What more must a principal do?

It’s not surprising that there is a crisis in the teaching profession with fewer individuals wanting to take up the mantle of teacher.

Parents, are your children lazy, disruptive in class, inattentive, fail to complete assignments, not interested in school or learning, skip lessons, into trouble, even into crime? Well, now you have a new candidate to blame. Stop accusing the teachers. You can now blame the principal. And it works. Just ask Tim Foy, school principal at Huntly College.

The suits in Wellington have lost complete confidence in Foy who has been at the college for 13 years. Apparently Foy’s crime was a poor record of student achievement. He wasn’t ‘‘accelerating student progress’’ sufficiently, according to the Education Ministry report, and we all know that acceleration is what matters.

Yes, Foy has failed in the acceleration stakes and been unsuccessful in raising the standard of pass grades at the college and that’s enough to earn him the chop. It’s Foy’s fault that the pupils are bad learners and have not come up to the mark. And it is marks that count in this new world of NCEA pass rates.

Numbers are all that matters and they can be easily counted by the bean counters who’ve never set foot in a classroom.

According to the principal, he gave his all, 24/7, in a low-decile school, even to the extent of supporting, tellingly, students in Youth Court. But that wasn’t good enough and doesn’t count with those who can only count beans.

Nor was the fact that this man put up his own money ($500) as reward to catch thieves who had repeatedly stolen from the school, the most recent being the theft of 18 mountain bikes, replacement for others stolen earlier in the year. Thieves ripped out an entire wall to get at the first lot. Scarce money was spent to build a steel cage to secure the next batch, but the thieves still smashed their way in. Police have no leads.

Students used the bikes for sport to gain NCEA credits. Maybe that’s why the ‘‘acceleration’’ rate was down.

No excuse, according to the Education Review Office (ERO). Nor was the fact that the school had to spend a precious $20,000 just fixing up vandalism this year alone, money that could have gone into educational resources.

I can’t imagine many prospective principals lining up for Mr Foy’s job.

But I can imagine that principals in the Waikato will be sweating a little more profusely under their collars now and driving teachers even harder in a world where education has become all about grades and pass rates. They’ve become the be-all-and-end-all in education circles and the proof of that is the fact that they have started publishing them. And it’s the only measure the boffins in Wellington can comprehend.

It’s not surprising then that there is a crisis in the teaching profession with fewer individuals wanting to take up the mantle of teacher. There are even jokes doing the rounds about teachers becoming endangered species and needing DOC intervention. Who’d want a job where your boss is breathing down your neck day and night, screaming ‘‘MORE GRADES!’’ ‘‘BETTER!’’ ‘‘FASTER!’’ because his/her job is on the line over numbers? It breeds toxic environments which are ultimately counterproductive.

Where has this obsession with grades, numbers and ‘‘acceleration’’ come from?

Its ideological roots go back to the early days of the inception of the Brave New World of NCEA. There were many things wrong with the old system but the new way came with as many devils. Add in the mix the development of neoliberalism and growing competitiveness between schools (notice the development of larger and larger billboards outside school gates advertising their successes – ‘‘Congratulations to Johnny Tryharder for coming second in nose blowing competition’’) and you have a recipe for capitalism as applied to and worked out in today’s schools.

NCEA is, theoretically, a system where no one fails and failure is verboten in the new politically correct world. And they’ve made it so educationally easy not to. Hey, you’ve just got to know how to ride a mountain bike and you’re halfway there. Of course, if someone has stolen yours then it becomes a little more difficult.

But for anyone failing in this new, bright, malleable system, it becomes a blot on the brave new world which cannot be tolerated. It shows up the programme in a bad light and we cannot have that. The ideologues have invested millions in it and egg on political faces is verboten. Anyone failing and the blame is quickly sheeted back to the fall guy, in this case, the principal.

Mr Foy will probably be glad to see the back of it all given the way he has been treated. He tried his best with coaching, mentoring, supporting students in trades and vocational courses, even having them build a house, but he was on a hiding to nothing. However one can understand the hurt and bitterness associated with the claims of his purported ‘‘lack of community involvement’’, yet another peculiar layer of performance added to a principal’s lot. That the man was astonished and deeply hurt by such accusations speaks volumes about those writing the report.

Good luck to those taking over.