The failure of modern learning environments in New Zealand

a lesson in the dangers of ideologically motivated decision making

Societies have always split between liberals and conservatives. 

Liberals are typically higher on a trait called openness.  It’s a good thing.  Liberals want to challenge the status quo, to make change, and to innovate.  Balanced against conservative forces in society, liberals help to make changes as society confronts new realities.  Some societal norms and ways of doing things need to change over time.  Liberals hunt on the boundary.

Conservatives tend to score higher on trait conscientiousness. They are not always rigid and unchanging; they just need to see more evidence of the benefits of change. They like to do things properly and believe in time-honoured ways of doing things. They tend to the garden and look after the core. 

But liberals, especially those on the extreme left, have a bad habit of breaking things without coming up with a viable alternative system.  Rather than being helpful, these changes can negatively impact society.  Sometimes, the impact of the negative change is not immediately evident, but ultimately, significantly pernicious and damaging.  

Modern learning environments in our schools are such an innovation. Proponents railed against the cell-like structure of our traditional classrooms—ugly boxes that stifled our children’s freedom and imagination. Like the workplace equivalent, open workspaces, the innovators fixated on the need to communicate and to work in teams; indeed, they claimed these spaces would enable 21st-century learning. Who could argue with that grand vision?  

Well, me, for one, and I aim to convince you here that I am right. I will look into the rationale and evidence for the benefits of these environments. I also argue that these environments and the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s overzealous commitment to inquiry-based learning and co-construction explain, in large part, our students’ continued decline in maths, reading, and science, as evidenced by the PISA exams. This expenditure has also been a monumental misallocation of taxpayer money.

At the outset, I accept that new classrooms need to be built. New Zealand has underinvested in classrooms for too many years, often relying on prefabricated classrooms, which have also reached their use-by date. That is not to mention the failed, leaky classrooms built during the wild days of deregulation in the 1990s. But that is another story and an example of the excesses of the other extreme in politics.

For twenty years, the leaders of our Ministry of Education in New Zealand have pushed school boards to build “modern learning environments” (MLEs) to replace old classrooms. What evidence did they have for this policy decision?  Why did the Ministry spend so much of its budget on these buildings, especially when teacher salaries have not kept pace with inflation?  

The first step for any research in this space should be a literature search. If the Ministry researchers had done this, they would have found the 1986 NZCER report on the 1970s open-plan learning trials. That report identified problems that have again surfaced in MLEs, with the noise and distraction of so many children working in the same space being a key complaint.  

 

I can identify with some of the positive and many negative findings of the NZCER report because I participated in the experiment, albeit unwittingly. In 1974, the wall between Forms 1 and 2 and Koromatua school’s Standard 3 and 4 classrooms was knocked down. Four teachers, including my Father, then tried to teach four different year groups in one space. 

My memories of that year are of chaos, a lot of noise, and, most memorable, growing tensions between the teachers, which occasionally escalated to a level that even those of us with the least sensibility could not fail to miss.  

My father was the Principal and headteacher at that school. Many years later, we discussed this experiment and how it sat well with the ideas of constructivism that were becoming fashionable in New Zealand. My father reminded me that the PTA reviewed things at the end of that year, and the local builder came in to rebuild the wall. Enough said.  So, one positive outcome was a small contribution to the gross domestic product.

Bureaucracies, brimming with leaders keen to make their mark by spending other people’s money, have a dreadful habit of repeating past mistakes; albeit with the protection of an outside consultant who can be fired if the adventure goes awry.  It’s a mutually beneficial system, as the bureaucrat becomes the consultant, and the consultant becomes a bureaucrat in a revolving door system.  It is why Wellington is so insular and out of touch with the rest of New Zealand. 

Bureaucracies led by left-wing ideologues tend to make the even more egregious mistake of change for the sake of change. All too often, these leaders are promoted to the next significant role, frequently just before the chickens come home to roost. 

Investment decisions in education are no trivial matter. Significant changes in education strategy have an enormous fiscal impact. We must be careful when we make big decisions affecting a whole generation of children. 

Of course, these Queens of education would argue in defence that independent consultants and research supported their strategic moves and that they align with the need to ensure students are prepared for the well-touted “jobs of the future.” It’s sad that these jobs will all be overseas, as the current generation of students will be forced to find work in the low-paid tourism economy and workforce of a poor but beautiful country.   

The MLE policy aligns with and forces schools to adopt the Ministry’s co-construction, inquiry-based, and project-based learning concepts. These new barns will be their legacy, a permanent reminder of their wisdom.  It seems they forgot their Shelley:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

So again, where was the evidence? To borrow from Jerry McGuire; “show me the money!”  

Our Ministry leaders are appropriately qualified for research; they have the right degrees issued by our best university education departments.  But education is a social science.  Social sciences can be described as dismal (alongside economics) due to the difficulty of controlling for confounding factors. Social science experiments are difficult to replicate, suffer from the bias and subjectivity of the experimenters, and lack precision.  There is also a strong tendency for experimentation to be politically or ideologically motivated.

Even allowing for the shortcomings of education research, what research evidence supported MLEs in the early 2000s? 

I assume that the Ministry did review and consider the 1986 NZCER report. If so, were they swayed to ignore it in favour of a litany of evidence suggesting that something magical happened to education in the 21st century? 

It is easy to see how they might fall into that trap. After all, the changes in our world between 1994, when the Internet emerged into public consciousness, and 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, were transformative, almost miraculous and to some, I guess, magical.

There was no doubt a great deal of conjuring going on alongside the discussion, brainstorming, and excitement within the Ministry during this time. However, motivated reasoning is as dangerous as magical thinking regarding collisions with reality, hence the need for real evidence that supports the change. However, the normal checks and balances are removed in Wellington when the left-wing cabal controls both the Beehive and The Terrace.

It seems clear now that there was more motivated reasoning than evidence. In conjunction with the launch of the NZ Curriculum 2007, the Ministry noted that:

“The educational vision set by the Ministry of Education in 2007 is to prepare 21st-century learners for what has become known as the ‘knowledge age’, where young people will become “confident, connected, actively involved [and] lifelong learners” (Ministry of Education; New Zealand Curriculum, 2007, p. 8).

The document sets out the following values: excellence, Innovation and Curiosity, Diversity, Equity, Community and participation, Ecological sustainability, integrity, and respect (Ministry of Education; New Zealand Curriculum, 2007, p. 8).

There is a focus on competencies and almost no prescription of content or knowledge. Tellingly the writers note:

Opportunities to develop the competencies occur in social contexts. People adopt and adapt practices that they see used and valued by those closest to them and make these practices part of their own identity and expertise.  (Ministry of Education; New Zealand Curriculum, 2007, p. 14, bolding my own).

Ironically, that one statement pretty much accurately summarises the commitment to the radical ideology of social constructivism and describes exactly what was happening within the halls and walls of the Ministry of Education from 2000 to 2007: ideologically motivated groupthink without any quarter given to dissenting views.  

Subsequently, the Ministry of Education doubled down on MLEs, albeit renaming them Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) in its School Property Strategy 2011 - 2021. This plan targeted all levels of compulsory education, including primary, intermediate, and secondary schools.   

A quick Google search pulled up a report by Adele Redmond (Nov 2017 Stuff) that noted that the Ministry had spent close to a billion dollars on MLEs since 2013. A New Zealand Initiative report noted that despite an OIA request in 2016, the Ministry refused to release figures on the amount spent on MLEs, claiming that data was not held. However, the report noted that in 2016, $5 billion had been invested in school buildings since the launch of the property strategy. (“No Evidence, No Evaluation, No Exit`”, p.14, Dr Michael Joohnston, 2022). That’s a lot of cash to splash in four years without hard evidence.  

A charitable view is that our Ministry officials rejected research evidence to back their business and investment case due to the notorious lack of reliability of education research. Perhaps it was just a gut feeling. It could have been the encouragement of the Clarke Government Education Ministers Trevor Mallard and Steve Maherey. Indeed, one of these two must have signed off on the strategy and the planned expenditure. Surely, these two community stalwarts would have ensured investment only occurred backed by evidence-based research?

Yet, the report by Johnston notes, inter alia, that:

“In response to a request under the Official Information Act lodged in support of this report, the Ministry was asked to supply information regarding the existing number of ILEs; how they are distributed among primary, intermediate and secondary schools, how many students are being educated in them; and how much money has been spent on them. The Ministry claimed that it does not hold any of this information. Nor did it furnish any reliable or generalisable research evidence on which it based its strategy to develop ILEs. Finally, the Ministry confirmed that it has undertaken no evaluation of the educational effects of adopting ILEs, nor any survey of community or parent views of these classroom environments. (“No Evidence, No Evaluation, No Exit`”, p.6, Dr Michael Joohnston, 2022).

These issues were bravely picked up even earlier by Jo-Ann Bisset in her rationale for her master thesis, “The Move to Modern Learning Environments in New Zealand Secondary Schools: Step Forward or Smokescreen?” (2014):

“Despite this major change for New Zealand schools, there is very little research into the rationale and perceived benefits, or otherwise, of the introduction of MLEs in the New Zealand context.  However, the move to Modern Learning Environments in New Zealand secondary schools is happening, despite the paucity of research”.

Bissett does not oppose these changes; her thesis focuses on the teacher and school leader training required to ensure sufficient learner success in such an environment. 

I am confident she is well-intentioned, and I don’t want to knock her efforts to make a silk purse out of a sours’ ear.  But firstly, it should not have been left to a master’s student to do this research post facto; second, I challenge both her and the ministry’s underlying assumptions.  She notes in her introduction:

“It is challenging to provide modern teaching practices in some older settings. The way students learn today is very different to the past, yet the majority of school learning environments reflect the period in which they were built. These environments were often designed as isolated silos, where a teacher effectively shuts the classroom door and imparts ‘expert knowledge”. MLEs, on the other hand, are designed to “provide teachers with the ability to use innovative and imaginative teaching practices that are not the traditional classrooms of the past” (Ministry of Education, 2014b, bolding my own).”

Firstly, I have seen no evidence that students learn differently today. New technologies have changed how we can access information. The internet has greatly democratised access to knowledge, making instant access available to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere. 

But does the medium or the vastness of the knowledge available change how we learn. My critics will say I am being pedantic. But am I? Is access to information equivalent to learning?  What do we mean by learning?

The Oxford Dictionary defines learning as:

To gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) by study, experience, or being taught.

Example: "They’d started learning French"

Now, the example above is helpful. You can now learn French with the help of an “app” like Duolingo. Duolingo is cool—very 21st-century. Yet, if you try it, you will find that it assists the learning of French words and grammar through repetition, memorisation, and constant reminders to keep practising. 

This is not to say that repetition and memorisation are the only ways to learn. They just need to be balanced with other approaches, such as immersion, when learning a language. For more on this, see my earlier article entitled “Too much co-construction in New Zealand schools.”

Unsurprisingly, the internet has not changed how we learn, nor will AI.  Evolution is a powerful force that can result in astonishing outcomes over time. The human brain is the prime artefact.  But evolution is slow.  An excellent example is that our brains have yet to adapt to the food-rich or obesogenic environment of the 21st Century. If they had, we would not need Ozempic to fool our brains into thinking we are full.   

Secondly, Bissett’s idea that teachers cannot use imaginative teaching practices in traditional classrooms is errant nonsense and condescending to all the teachers of the 20th century. Some teachers are just more practised, inventive and dedicated than others. We would be significantly better off if the Ministry of Education had invested even half of the billions spent on MLEs to upgrade teacher training and pay teachers more.

Before you accuse me of sitting on the sidelines and taking potshots, I want to emphasise that I am not writing this article just to be a cynic.  I am writing as a taxpayer and a citizen with some experience in the education sector who genuinely seeks to ensure that our children are well-educated. I sincerely ask you to support the new Minister of Education’s quest to bring explicit instruction back into classrooms and content, not just competencies, back into the curriculum for our kid’s sake.  I believe Education and good physical and mental health are the greatest gifts we can give them.

So, back to my opening point. Liberals, especially those with a more extreme agenda, have a terrible habit of moving fast and breaking things.  Now, most of you will be familiar with those words as they were the motto of Facebook, launched by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Surely, being in the company of FaceBook and the like is a good thing?

No, not at all. Facebook is a private company, and when it started, all the risk of success or failure rested in the hands of private investors. 

The Ministry of Education, on the other hand, is a government department that spends taxpayer money.  That is not to say they should not make bold moves. Still, the least they should do is base their investments on clear evidence and, even then, trial options before resolving to make fundamental changes that cost billions of dollars based on nothing better than the rhetorical claims of education researchers. 

I am justified in providing my own brief analysis of the outcomes of the 2007 NZ Curriculum and the 2011 School Property Strategy. The anecdotal evidence I have gathered is at least as worthy as the Ministry's “paucity” of evidence at the outset. 

From what I can see, we now have a situation where neither students nor teachers are happy.   Where ADHD abounds and where autistic children see going into one of these places as their worst nightmare.  Boys simply switch off from learning and become active disruptors.  They could deal with the old classrooms in between bursts of activity on the playing fields, but now, with every facet of learning in these environments also linked to endless discussion, forget it.

Precious school grounds are now dominated by these monstrous barns and parents are often deciding to homeschool.  Money that could have been spent on teacher salaries and training is now lost in hubristic halls of concrete and steel. 

This cautionary tale is not academic.  There is a danger that we are about to rush to the next bright, shiny thing and implement AI-augmented education. 

AI is revolutionary in its potential impact across the economy. It is a significant disruptor. It has a great deal of potential in education.  It may well allow for accelerated and personalised learning.  But there is firstly a danger of becoming distracted from the science of how we learn, particularly as children. Ironically, these new large language model AIs serve as a very relevant model of how our brains function, offering insights into how we learn. I will turn to that in a future article.

However, there is a real danger that the current inequity of education will just be amplified as those who have the benefit of personalised learning plans, those who have the benefit of building knowledge on top of knowledge, speed away from those who don’t. We will see manifest the truism of the Ministry’s admonition that people learn in social contexts and that “....people adopt and adapt practices that they see used and valued by those closest to them.”

New Zealand has mis-invested in creating a generation of young people who have been poorly educated in our schools over the first quarter of the 21st Century. Some of this generation have home environments, circumstances, or IQs that have allowed them to thrive despite the lack of content in the curriculum. The rest, perhaps the majority, are slipping further behind, and many are failing to even attend school as they adopt and adapt the practices they see by those close to them.

Perhaps the greatest shame is that our Ministry of Education seeks to create “equity”  (a concept that needs to be unpacked to understand its real meaning, which I will address in a future article). Instead, they have exacerbated and perpetuated our society’s inequality in education outcomes without the appropriate evidence to support their strategies.

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The old saying goes if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  It accords with a conservative view of the world that insists that unless you are sure you are going to make it better, leave well alone. Before we bang on about 21st-century learning or other buzz phrases, let’s agree we should first focus on the science of how humans learn.