Straw Person Arguments, Whole Person Responses
Photograph by Pania Te Maro
Straw Person arguments are created to misrepresent situations, setting up an easy and false target to knock down. In a recent ERO report Ready, set, teach: How prepared and supported are new teachers? Straw Person arguments, questions, data and interpretations are employed to single out and discredit Initial Teacher Education (ITE) providers and programmes. The methodology of the report is critiqued here. All ITE programmes should be, and are, regularly and reflexively reviewed, therefore, damning programmes for not doing a job that is not theirs alone to do is a classic Straw Person exercise (see Strawman scapegoating). A Whole Person response would fund systems and processes that allow Whānau, Iwi, Hapū, (Communities), Schools, Teaching Council, Teachers, ERO, Teacher Unions and Mokopuna to work together productively rather than shrinking the sphere of influences and potential.
The ERO report uses catastrophising (Warner, 2013) and crisis languaging (Giroux, 1984) to background the preparedness of new teachers by uncritically and unscientifically referencing results from PISA and the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement, (NMSSA). The report picks up its metaphorical target in its second main argument (p. 12) relying on PISA and NMSSA results. This both ignores and perpetuates government and media reporting of PISA and NMSSA results, which is problematic. Flawed use of both assessments presents false correlations, as described here. The report conflates ITE work with students’ ability to be fully equipped teachers on day one, further insinuating that students’ ITE training will lift results for assessments like PISA and NMSSA and that all children will be better educated.
A Whole Person response questions grand narratives about PISA and national assessments. A Review by Smith 2017, for example, shares questions we should ask to understand how (mis)use of PISA and national assessment results creates false dialogues about educational crises. PISA (and national assessments) are developed to evaluate specific aspects of learning and can only be reliable when all variables in data collection and analyses are accounted for. Specifically, PISA evaluates what a small percentage of 15-year-olds do with real-world problems, it does not test curriculum or all children, “Since it is not curriculum based it is an inappropriate measure to use for evaluating the success of an education system in implementing a curriculum” (Smith, 2017, p. 3). Smith’s (2017) review lists and answers questions we should expect from the media and officials who report the data. Who is being tested? What is being assessed? Do the results represent the same thing in all countries or economies? What do the national rankings mean? What valid conclusions can be drawn from the results? The answers provided by Smith further expose the Straw Person arguments of the ERO report.
The ERO report then focuses on improving student outcomes through a deliberately broad and open-to-interpretation-maxi-soundbite called the science of teaching and learning. Reference is made to the government drawing on research from the last two decades into the science of teaching and learning. A footnote leads to the National government’s Teaching the Basics Brilliantly report where no research references are to be found. Contradicting their insistence on scientific evidence, the National Government’s report says, “The state of education in New Zealand has been in decline for the last 30 years, with study after study showing achievement going backwards.” No references are provided to said studies, which is the antithesis of scientific rigour. This soundbite narrative is instead wide open to critique that it is an exercise in catastrophising and crises building for a different agenda.
The same National report sets up further misleading Straw Person targets about the national curriculum. For example, “Rather than operating as a guide for teachers and parents”, the New Zealand Curriculum “prioritises key competencies”. Here a false binary is created pretending that prioritising key competencies comes at the expense of guidance for teachers and parents. It does not. This is notwithstanding the veracity of the statement that the NZC does prioritise key competencies in the first instance. The report goes on to say that Key Competencies “...are vague, hard to measure, and impractical to report.” Here the pretense is wrapped in the word vague, and the notion that children’s competencies ought to be measured and reported on. It could be argued that reporting is for whānau and communities of interest, therefore, schools should have better relationships with whānau and communities of interest, which would support them knowing how well their children are doing in any field. Aligning with Benavot & Smith’s (2020) contentions, the ERO report statements devalue learning that is “not measurable or comparable,” and they weaken “the principle of educational equity.” The same report then says that the curriculum, “... lacks guidance on what children should be learning and when they should be progressing to new concepts”. This statement fails to say that curricula are meant to be high level documents. The details are in second-tier materials. This is done deliberately so that schools have room to develop localised curriculum. Further misrepresenting the purpose of curriculum, they add, “This [lack of guidance] leads to significant variation in what is being taught.” This statement holds the Straw Person assumption that variation is unwanted. There should be an expectation of variation in what is taught if we are to be equitable and meet the needs of diverse learners, whānau and communities of interest in their locale.
To continue with the theme of measuring young people and what they are being taught. Sayed and Moriarty (2020) call out current reliance on “pseudo-technicism” which uses “a narrow set of indicators, that are axiomatically assumed to measure equitable and quality lifelong learning for all.” Through their rigorous use of literature and research Sayed and Moriarty (2020) argue that “rights-based understandings of quality are marginalised and delegitimised” in such technicist and positivist formations of systems and processes for learning and teaching (p. 213). Benavot & Smith (2020), come to similar conclusions in their studies of standardised assessment. A Whole Person response to these narrow technicist views comes from Darling-Hammond, Schachner, Wojcikiewicz, & Flook, (2024) who provide holistic and full-bodied understandings of the science of learning which is a field that discusses more than young people’s brains and their capacity to pass tests and grow to be human capital for market gain, (docile subjects). Their Whole Person arguments are holistic, they acknowledge and synthesise decades of research from diverse perspectives, and provide access to that diversity, rather than presenting extremely cherry-picked views. Whole Person researchers consider the range of factors and variables that children face, and they focus on the rights of children to be educated for human flourishing.
References:
Benavot, A., & Smith, W. C. (2020). Reshaping quality and equity: Global learning metrics as a ready-made solution to a manufactured crisis. In Grading Goal Four (pp. 238-261). Brill.
Darling-Hammond, L., Schachner, A. C. W., Wojcikiewicz, S. K., & Flook, L. (2024). Educating teachers to enact the science of learning and development. Applied Developmental Science, 28(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2022.2130506
Giroux, H. (1984). Public philosophy and the crisis in education. Harvard Educational Review, 54(2), 186-195.
Ministry of Education (2023). PISA 2022 Aotearoa New Zealand Summary Report, Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/224601/PISA-2022-summaryreport.pdf
Sayed, Y., & Moriarty, K. (2020). SDG 4 and the ‘education quality turn’: Prospects, possibilities, and problems. In Grading goal four (pp. 194-213). Brill.
Smith, W. C. (2017, December 13). Review of The global education race: Taking the measure of PISA and international testing, by S. Sellar, G. Thompson, & D. Rutkowksi. Education Review, 24. December 13, 2017 ISSN 1094-5296 Sellar, S., Thompson, G. & Rutkowski, D. (2017). The global education race: Taking the measure of PISA and international testing. Edmonton, Canada: Brush Education.
Warner, J. (2013). The politics of ‘catastrophization'. In D. Hilhorst (ed) (2013), Disaster, Conflict and Society in Crises: Everyday politicis of crisis response (pp. 76-94). Routledge.
Pania Te Maro Nō Ngāti Pōrou ahau, nō te whānau a- Pōkai. Ko Te Kapa a Hinekōpeka taku tūrangawaewae. Currently I am kaihautū Māori for te Kura o te Mātauranga and a kaiārahi Tiriti for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. I teach into the masters programme, and supervise masters and Ph.D. candidates. My research is in mathematics education and pāngarau. Kura mokopuna are doing well at learning mathematics through pāngarau, and yet struggle and tensions continue to exist for them. My research has found that those tensions are maintained by rhetoric about knowledge legitimacy driven through colonial structures and processes that marginalise and seek to tone down Indigenous voices.