Mike's Minute: We don't care enough about education

Is it possible that our education standards are now so low, that when the reading report that got produced yesterday shows our score is the lowest ever, the reason you didn’t see that story anywhere apart from this show is because no one cares? And that’s why education is the way it is. To be fair, RNZ covered it. But there was no mention of the fact it was our lowest score. Over 400,000 kids in 57 countries and the headline was “Reading level of 10-year-olds tested against international counter parts”. It's not really a headline that suggests the lowest ever score. The article suggested the latest drop was statistically insignificant. It went on to explain that some countries did better than others, no kidding, that variation in reading standards happen for a variety of reasons, double no kidding, and that the ministry hadn't evaluated the data yet. So, sort of a republishing of a press release, which happens a lot these days. The Sydney Morning Herald, for a while, lead with these stats, thus indicating someone there is at least awake. Their headline was “Falling through the cracks”. They too had a score that suggested they shouldn’t be happy about, but ironically it was a score a lot higher than ours. Here is the tragedy - reading joins literacy and numeracy. The well-known PISA tests have seen us drop from being in the top 10 globally for maths and reading and science. In maths, we have gone from 4th to 27th, we are 11th in reading and 12th for science. This of course tends to involve kids who turn up at school, which is another of our problems. Most of them no longer do on a regular basis. The point is, there is clearly a crisis here. There's an indisputable, documental crisis and, yet, where is the concern? Where is the coverage? Where is the discussion that comes out of the coverage? Where are the alarm bells and red flags? Are we numb to failure? Is the media too biased to cover it because it makes the Government look bad? When did our kid's backwards trajectory become such a non-story, that a globally significant study, showing an ever-decreasing outcome, can barely draw a headline anywhere? It's easy to blame the media, of course. Maybe they merely reflect the lack of interest from readers and watchers, most of whom will be parents. Did no-one read all the other stories of educational decay, so they gave up writing them? What the hell is the matter with us?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.