The spectacular improvements in reading achievement announced by Education Minister Erica Stanford on Monday were almost too good to be true – so it isn’t surprising that the figures justifying those claims don’t stack up. The real achievement here was in the government’s success in to scoring a bogus good news story about education, just as the nation’s teachers were preparing to go on strike.
The data on which Stanford built her triumphant conclusions can be found on Tahurangi, the NZ Curriculum website. The shaky methodology involved has been debunked by the Aotearoa Educators Collective here. Similar misgivings about the shortcomings of the data were voiced on RNZ’s The Panel by Dr Sarah Aiono, CEO and co-director of Longworth Education. Dr. Aiono’s criticisms begin around the 15:20 minute mark on this link. There’s more in the same cogent vein on Brie Elliott’s Breaking Down the Beehive Facebook page.
Lets be clear. Progress on phonics – i.e. the ability to match sounds to letters as measured in a brief, 40 word decoding test – is not the same thing as progress in reading, which involves a more complex process of understanding. (A child may be able to sound out av-a-lanche without having much clue what the word means, or in what context it occurs.) So, this report was not measuring success in reading achievement, as Stanford and her colleagues claimed. It was measuring one important element in a much wider process.
It gets worse, much worse, from there. Only 516 children, or 4.5% of the children sampled were the same ones tested in terms one (at 20 weeks) and again at term three (at 40 weeks.) Meaning: this was not a longitudinal study of the progress that structured literacy had achieved over time, among the same group of children. It was a spot check on a different sized cohort of almost entirely different children conducted later in the school year, after they had settled into their school routines. Moreover, those 516 kids comprised only a tiny fraction of the 68,349 Year 1 children who started school this year. Absurdly, Stanford has been claiming a national “transformation” based in large part on the results over time of only 0.007% of the current Year 1 school population.
Similar problems crop up in the schools sampled, that seem to have self-selected their participation. This point is important. Inevitably, the overall results would have been skewed by the dramatic changes in the numbers of schools and children participating, which went up from 194 schools in term one, to 458 schools in term 3, along with a corresponding rise in the numbers of children sampled, which went up from about 1,100 to 4,300 children. As the Educators Collective says succinctly:
Put simply: when the sample quadruples, and changes who’s included, the numbers cannot be used to show national progress.
As the Collective further points out:
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
The Ministry admits that some Term 3 schools used Term 1 question sets but were still included if two of three data points (test date, question set, submission date) matched the Term 3 criteria. That is not rigorous test equating. Nor does the report show how many children were excluded or absent, or which schools declined to submit results. This lack of transparency would not pass peer review in educational research. Yet these incomplete, shifting samples are being presented as evidence of “transformation”…critically, there’s no evidence yet of improved comprehension, writing, or vocabulary outcomes, the actual markers of literacy success.
The risk, as they say, is that the trumpeted focus on a single element of reading –- a single test of letter-sound knowledge – will leave no room for the other strategies (oral language, play and comprehension) that go into the fostering of literacy.
In sum, parents were the real targets of the Minister’s political gambit with structured literacy, not the teachers being tasked with implementing the policy. On the brink of a national strike over pay and conditions the government successfully concocted some good news about a spurious policy success in the classroom.
…What the Minister’s announcement reveals is less about what works in classrooms and more about how evidence is being used to tell a political story. The data released this week does not yet show reading transformation at a national level; it shows a limited measure of one skill, drawn from a small and shifting sample, interpreted with far more confidence than the evidence can support.
Quality literacy instruction requires careful implementation, robust evaluation, and time to take root. When political storytelling outpaces sound analysis, it erodes confidence in the evidence teachers are told to follow and faithfully implement.
Footnote: The 11th hour pay offer made to the teacher unions was another example of bad faith political bargaining. To the government spin doctors, it must have seemed like an incredibly clever tactical ploy. In the unlikely event that the unions took this belated, inferior proposal back to the members, the delay would have pushed any subsequent strike back to a time in the school year when a strike would have had less leverage.
Since the offer was objectively worse than previous ones, the unions did not take it back to members. Gotcha! This enabled the government to bash the unions as intransigent, and cry to the heavens about the need to get back to the bargaining table and negotiate – even though the government has consistently refused to put anything on the table that amounts to a far reward to teachers for the demands being made on them.
The Reserve Bank comes in off the bench
After it won 2023 election, the coalition government reduced the Reserve Bank’s twin mandates (employment, inflation) down to a single, all-consuming focus on inflation. How times change. Barely two years down the track, the government is looking to the Reserve Bank to rescue the entire economy from the hole dug for it by the crackpot decision by Finance Minister Nicola Willis to pursue the policies of austerity during a recession.
To recap: tens of thousands of people working in construction and in the public service have lost their jobs. The retail economy has tanked – in Wellington in particular. GDP has shrunk. Although the services sector constitutes about 60% of the New Zealand economy, it has been in ongoing contraction for 19 months in a row. Consumer spending has dried up etc etc. Panicked, the centre-right – and the bank economists that dominate the business news commentariat – have urged the Reserve Bank to restore consumer spending by making “jumbo” cuts to interest rates.
It is easy to see the political motive in play here. There is an election coming next year. The coalition parties need voters to see some signs of an economic recovery, by mid 2026 at the latest. So…forget about the dangers of re-kindling the fires of inflation. Relentlessly, the Reserve Bank has been jawboned into cutting interest rates in the hope that people with mortgages will start spending again. Green shoots! Good times! Release the party balloons!
In order to foster an illusion of wellbeing among the property-owning classes, all hands are being called to the deck to hike up the market value of their houses. Dutifully, the Reserve Bank is loosening the loan to value (LVR) ratios introduced to dampen down house price inflation, and deter risky spending. Now, the RB thinks its (a)safe and (b) desirable to put that into reverse. As RNZ reported this week: :
RBNZ is proposing to let banks have up to 25 percent of new lending to owner-occupiers with less than a 20 percent deposit. For investors, the lending limit would be increased to 10 percent for those with less than a 30 percent deposit. The current limits are 20 percent for owner-occupiers and 5 percent for investors.
Yes, relief on the LVR ratios on the scale proposed will offer some limited help to first time home buyers. Great. Yet the more significant change (applying to investors) will risk a re-opening of the door to property speculation, and house price inflation.
Originally, those LVR ratios were part of a package meant to counter-act the alarming extent to which the New Zealand economy consists of us buying and selling houses to each other. The aim was to channel investment into productive enterprises offering full-time well-paid jobs. In that respect, the RB changes mark a backwards step. Can it be a coincidence that the loosening of the LVR ratios will take effect on the first day of December, setting things up nicely for election year?
Conclusion: National may not have a plan for growing the economy, but it does have a plan for re-election. The property-owning classes on the centre-right want to see the value of their houses increase in 2026. When they ask, National provides. This time, the Reserve Bank is helping out. It is doubtful whether former RB governor Adrian Orr – who, whatever his other faults, did believe in the concept of central bank independence – would have played ball to this extent. It may help to explain why Orr no longer has the job.
Yes, debt-to-income ratios will remain as a solitary guard rail against another property boom-and-bust cycle. Yet the RB is choosing to loosen the LVR settings at the same time as it is slashing interest rates…and both those steps will co-exist in future with the usual pump priming handouts to voters in election year.
Maybe some-one needs to remind the Reserve Bank that its prime focus is supposed to be to on controlling inflation, and not on getting the current government re-elected.
Geese in flight
In the wake of the unexpected success of Cameron Winter’s solo album, Geese have moved up into the slot reserved for Next Big Thing. Easy to see why. The band’s cool kids nonchalance – expressed musically by Winter’s slurred, seemingly off-the cuff vocals, and drummer Max Bassin’s loose, unpredictable fills and patterns – is deceptive. This is highly sculptured, well executed and melodically interesting pop music that manages to land like a tossed-off happenstance. Very Pavement. Very Strokes. Very successful.
Getting Killed is the name of the album. Here’s “Half Real” one of the album’s quasi-ballads :
And from a concert late last month, here’s their live version of ”Trinidad” the album’s opening cut: