to actually take the trouble to find out.

Treasury’s statement is a travesty and a disgrace. It is compound lie that has done great harm to the education of New Zealand children, the reputation of public schools, and the social cohesiveness of our society. If people like Makhlouf really cared for New Zealand children more than their ideology, they would check out the facts and get them right.

His and Treasury’s failure to do so is disgraceful.

As O’Neill shows (above), New Zealand does very well with our more able children which contributes substantially to what has come to be called the long tail but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t do very well with children from disadvantaged backgrounds as well.

The so-called long tail needs to be checked out.

Let’s take PISA Reading 2009 and compare New Zealand with USA: New Zealand’s top 5% reached to 678, USA’s 656, that’s 22 points better for New Zealand; and New Zealand’s bottom 5% spread to 344, USA’s 339, that’s 5 points better for New Zealand. The gap for New Zealand, however, is 334, and for USA 317. New Zealand while having better scores at both ends, has the bigger gap.

But the critics of public education in the relentless and unfair manner to which public schools have become accustomed, ignore the achievement at both ends of the table and damn public schools for the gap. Yes – they focus on the gap. But the gap, with the sterling score by the children at the foot of the table (given the social and economic conditions that prevail), and the wonderful score at the top, should be a source of pride and acclamation, not an occasion for acrimony and undermining.

So would the Makhlouf’s, the editorialists, the government politicians, and the global corporations please be decent enough to acknowledge this. We in school education have tried again and again to get the facts right, but no one is listening because we are only self-serving, incompetent public school teachers. (By the way, Makhlouf might want to have the relevant numbers for the UK, well they’re even worse – 646 and 334)

Makhlouf, editorialists, government politicians, and other opponents of public schools, for their own anti-public school purposes, continually refer to the long tail, the longest in the OECD they say, public schools are doing all right with children in higher decile schools but failing with ones from lower deciles, they can’t handle the education of Maori and Pasifika children, and show no likelihood of being able to do so, you have failed New Zealand, but we the Makhloufs, the editorialists, the government politicians, we know, we care, we have listened to the Hatties, the Hanusheks, and the global corporations, we know what to do – and we will make you do what we know.  We will bring in national standards, we will narrow the curriculum for all children, don’t worry about getting children to think and to be imaginative, this is the 21^st century, we will bring in league tables, we will increase class sizes, we will empower bureaucrats to scare you to do what needs to be done, we will bring in performance pay because you will only lift your game through cash incentives, we will bring in charter schools to try to shame you, we will de-unionise teaching because the unions are opposed to the beneficial changes we are bringing in – oh yes, to keep you on your toes we will be careless with the truth and continually blacken your reputations.

And if public school teachers say, wow! that seems pretty rough, what about private schools? Nothing doing there say Makhlouf, editorialists, government politicians, and other opponents of public schools say – the parents of public school children will need private schools to send their children to when they become disillusioned, for whatever reason, with their local school.

O’Neill’s analysis also provides some much needed clarity to the ideological issue inherent in the refrain as Makhlouf puts it of ‘three out of 10 kids leaving school without NCEA level 2 …’ (Listener), or as Catherine Isaac puts it (in justifying charter schools) that New Zealand  rates ‘very low for equity’ and that ‘20 percent of students left without level one NCEA’. (Sunday Star-Times, 22 April, 2012)

I repeat what O’Neill had to say, ‘The PISA report shows fourteen percent of New Zealand students achieve below Level 2 (the OECD benchmark for life success. The OECD average is 19%. Sixty-six percent of New Zealand students achieve at Level 3 or above. The OECD average is around 57%. New Zealand has 37% of ‘resilient’ those who overcome disadvantaged backgrounds. The OECD average is 31%.’

New Zealand public schools are doing very well and they can do even better, but erroneous, ideologically self-serving analyses like those of Makhlouf and Isaac are resulting in terribly wrong responses and policy decisions: schools, for instance, need to become more interesting to children, more intellectually and imaginatively challenging and less standardised and crimped: too many children are getting to secondary unpractised in thinking, and brassed off with having to be there.

When are public schools going to be freed from the hold of the ignorant, the ideologically-driven and the bureaucratic to do better what they do best, that is to inspire and lift all children no matter their backgrounds?

As I have demonstrated, Makhlouf and Treasury got it wrong, seriously and inexcusably wrong.

Then there is Treasury’s use of a categorisation it found in a report from the globalised English education corporate, of ‘New Zealand’s schooling as “fair to good” similar to “Malaysia, Armenia and Portugal”.’ (Treasury’s advice)

A check of the latest PISA results makes such a categorisation farcical. Treasury has clearly, as demonstrated in this instance and in numerous others, gone out of its way to find anything it can that is derogatory about New Zealand public schools, not deeming it necessary to take care to establish the validity of what it comes across – if it is derogatory, it is good enough for Treasury to put it out there. I challenge Makhlouf and Treasury to provide some credible evidence to support this categorisation.

Warwick Elley in his comment on OECD reports says ‘that New Zealand is consistently ranked in the top three or four countries in literacy. And in general, the only countries that consistently surpass New Zealand are the ethnically homogenous ones of Finland, Korea, and Japan.’

Some assorted claims by Makhlouf

I want to return to Makhlouf’s heavy use of Hanushek’s work. As a starter, Makhlouf should seek advice from New Zealand academics about the validity of Hanushek’s research and the soundness of his pronouncements (also about the validity of Hattie’s research while he’s about it). There are grounds for considering him a rightwing academic associated with many of the extreme education policies being pursued in America. Hanushek, for instance, was involved with ‘Waiting for Superman’; is a strong advocate of value-added methods of assessing teacher effectiveness; a strong advocate for the wholesale closing of schools and sacking of teachers; and, as we have seen, the producer of some mindboggling statements and predictions to do with the teacher quality.

Makhlouf is, of course, at perfect liberty to base his education arguments on any academic he chooses, but it is our right in return, to judge Makhlouf’s arguments on the basis of who he chooses and how analytically he considers what they have to say. If we follow the advice of Hanushek, we are in for the full gamut of disorder occurring in the American education system.

And what Mr Makhlouf is the problem in New Zealand public schools you think you are addressing?

We have the profoundly disturbing sight of the head of a New Zealand agency of state, making recklessly ignorant, biased, and destructive arguments about the performance of another institutional part of New Zealand, and drawing into his destructive ways, the most extreme of American academics. An academic who, like Makhlouf, has no feeling or understanding for New Zealand’s education history, traditions, characteristics, or ways of doing things.

If New Zealand public schools have a value-added performance pay system imposed on them, it will be a far greater mess and failure than has occurred with national standards. The decile system is only a very rough guide for the actual education capital of a school, being a far from consistent fit with socio-economic status. Wealthy inner-city schools have a considerable education capital advantage over wealthy schools in other geographic categories. Children in classes are not randomly assigned. Performance pay will not fit with management units which are a kind of performance pay but with the teachers involved in carrying the additional responsibility of being required to share their expertise. In other countries, a value-added performance pay system has proved to have a harmful effect on the wider curriculum, on the interest by children in the curriculum, on the longer term education of children (especially children of lower ability), and on co-operative staff relationships. The effect of such a system has been to increase the bureaucratic nature of teaching, to reduce initiative, and increase the sense of hierarchy. As far as New Zealand is concerned, there is more: value added depends on national standards and we don’t have national standards – we have the form of national standards, but not actual national standards. We will not have national standards till we have moderation of national standards – genuine and rigorous national standards: and what an exercise that will be.

Yet Makhlouf has just taken performance pay as a given, as an uncontested good.

Let us look at a couple of the claims by Makhlouf based on Hanushek. Makhlouf says that if New Zealand lifted its PISA scores ‘by 25 points, the GDP would grow 3-15% faster by 2070’. (Listener) If New Zealand lifted its PISA scores by 25 points, the country lifting its points by 25 points wouldn’t be the New Zealand we know. Makhlouf has acknowledged that socio-economic inequality has a substantial effect on learning, and we all know that in New Zealand inequality is increasing with particular rapidity – so how will 25 points come out of that? (I would point out that in a number of PISA areas we are already close to 25 points better than the USA, yet life goes on here without any particular evidence that that it is having a decisive effect on our GDP.)

Let’s look more closely at that 3-15% spread by 2070. Leaving aside the absurdity of Treasury fixing on a prediction for 60 years out when it has a very poor record for getting next year’s right. One implication is that New Zealand could lift its PISA score and only get a 3% GDP lift, or much better, and a 15% lift. What kind of mickey-mouse forecasting is that? But to get to the key point, and I’ll give this for free to Makhlouf, that despite the contentions of Hanushek and the authors of The Race Between Education and Technology, Bill English’s and Makhlouf’s book of the month – after education standards get to a certain level in a country, any link between education levels and GDP becomes marginal.

Makhlouf says he doesn’t like to use the word ‘inequality’.

‘From our perspective’, he explains, ‘these things are important, but you can get quickly from a discussion of fairness, and that’s really a political value.’ (Listener)

‘Fairness’ is a political value Makhlouf opines.

No Mr Makhlouf it is a fundamental human value and, not uncoincidentally, a core public service value he is supposed to respect, but clearly doesn’t. Not respecting fairness seems to have given Makhlouf a feeling of being able to be political as he wants to be, and to be so with impunity and without qualm.

Makhlouf says that ‘despite spending per student on schooling having risen 20% above inflation over the past decade, our performance on international surveys has stayed relatively static.’ The implication is that this is another indication of the failure of New Zealand public schools. I have sought information on the accuracy of his 20% calculation but, meantime make the comment that none of the consistently top PISA performers (except Korea) have increased their PISA results, for instance, the UK has dropped 29 points, Australia 13, and New Zealand 9. I took the trouble to find out about this – Makhlouf clearly didn’t.

Makhlouf, I suggest, is using public education as a distraction from his failure as secretary for the Treasury to arrest our economic decline. What other institutional part of New Zealand society gains top international ratings? Certainly not the Treasury and its economic performance. Makhlouf should take heed of a Waikato professor’s analysis (Darrin Hodgetts) that poverty is ‘our growth industry and it’s growing at three times the OECD average.’ (NZ Herald, Tuesday, 17 April, 2012). 

And at the heart of everything Makhlouf and Treasury have said is their complete buying into the teacher quality movement. Treasury  returns to Hanushek by giving credence to Hanushek’s claim ‘that teachers at the top of the quality of distribution can get up to year’s worth of additional learning from students …’ (Treasury’s advice) The implication is that this can recur year after year, which is a statistical absurdity, and what is the nature of the learning involved? The research by Hanushek and his ‘quality teaching’ colleagues does not bear scrutiny – if you believe it, it is because you want to.

The quality of teaching movement emanating from America is an interesting phenomenon. Its origins seem to lie with economic historians who argue that America’s economic difficulties and the subsequent rapid growth in inequality began with the sudden failure, still unexplained, of schools to provide students with sufficient skills to carry on to get degrees. Gaining a degree is described as the means for individual and national prosperity; those having degrees described as the ones to be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial. (America currently has 80,000 bartenders with degrees – oh well, I suppose there’s scope a la Tom Cruise to be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial behind the bar with a shaker in hand.) This farcically naïve silver bullet approach seems to have been accepted unquestiongly by Makhlouf and English.

America’s economic decline began, they say, in the ‘70s when schools started to fail in providing children with sufficient skills – it had nothing to do it seems with such things as the financial drain of wars, or the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies, or financial de-regulation, or the decline of public institutions, or education becoming very much a private good, or the breakdown of social cohesiveness – no it had to do with poor skill teaching in schools.

If a magic wand could be waved and all people could have a degree with employment appeal, then that would be helpful to the individual and society. In other words, if everything was far more equal, everything would be far more equal. But everything is not far more equal, indeed, is becoming far less so, and at the rate of knots. But inequality is about fairness says Makhlouf and that is a ‘judgement which I don’t want to get drawn into …’

Makhlouf says that, ‘There’s an absolute direct correlation between the level of skills in a country and the growth of the economy.’ (Listener) Has Makhlouf put this to rigorous analysis to see how the idea works for New Zealand? If it’s true, it would be a breakthrough for New Zealand and its economy. Does this correlation, if it exists, prevail irrespective, for instance, of a lack of government funding for research and development, or incentives to invest in the productive sector, or continuing availability of capital for industry ownership to be retained in New Zealand, or higher wages to check the brain drain? Will the correlation prevail even if we fail, as Sir Paul Callaghan put it, to ‘avoid the self-serving myths, shallow game-playing, the selective thinking that blights our ability to progress’?

If it’s true, and Makhlouf is sincere, it could have a radical effect on how we regard education. If there is, indeed, a direct correlation between the level of skills in a country and the growth of the economy, this would, surely, make education more of a public, than a private good, and we could look forward to far greater investment in education, including easier and cheaper access to pre-school education and universities, and the computerising of schools proceeding apace.

So what was the American response in the ‘70s to this panic of the so-called lack of skills – wait for it: managerialism, standardised tests, league table, performance pay, increased bureaucracy, the narrowing of the curriculum, increased privatising of schools, scapegoating of public schools, de-unionisation of teaching, the idea of the superman or woman teacher, and charter schools. Policies which have created considerable confusion and a good deal of failure in America, but which are now being embraced by Makhlouf as providing an ‘absolute direct’ way to economic prosperity and our future.

[A major demur: it has pained me to have focused so much on PISA, also the various manifestations of managerialism. To present my argument against Gabriel Makhlouf I had necessarily to concentrate on where he set the argument.  The education system that moves away from the obsession with the narrow objectives and low level learning of the 3Rs, to the wider objectives and higher order learning of imagination and creativity will be the one that wins the day. Gabriel Makhlouf gives no indication that he values learning beyond that which can be set out in narrow objectives for the purposes of learning measurement and control of teachers. For children ultimately to succeed in education, they need to be able to think flexibly and be adroit in manipulating concepts. Our current education direction is casting a blight on the imaginative thinking of our children who are more than ready to take flight; and restricting other children, many of whom are Maori and Pasifika, to a second-class education. PISA is not a proxy for the curriculum, nor does a country’s success in it necessarily mean a successful education system – it just means what it measures, which is a mighty small part of genuine learning.]

Conclusion

Complaint 1

Makhlouf through his Treasury representatives honoured the public service code of conduct by participating, on the eve of an election, in a series of charter school working group meetings along with representatives from the ACT party, the prime minister’s department, and the ministry of education. Though the group worked with great urgency on a charter school policy the public servants involved had no inkling the policy was going to form part of a Confidence and Supply Agreement between National and ACT following the election. Neither were they aware that ACT and National had omitted to mention charter schools in their manifestos. So when, following the election, out popped the policy they had worked on in all good faith, you could have knocked them over with a feather.

Complaint 1 has been expressed this way, because deniability was discussed by some of the participants.

The failure by the State Services Commission to stem the politicisation of the public service has been the focus of mainstream media comment. The participation by public servants in the straight out political activity of preparing a political policy, and in the strictest secrecy, for a post-election agreement is an extreme example public service politicisation and demands State Services Commission investigation and judgement. 

I urge the State Services Commission to take the strongest possible action against Gabriel Makhlouf for this serious breach of the public service code of conduct.

Complaint 2

Makhlouf is bound to be fair, impartial, responsible, and trustworthy but he has acted with consciously careless behaviour to support ideologically partisan ends.

Consider the following instances (from amongst many):

In his case for larger classes, Makhlouf features an academic whose research is unconcerned with classrooms as we know them, and who, in making conclusions about larger class size, says variously, they will do some harm but not much, and, elsewhere  they would be bad policy. Take your pick. Another academic, this one strongly in favour of larger classes, used biased research procedures, so biased that when corrected, the research conclusions turned against larger class size. A third academic, one who undertook highly praised research, comes out strongly against larger class size, but Makhlouf brushes this aside in spurious fashion. And, bizarrely, overlooked altogether was Treasury-sponsored research that, in its conclusions, was firmly against larger class size.

Treasury says ‘New Zealand’s education system does not appear to be very good at enabling students to succeed regardless of their background.’ Yet, I was able to demonstrate, using Professor O'Neill's analysis, that the New Zealand education system is probably the best in the world at doing this.

This is a horrendous error by Treasury with serious implications for public schools and social cohesiveness. That this particular error is a commonplace from opponents of public schools, is no excuse for Treasury to follow along. But then, as the whole text of my complaint shows Treasury and Makhlouf have so aligned themselves with the governing party that their judgement as to appropriate behaviour is dangerously awry.

Treasury refers to a ‘long tail of low performing students, of whom we have a higher percentage than other high achieving countries.’

This statement is completely untrue. Once again it is a commonplace from opponents of public schools, and once again Makhlouf and Treasury just follow along. The statement is a compound lie that has done great harm to the education of New Zealand children, the reputation of public schools, and the social cohesiveness of our society.

It is the role of the head of an agency of state to be honest, politically neutral, professional, and to treat information with care. Makhlouf has made pronouncements that were unresearched or carelessly researched, and consistently ideologically biased – often it seems, simply plucked unexamined from the government narrative about public school education. Public school teachers are New Zealanders too, and taxpayers, they deserve to be treated fairly and with respect. It also seems to me, that the children of New Zealand would be best served by agencies of state making a fair attempt at the truth. If the government analysis is wrong in, say, public school education, as it likely is, then the policies set for solution or development will be wrong, as they likely are.

The sight of the head of a powerful agency of state, with the encouragement of his ministerial master, being variously clandestine political intriguer, noisy supporter, and strutting bully boy has been constitutionally and educationally distasteful.

Gabriel Makhlouf in his involvement and complicity in the pre-election rort, and his association with Treasury in the careless, reckless and partisan education announcements since, has, in my view, seriously breached the public service code of conduct.

Kelvin Smythe

ksmythe@wave.co.nz

0272409092

35 Fort Street

Cambridge