Peter Garrett: encouraging signs (a Kiwi perspective)

I'm sure Pete is trying to be transparent and helpful. Perhaps it might have been better if he'd set the encouraging signs to music.

His next paragraph seems quite masterful, perhaps that will be an augury for the clarity we've been seeking.

'Our best performing students are not doing as well as they were 10 years ago, while the gap between top and bottom students has increased. This is not acceptable in a country as wealthy and well-resourced as Australia.'

Masterful – yes – but in the matter of encouraging signs seems rather short of the mark.

Perhaps, to Pete, encouraging signs mean something different to those who haven't sung at an Olympics closing.

Now he's didactic but in a plagiaristic way.

'NAPLAN is a powerful tool which means we now have detailed data on how our schools and students are performing, identifying where extra support is needed as well as learning the lessons from schools that improve their results.'

Come on; own up Pete, you took this sentence from the New Zealand National government's media advisory handbook.

But could this lead to the encouraging signs?

Pete – now that you have the detailed data on how students are performing, does that mean you and a host of education bureaucrats and associated academics are going to fan out to schools and do some teaching?

Teachers already have that data, well not that data, actually better data, their own data, from their own tests, and actually working with children, because we all know national testing data is rubbish.

But if your data, even though rubbish, is a stimulus for fanning out, well, that could be an encouraging sign: you and your bureaucrats and academics, might learn something about real education, well not much but a bit, and be better politicians, bureaucrats and academics as a result, well perhaps.