education, government, politics
In Rory MacKinnon on February 3, 2010 at 2:04 am
[First things first, some great news: I've now joined Scoop as their new duty editor, which means that in between copy-pasting press releases I'll be writing the odd story and doing weekly segments on Radio Active and bFM. Should you be interested I've already got a couple of things here, here and here.]
So the government’s surprise press conference yesterday wasn’t such a surprise after all. The PM and Education Minister Anne Tolley are sticking to their guns on their national standards policy; the one that guarantees young New Zealanders get a fair go, etc. etc. through regular testing on the three ‘r’s. They’re so confident, in fact, that they’re refusing to trial it in a few schools first.
Except that they are. As we heard yesterday, they will be trialling the national standards for te reo Maori in some kura kaupapa to make sure they’re appropriate – an eminently sensible decision, but one which makes this battle with the teachers’ unions over the rest of the curriculum all the more absurd.
politics, polytechnics, universities
In Rory MacKinnon on October 4, 2009 at 9:59 pm
ACT on Campus vice-president Peter McCaffrey recently put out a top 10 list of student unions misrepresenting their members. It’s been briefly mentioned in the Dominion Post, but on closer inspection the list manages to misrepresent more than a few things itself. I thought a good brisk fisking might be in order to set the record straight (as always, any dissent is welcome in the comments). So let’s get started.
10. NZUSA endorsement of Labour in 2008, despite more students voting National than Labour.
Not true – the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations put out a voters’ guide which can be clearly viewed here. Nowhere in the guide does it endorse Labour – even the colour scheme is non-partisan. What it does do is endorse universal student allowances, a policy adopted by Labour and the Greens in the last election, and it would seem this is the source of McCaffrey’s discontent. But there’s nothing illegal, questionable or even unusual about a lobby group endorsing a policy. It’s a very different thing from third-party electioneering - more Federated Farmers than Exclusive Brethren – and McCaffrey should be smart enough to know this.
