Afternoon roundup

An overdue closing of the browser tabs brings these worthies:

• Justin Giovannetti on New Zealand diplomacy and China.


• The New Zealand Principals Federation suggests merging the teacher colleges into the universities might have something to do with declining teacher competence. I was on faculty at Canterbury when the College of Education merged in in 2006. It never made much sense to me on academic grounds. Teacher training was vocational training. Experts in vocational training, of the kind provided at a College of Education, are not necessarily great fits at a university where research expectations matter more than teaching ability. It seemed likely to result in great teacher trainers being exited in favour of those able to get papers into low-grade education journals.


• A Wellington taxicab cartel? The Commerce Commission alleges they were trying to set minimum prices for fares from Wellington airport. I'm still glad I can just grab an Uber to avoid such rorts.


• New Zealand now has a trade union whose purpose is to defend the free-speech rights of those whose outside-of-work statements get them in trouble with their employers.


• It looks like the government will be using procurement rules to try to favour Māori-owned businesses. There's some evidence that these kinds of rules, in the US, increase black business ownership rates while also increasing government contracting costs by something on the order of 3.8% or 5.6% on those contracts.

So...it can't happen again?

Fairfax's Tony Wall explains how the New Zealand Educational Institute, a teachers' union, made it very hard to fire a deputy principal who really should have been out of the system.

A teachers union has been accused of "protecting" teacher Robert Burrett before he went on to molest and rape 12 Christchurch schoolgirls, missing a chance to remove him from the profession in the early 2000s.

Pukenui School in Te Kuiti tried to get rid of Burrett, its deputy principal, in 2001 because he was drunk, dishevelled and disorganised.

But according to board chair at the time Steve Parry, the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) made the process extremely difficult.

"They were quite evasive and defensive of the guy, and it frustrated us to a high level," Parry said. "Of course a person has rights and has to be protected, but they were really trying to make things confusing and difficult, they weren't really engaging in the problems we had."

The story then gets messier, with Burrett being paid to leave, the school not reporting him because of the confidentiality agreement they had to sign to get him to leave when they couldn't fire him, and NZEI washing its hands of things.

Stephanie Mills, the NZEI's director of campaigns, said she could not comment on individual cases. The union acted for members in cases of competency or misconduct "in order that every member receives natural justice and due process".

Mills said it was the employer's role and legal obligation to report teachers where there were claims of incompetency or misconduct.

"We are not in the role of reporting individual teachers, because this is clearly a board's responsibility."

She said the union had actively engaged with the Education Council in the development of registered teachers' criteria and the council's competency processes.

It "strongly supported" the profession taking responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the quality of teachers, she said.

So...does this last part mean that things have been improved such that teachers like this can be dismissed more readily and not make it back into the system?

If things have been improved, and if the unions were part of that process improvement, then the story doesn't make enough of that side of things. If they haven't, though....

I wonder whether Tom McCarthy is busy these days....

Teacher-run schools

A couple of weeks ago, Rose Patterson wondered why the teacher unions don't start their own charter school as demonstration project: to show what can be done when they call the shots:

Recently, the Washington Post wrote an article titled “to improve schools, let teachers run them”, about 70 U.S. schools that are completely teacher run, where kids are engaged and achieving.

Here is the rub. They are charter schools.

Teacher unions see charter schools as a threat to their existence, but they could also provide some opportunities to improve the status of teachers in the public eye. Imagine, for example, a professional arm of the PPTA setting up a fund to sponsor a group of teachers to start New Zealand’s first teacher-led charter school.

Not all the teacher-led charters have been successes though:

A decade later, the union is closing the school. Capital New York has the details:

 [T]he U.F.T. charter has consistently been one of the lowest performing schools—charter or otherwise—in the city and has received stern warnings from its authorizer, the SUNY Charter School Institute, about its viability.

Last year, SUNY issued a report on the U.F.T. Charter School in which it documented instability in leadership, low test scores particularly in middle school grades, lack of resources and disciplinary issues. 

The school has been an embarrassment for the union from the get-go, starting with an unfortunate 2005 incident in which its principal ordered two boys to clean up another student's feces off the bathroom floor, which, of course, made the tabloids. Since then the school has been plagued by principal turnover, textbook and material shortages, and fiscal problems. There have been 10 reported incidents of corporal punishment.

This hardly damns the model, so long as the system can expeditiously identify failures and either fix or close them. But it does not speak well of the operator.

A little economics goes a long way

Via Cafe Hayek, a nice (award winning!) video put together by some GMU undergrads on the corrupting effect that economics can have.



Sarah's friends complain that she's become intolerable since taking economics.

Sounds like what I often hear back in student evaluations:

• "I am now more irritating than ever, sparring with others not just on policy issues but general decision-making as well."
• "Awesome course, I wish I could take something like this next year :( It's helped provoke many arguments with my flatmates and annoyed my girlfriend when I start rambling on about some economic i..."
• "Learnt tonnes. Had many a-discussion with friends after lectures as what is taught is extremely interesting and 'fun' to think/argue about."
• "I have often found myself explaining the theories learnt in class to family and friends."

A GMU education is for folks who love economics. I'm glad I can spread that around a bit too down at the far end of the world. I'm particularly pleased that of the 11 students in this year's incoming honours cohort at Canterbury, 7 have taken my public choice class (a very high proportion for an elective). The Gnomes of Canterbury return.....