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Among the more irritating education fads is the idea that schools need to teach a “growth mindset”. It is true that students who think they can improve wind up faring better than those who feel stuck in a hole from which they see no way out. Read more

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, there were gaping inequities in the educational outcomes of students in New Zealand. For example, in its latest (2018) round of PISA testing, the OECD found that New Zealand had the worst socioeconomic gradient (i.e. Read more

This week, the vice chancellor of Victoria University (in Wellington) proved once again he is the bull in the china shop by doubling down on an $150 weekly holding fee for first year student halls. Now, we can all sympathise with universities since they have lost a large portion of their income from international students. Read more

New Zealand’s ‘upset-no-one’, content-free National Curriculum is hurting our children’s education. To identify what knowledge should be every child’s entitlement, the Ministry of Education must be willing to have some difficult conversations. Read more

What if the principal and chair of trustees of each of New Zealand’s 500 secondary schools received a report every year that cut through the noise to show exactly how their school was performing? Crucially, this report would be objective, data-driven and fair, because it adjusts for the unique community of students each school serves. Read more

If your school has strong NCEA results, is it because it’s performing well, or because it serves a lot of children from more privileged backgrounds? Schools with identical NCEA outcomes could have wildly different performance if one of them got there through extraordinary efforts to overcome the disadvantages that its students brought with them to class. Read more