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Speaker 1: Track cycling Gold Medal race coming your way very shortly.

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Speaker 1: Right now, Let's call it what it is. It's an

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Speaker 1: education crisis. Just twenty two percent of year eight students

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Speaker 1: are at the expected standard for mass. That means roughly

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Speaker 1: eighty percent are not, and the government wants to flip

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Speaker 1: that eighty twenty so that eighty percent they are actually achieving.

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Speaker 1: They've got new workbooks coming next year, they've got teacher upskilling.

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Speaker 1: The ero is being overhauled to focus on outcomes and achievement.

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Speaker 1: The Ministry of Education will intervene earlier and more often.

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Speaker 1: Is it get to work? Doctor Michael Johnston is with

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Speaker 1: the New Zealand Initiative. He's a senior fellow there and

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Speaker 1: has worked in education most of his life. Michael, good morning,

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Speaker 1: Good morning.

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Speaker 2: How are you doing very well?

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Speaker 1: Thank you? Are they on the right track with what

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Speaker 1: they're doing.

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Speaker 2: Well? They definitely need to do something like this, as

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Speaker 2: you said, or you could describe it as a crisis,

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Speaker 2: but actually there's no indication from these data that things

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Speaker 2: have got worse. It's probably just revealed what's been there

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Speaker 2: for quite some time. The way in which they've tested

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Speaker 2: maths and other curriculum areas has changed, and what we're

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Speaker 2: catching now kids who are behind the year level that

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Speaker 2: they're at, Whereas in the past we measured how far

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Speaker 2: whether they were at the right phase, which bands of years.

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Speaker 2: So we've got finer grained data here, and so it's

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Speaker 2: likely that things haven't actually got worse, that they've been

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Speaker 2: mis bad for a while.

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Speaker 1: How long are we talking decades?

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Speaker 2: We don't know exactly, Quite likely a decade or more.

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Speaker 1: So if that's the case, should we should be that worried?

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Speaker 2: Oh? I think we should be worried when only just

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Speaker 2: a bit more than a fifth of year eight students

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Speaker 2: are meeting the standard according to the curriculum. So yeah,

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Speaker 2: I think the action that the Minister for Education and

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Speaker 2: the Minister I've announced is absolutely necessary. Will it be enough, well,

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Speaker 2: time will tell, But I think that it's encouraging that

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Speaker 2: they're introducing these workbooks and teacher guides. Just to be clear,

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Speaker 2: my understanding is that those books will be aligned with

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Speaker 2: the new curriculum that's coming next year, so the publishing

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Speaker 2: companies will do some work on them to reconfigure them

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Speaker 2: to match the curriculum.

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Speaker 1: I spoke to a principle yesterday and he didn't have

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Speaker 1: high hopes for this, first of all, that they would

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Speaker 1: even get the booklets. But second of all, he said,

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Speaker 1: will they cater to my ever increasingly diverse range of students,

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Speaker 1: including neuro diverse students in different English second language all

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Speaker 1: these other things? Is will they do that? And is

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Speaker 1: that a big problem for the education system?

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Speaker 2: Well, first of all, let me say that I think

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Speaker 2: it is a big problem for the education system, and

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Speaker 2: I would acknowledge the huge challenges that teachers are facing

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Speaker 2: at the moment with behavior in our classrooms. There was

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Speaker 2: a report, I think it was from the OECD that

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Speaker 2: said that the disorder in our classrooms is amongst the

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Speaker 2: worst and the worst in the world. Neurodiversity seems to

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Speaker 2: be on the increase for reasons that are not fully understood.

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Speaker 2: I certainly acknowledge the challenges that teachers face, and I

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Speaker 2: think more will be required to meet that target of

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Speaker 2: eighty percent at curriculum by the end of year eight

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Speaker 2: in twenty thirty.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, we've still got a long way to go. Doctor

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Speaker 1: Michael Johnson, thank you very much for your time. He's

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Speaker 1: a senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. Talking about

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Speaker 1: the government's crackdown on education seven.

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Speaker 2: For more from News talk edb listen live on air

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Speaker 2: or online, and

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