Fact: New Zealand’s education system is the envy of much of the world.

This is a matter of pride for many of us, I’m sure, but it simply does not suit the National government’s “private is best and nothing the government does is ever any good” ideology, so let’s do all we can to break it, how about that for an idea?

According to this article ‘Class size life could help education’ (NZ Herald) the latest claim out of Treasury is that if we increase class sizes by “about 3” students, we’ll be able to have less teachers overall, so we can pay the ones we still have more, so we’ll then (somehow) have more gifted and master teachers, and that will somehow make things better.

I think it goes something like this:

1. Increase class sizes
2. Fire a bunch of teachers
3. ???
4. Profit!

Step 3 is left to sort itself out, but we’ll probably hear the phrase Public Private Partnership at some point. Don’t you know that private business never do anything stupid or wrong, never mind that about 80% fail in their first year. Because privately run businesses are SO EFFICIENT, and the public sector is mumble-mumble-let’s-sell-it-all-off.

Something along those lines. (We’ve heard this all before.)

Treasury say that “master teachers”, through their skill at the job, teach so well that educational outcomes for students turn out to be about the same as students who were in smaller classes.

Their number is that it’s the equivalent of about a 10 pupil reduction.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were true. Gifted teachers are inspiring. I think we’ve probably all had one (or if we’re extraordinarily lucky, 2) at some point. They make you strive, they show you the way forward, and they help you figure out how to get there.

But here’s the thing, maybe 1% of teachers is really gifted. You can’t send a normal teacher on a week long training course and turn them into a gifted teacher.

So we’d still only have about 1% of these amazingly high performing teachers. But the class sizes for all teachers across the board, including the very large majority who are merely good, and the few who are (frankly) bad, would also increase.

In other words, we’d have worsened the likely educational outcomes for 99% of pupils.

Exactly who do they expect to buy the rubbish they’re trying to sell us?

I’ll give you three guesses which kinds of schools will remain entirely unaffected by these changes, and continue to have wonderful educational outcomes for their (mainly white, mainly rich) pupils. Some valid answers will rhyme with words like “Drammer Bone”, or “Brivate Stools”.

There is literally no education system in the entire world where teachers are paid so little, yet perform at such a high standard that their students come out topping the global educational outcome rankings.

Don’t understand how good our system is? Check out this revealing chart (as seen on DimPost):

New Zealand’s education system is a top performer, and by comparison with other countries that perform anywhere near our standard is headshakingly underfunded.

So I have a different suggestion than Treasury:
Don’t mess with a good thing, don’t try to fix something that already works, and just as an aside, maybe leave the design and future of our education system to education experts, not bean counters.

One very important note, as good as I believe our education system to be in the main, it’s clear that many Maori & Pacific Island students, and students in lower socio-economic groups generally, have much worse educational outcomes than desired.

Our system is not perfect, I’m sure it’s possible to make changes that will make the results for our people even better. But the idea that increasing class sizes is the way ahead is completely boggling.

But if any improvements are identified, it’s the teachers who are the ones who are qualified to tell us what they are. Then Treasury can do the vital job of helping find the money to pay for it.

But until that happens, they should stick to their actual job which is advising the Government on economic matters, not on education.

Updated to note that there is some discussion on YCombinator about limitations of the design of the study behind the Pupil score as a function of teacher salaries chart. I don’t believe those design limitations change its relevance in this context, just don’t read too much into the chart in terms of greater causation. Thanks to Keith Patton on Twitter for providing the YCombinator reference.

[youtube width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pw-2LZT7Ys[/youtube]

This is very important info.

My second give way rules video ‘Top of the T goes before me’ is also available.

I got this handsome chap in Art Museum shop in the Mori Tower in Tokyo, you’re meant to colour them in and customise them to suit yourself, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to sully his milky perfection. One day.

Check out this gallery of customised Munnys, some of them are completely bonkers. Not many Raffys though.

Tonight I’m getting the band back together.

Since Discourse has been on hiatus I’ve moved to a standing desk (the desk here is around my navel height), I don’t know how this will affect the show, or if it will affect it at all. Maybe my voice will sound different? Maybe I’ll be more impatient?

Regardless, the show is going to be a train wreck, we’re doing it live, and once again doing it with streaming video. But I’ve set things up to be a bit more flash than last time we did that (though still not nearly as flash as the Election Show, which was ridiculously flash), with clever video switching, multiple video angles in the studio, Skype co-hosts calling in, and interacting with whatever audience is left following the break, who will be heckling us from the chat room.

It’s all very exciting, you know. I hope you can make it.

Several months ago, following the slowly building success of my weekly “underground internet radio show” (as described by NBR) I decided to produce a live online “internet TV” election show.

I’ve been live streaming our weekly show recording sessions, and have made a couple of live video shows (though in about the lowest tech way possible). I mentioned my idea to a couple of my friends & collaborators on the show, Ben Gracewood & Dylan Reeve. Dylan is an old friend, we’ve made short films together – and won an award for one of them – and he works in TV as an editor on the most popular show in the country. He has a bunch of talented friends in the industry, and with his hard work and sustained effort, we made something quite special.

It’s not just me that thinks it was special either, our viewers said things like “The Discourse election special is going off.”, and “Most entertaining, loosely-based election coverage is at discourse.co.nz.”, and “Loved the Discourse live election show. Can’t wait for the next election now!”

We had our share of technology problems, but considering the truck load of gear that arrived needing installation, configuration, and operation, all in the space of just a few hours, I think we did pretty well.

There were some problems that could have been easily resolved with a bit more testing, but testing was extremely difficult given that all the hardware only existed in one place on the day itself. So we didn’t have our on-screen graphics, diagrams, tickers, twitter box and so on for most of the show – but it all came up in the end.

If you didn’t watch the show live on election night, it is possible to watch it on justin.tv/discourse, but the recording there is sketchy, and broken up into quite awkward chunks.

Here are a few behind the scenes photos.

Dylan working on the control centre for the show, on the other side of this desk is the Mac we used to do the live hookups, Skype and so on.

This is camera 2, mounted on a big swinging jib arm, some people in the chat room didn’t like it moving around, but it was so damn cool we had a hard time listening to those people.

This is Wendy, sound recordist extraordinaire, you can see a couple of the cameras – all Sony PDW 700s, there’s one more hiding in front of her.

And here’s a big giant gallery of grabs from the stream.

The big blobs are from when I was away from my computer.

No big deal, just a rhino chair. Designed by Maximo Riera.

Can’t help thinking it’d go great with this other thing I want, from the same designer.

A new credit card arrived, plain white envelope, terms and conditions inside, but I knew what it was as I’ve been feeling all of my mail for the last month hoping for this – as, obviously, the previous one was running very close to expiration.

Once upon a time it was optional to add a PIN to your credit card (hell, once upon a time it wasn’t even possible to add a PIN to your credit card), now it’s mandatory, and it was that requirement that had ASB send me off on quite a satisfactory journey of verification, malware countermeasures, and delicious gooey multifactor goodness.

First up, of course, you have to log in to the bank website, which is all encrypted and verified by SSL. I don’t use a username or password I use on any other site.

This is the most basic of first steps, “something you know”, vis: username and password. So far so ordinary, but once you get into the card activation section things get slightly more interesting.

We get our first example of requiring a second authentication factor “something you have”, in this case the thing you have is the secret code printed on the back of the card. Possibly you could argue this is just a third example of “something you know”.

Next we have the bit I found most interesting, partly because I didn’t even notice they’d done it until I was about to hit enter. The numbers in the pad are scrambled, so malware that tracks your mouse clicks doesn’t net “the bad guys” anything useful.

Interesting that my brain translated this without even alerting me to anything suss, either it’s because I play too many computer games, so I’m used to little puzzles like this, or maybe everyone’s brain does the same thing?

Sure enough, after submission the “re-enter your code” box has a different number order.

Lastly, another factor: “something you have” again, this time my mobile phone – I couldn’t proceed without entering a randomly generated string of numbers they texted to me. I’m sure most people are used to this, it’s only in a combination with all of the other steps that I found this noteworthy.

Very satisfying, possibly this has been the way it’s worked for a couple of years, but of course I’m not in the habit of getting a lot of credit cards.

Have you noticed any other examples of really satisfyingly “good feeling” security?