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Bureaucracy Revisited

Entry 179, on 2005-06-04 at 13:16:28 (Rating 3, News)

A report, commissioned by our Ministry of Education, has just been released listing the major reasons teachers feel they aren't producing as good an education system as they should. This is significant, because a recent survey found most New Zealander's think the education system is getting worse, despite the input of huge amounts of extra money.

So why do teaches think the education system isn't as good as it could be? There were two major reasons. First, the extra, non-productive work, associated with implementing the new qualifications and assessment system, the NCEA. Second, the ridiculous amounts of paper work they are expected to produce.

Where do these two pressures come from? Primarily from well-meaning (presumably) organisations, like the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and Education Review Office, who think better eduction is a produced through tighter control and increased documentation.

Possibly sub-standard teachers will be discovered through a system like this so that they can be helped to improve or can be removed from the system, but for the average and good teachers it just represents time spent creating piles of largely meaningless documentation instead of getting on with the actual core activity of teaching.

So really the more the bureaucrats try to improve the education system, the more they are actually achieving the exact opposite - the system is actually getting worse because of their interference. Well, at least they have good documentation on how poor the system has become!

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