Long division

Erica Stanford's education revision may bring a touch of nostalgia, but a second neoliberal wave is building.

- Danyl McLauchlan

NCEA was doomed anyway. No educational framework so dependent on internal assessment could remain viable in the age of artificial intelligence. Schools the world over are going back to end-of-year exams. But Education Minister Erica Stanford's unilateral decision to scrap the entire system - a multi-decade debacle in which students were graded on skills like making coffee, learning to juggle and picking up rubbish while our scores in international education comparisons relentlessly declined - makes a sharp break with the culture of New Zealand politics.

Ministers do not replace core components of the education system merely because they've failed hundreds of thousands of students and inflicted profound damage on the nation's long-term prosperity. It is simply not done. Consider the agonising decades of inaction over other known problems like the broken tax system, the broken energy sector, the inertia over fixing grocery markets. Consider the 30-plus inquiries into Oranga Tamariki over the past three decades - an organisation that remains horribly defective.

The unspoken role of ministers is to minimise media risk, follow official advice to conduct reviews, and oversee departmental mergers, reorganisations and rebrands: to create the illusion of change while leaving everything intact. If Stanford successfully reforms the public education system she will join a very short list of recent ministers - among them Labour's David Cunliffe, who fixed telecommunications, and National's Steven Joyce and Amy Adams (the ultrafast broadband rollout) - who drove meaningful change in their portfolios.