not only CEO of a New Zealand bank but was previously a partner at management
consultingfirm, McKinsey & Co.
There are also other examples of how business is rising above universities in
terms of influencing primary teachers and principals in New Zealand. Ministry of
Education contracts are often being let to private education research companies and
sometimes not even to educational researchers. An example is that Martin Jenkins,
afirm of management consultations, has been recently contracted by the Ministry of
Education to both evaluate New Zealand’sfirst charter schools (called‘Partnership
Schools’in New Zealand) and a new one-year graduate teacher education pro-
gramme (the Master of Teaching and Learning). This sort of evaluation work would
have previously been done either by university-based education researchers or
researchers at NZCER. Business lobby groups are also starting to hold more sway.
For instance, the Minister of Education recently launched a mathematics education
report published by business think-tank‘The New Zealand Initiative’.
Such developments reach teachers through a mainstream media increasing ori-
entated towards infotainment rather than serious journalism. Like many other
countries, the media coverage of teachers and teaching in New Zealand is
increasingly derisive or salacious. There are also right-wing blogs that have become
notorious for attacking teachers and principals (e.g.‘Whaleoil’). The main lesson
for teachers here is the importance of staying out of the news and senior staff in
many schools are getting media training. Meanwhile the specialist education media,
such as it was in a small country, has all but collapsed.The New Zealand Education
Review(New Zealand’s answer to theTimes Educational Supplement) is down to
five issues a year whereas for many years it was a weekly source of information.
27.4 Teachers Being Critical but not Critical Enough
Due to the kinds of developments discussed so far, the general climate for New
Zealand teacher education and the culture of teaching is not conducive to creating a
searching approach to global education reform. The NZEI and NZPF do a good job
of informing members about GERM, there are lobby groups such as the‘Quality
Public Education Coalition’and‘Save our Schools NZ’, and of course teachers also
learn much via the Internet about what is going on in other countries. But the
concern has to be that many local developments in education are not sufficiently
connected to the GERM agenda by most teachers. There are probably many
examples that could be considered, but here I look at outsourcing of curriculum in
the Health and Physical Education curriculum area, the approach of primary schools
to the‘National Standards’and‘Investing in Educational Success’policies, and a
new enthusiasm in New Zealand for‘Modern Learning Environments’.^2
(^2) O’Neill ( 2015 ) links‘Bring Your Own Device’(BYOD) to the GERM agenda.
406 M. Thrupp