Tolley Backing Grammar – Nats going for Epsom?

According to the NZ Herald, Tolley is backing Grammar in their NCEA rebellion. I am surprised by this move, I was expecting a few more slaps with a wet bus ticket for Auckland Grammar on this one.

Tolley has condoned a school rebelling against government policy. Auckland Grammar may not be technically breaking the law, but certainly in spirit and proudly so at that! The law supposedly says that NCEA must be offered in state schools, but I can’t seem to find any legislation with that wording. There was no mention of NCEA in the Education Act when I searched the legislation website. In fact, it only is mentioned in statutes around eligibility around benefits as far as I can tell.

She’s given plenty of ammunition to the likes of Kate Gainsford, saying that she’s inconsistent with her telling off her primary colleagues for rebelling against National Standards. As an aside, the letter written by Gainsford to me seems it was very much ‘leaked’ Sir Humphrey style.

Since nothing Tolley could say would placate teachers regarding National Standards, this could be a moot point. She may have decided that since nothing bar ditching the policy is going to make teachers happy, it’s not going to make any difference.

My stab in the dark guess is that National is trying earn brownie points in the Epsom electorate, with the plan of taking the seat instead of leaving it to Act.

What does Kate Gainsford mean by average?

Kate Gainsford has launched militantly into Tolley’s claim that the average pay of a secondary teacher is around $70,000 in this PPTA press release. According to these salary figures by the Ministry, the figure was reached by taking the total wage bill on 7 April, and extrapolating that out for a year, and then dividing by the full time equivalent number of teachers. It’s a mean value.

So what about the median? Many people would say that it is a better measure of “average” income than the mean. According to the ministry figures around two thirds of teachers are on the top scale. That means the median pay for a teacher has to be at least $68,890. And that’s without any units or allowances factored in.

It would seem the best Gainsford can claim is that Tolley is using a misleading statistic. She goes far beyond that in colourful fashion, claiming that Tolley is spreading “blatant misinformation” and compares Tolley’s use of statistics to saying:

The average NZer is a 5’6” hermaphrodite

which in my opinion makes Gainsford look hysterical. She claims that getting to an average figure of $70,000 is impossible.

“This is blatant misinformation – the starting salary for a secondary teacher with four years training is $45,000 and if those teachers pass an annual appraisal based on professional performance standards, they can progress to the sum of $68,000. You do not have to be a maths teacher to see that no matter how hard you try you cannot get an average of $70,000 from those figures.”

Is Gainsford saying that units and allowances don’t count as income? That is misleading. You could make an argument about reimbursements for any expenses teacher incur, but in general if you have PAYE deducted from something, that something is income. She points to the $45,653 salary of a beginning teacher in part of her arguments that $70,000 is a misleading figure to quote. Well, I don’t think of a teacher at the start of their career as an average teacher – I think of them as a beginner or novice.

So what is Kate Gainsford’s definition of an “average” teacher? I’d love to know.