individual and collective professional development, and more performance man-
agement—more performativity—will do little or nothing to improve the quality of
teaching in classrooms for the simple fact that it does nothing to ameliorate the
conditions in which ordinary teachers work. Teacher unions operate in both the
industrial and professional domains. Over the years, matters such as class size,
teaching hours, support for advanced credential acquisition, career pathways and
remuneration have all been rehearsed for the most part in the industrial domain as
part of collective contract negotiations. This conceptual separation is an unhelpful
one. If the issue is quality of teaching, the debate needs to focus on making
improvements to the material conditions in which teachers’work every day, not
abstract and normative or idealised conceptions of“professional”development and
performance. Just as teachers may reasonably be held to account for the quality of
classroom relations, government must be held to account for the quality of material
conditions in which New Zealand teachers work.
33.5 Materiality
Teaching as work has both symbolic and material elements. Symbolic elements are
reflected in the demands made of teachers by society as a whole. Material elements
are reflected in the resources allocated by the state to support achievement of those
demands. QTD reifies the former and ignores the latter. The rationality and con-
sequent credibility of QTD depends almost entirely on society’s ignorance of the
material conditions in which school teachers work in New Zealand. However,
OECD and other readily available comparative international data demonstrate
unequivocally, for example, that: (i) government spends less per student than other
OECD countries; (ii) cumulative spending per student in compulsory schooling is
lower; (iii) teacher: student ratios and average class sizes are higher; (iv) teachers
teach more hours per week and per year; (v) teacher salaries compare well for the
firstfifteen years of a career but poorly thereafter; (vi) New Zealand teachers on
average enjoy better classroom relations with their students and in students’eyes,
are more responsive to their needs.
Four key trends stand out in the data.
- First, the material conditions in which New Zealand teachers are required to
work daily cannot reasonably be argued to be conducive to them creating
optimum learning relations in individual classrooms. - Second, these same conditions are not conducive to facilitating the investigative
and collaborative activities by teachers in and outside classrooms that are
asserted by influential QTD private sector lobbyists (e.g. Jensen 2012 ) to have
the greatest impact on learning. - Third, according to feedback from New Zealand students towards the end of
their compulsory schooling, as evidenced in the OECD’s PISA online database,
a sizeable minority of teachers need a mixture of education, support and
502 J. O’Neill