UNLEASH

ED

Tag: ACT party

  • No More Sense from Seymour

    And so it begins.

    The non-sensical dribble spews forth from the under-secretary of Education, who gets into a lucrative position on the back of one electorate described on Wikipedia as an “exclusive, affluent suburb of Auckland”.

    That’s right. Mr. Seymour is at it again as he launches the ACT Party campaign.

    We will pay good teachers more. And great ones even more. No doubt David will be the judge as to which teachers make good teachers and which ones make great ones. I would put money on schools not being able to decide that themselves, and even more money on it being based on student results i.e. National Standards ala Performance Pay.

    Of course, one can see his point when he opens with the statement that the average teacher is paid a pittance, and deserve to be paid more.

    To fix that, the party is proposing an extra $1 billion in funding for education. “ACT’s proposed good teacher grants will give your average teacher a pay rise of $20,000 per year,” Mr Seymour claimed.

    But to receive the extra money, schools “need to opt out of the centralised payroll system and collective agreements”.

    This has rubbed a lot of people (in particular teachers) up the wrong way. No surprises there.

    But here’s why his solution makes no sense.

    Hypothetically Synonymous Seymoronous

    Let’s assume that schools go for this, and EVERY school in the country pays their teachers an average of $20,000 per year more than they are already. That is going to cost a lot.

    However, none of that has anything to do with collective agreements, the unions, or any centralised payroll system. They are not synonymous with each other.

    It’s illogical.

    In fact, under Seymour’s scheme, teachers could stay in the union with the collective agreement, and they could still get paid $20,000 more if he really means it; just get a new collective agreement ratified between the government and the union, or have both – give a bit more to schools to ‘top up’ teacher salaries that are paid through the collective agreement. It’s only because ACT are notoriously anti-union that he is dangling the carrot for principals and teachers to consider.

    Pay more Seymour

    The second factor is that given the current climate in education, there are teachers leaving in droves, and not always because they aren’t being paid enough. On many occasions, the workload is too much. Refer to this article in March. As a teacher, like many others, I would probably take less workload over getting paid more to ‘compensate’ for the increased workload that is currently expected of us.

    In Conclusion

    While paying teachers more is a genuinely nice touch, Mr. S, if you really cared and were really in touch with the education sector, and you actually wanted to value teachers, then maybe the first step is to work with the union rather than trying to sabotage it into non-existence.

    Illogical. Blackmail. Numpty.

     

  • I wish David would see more…

    Today Chris Hipkins’ bill was drawn out of a hat in parliament to undergo vigorous debate as to the abolishment of the charter school policy brought in by ACT, even though all historic evidence and international examples of this have all been failures.

    It’s interesting that at the same time the Labour bill to abolish charter schools comes out, that the education world in the UK prepares for EVERY public school to become a charter school (called ‘academies’ over there).

    So, this comes with welcome news. The abhorrent dealings of charter schools in this country have been well documented. It has been an utter disaster despite what the politicians who want it to succeed will say.

    Needless to say, I was pretty disgusted with this tweet from the ACT party.

    Needless to say, it received a pretty swift response:

    Well, that’s awesome. Nice one.

    What’s more, and as has been pointed out, Chris Hipkins also gained more support from his electorate than the entire ACT party did around the country. Chris Hipkins: 19,286. ACT Party: 16,689. Just saying!

    As I went deeper into the conversation I suddenly found one DBSeymour piping up into the conversation.

    If I was unimpressed before, my impressions are now severely lacking. The lack of actual intelligence begins to show that the puppet in front of us running the country as Undersecretary of Education is little more than a the blubbering buffoon that we all thought was an act. Turns out no; its actually true. We may have just found the long tail of underachievement in this country.

    The conversation that precedes this screenshot is all centred around the privatisation of education, the choice of integrated schools for those that want choice, and the question of why tax payers should be paying for charter schools where there is no accountability and that any land, property, resources, etc… are all kept by the company behind the particular charter school.

    However, despite this all being in clear view on Twitter, and being written in basic English, and as grammatically correct as one can be in 140 characters, DBSeymour seems to think that this particular question doesn’t make sense.

    Sorry David. The question makes perfect sense. The problem isn’t the question. It is you. Obviously it’s well above your level of understanding.

    Then to make things worse; the Member of Parliament; a person who should be holding the public with some kind of respect and regard because they are the ones who may vote for you, instead of continuing to attack the question, turns personal and now says that the person asking the question doesn’t make sense.

    And this is the person entrusted with implementing changes within our Education system.

    Maybe David actually needs to go back to school and learn how to comprehend basic sentences. I’m sure that this will no doubt hold him in good stead to begin entering into the public sector such as Twitter. Ah – I mean, parliament.

     

    There is a very small chance that DBSeymour actually only wanted to reply to @actparty with “You just don’t make any sense”. In which case; it’s about time someone brought that question up!