Caught in between: How the scientific

management of education in New Zealand

made history history¹

Gregor Fountain

Abstract

Scientific management theory (SMT) is based on state legislation to control education. It usually involves an outcomes-based curriculum, standards-based assessment, audit mechanisms, and an unquestioned commitment to “evidence-based” practice. This approach has been detrimental to the study of history, where a student’s progress depends on the depth and breadth of their knowledge about the past rather than isolated, measurable, and transferable skills. History’s predicament has been compounded by the way in which the SMT model has been implemented in New Zealand. Particular difficulties have arisen from the organisation of the curriculum around learning areas rather than subjects, as well as the development of standards-based assessment for history without an outcomes-based curriculum to work from. The revised New Zealand curriculum provides a small window of opportunity for history teachers to undermine the scientific management of their subject and to reintegrate curriculum, assessment, and evaluation.

Introduction

In 2002, the Labour-led government implemented the final aspect of the scientific management model of educational control in New Zealand. After several false starts, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) was finally rolled out over three years. It was heralded as a seamless qualification through which students would be recognised for their performance against predetermined standards. Scaled percentages and bell curves were a thing of the past. Despite the three levels of achievement (Achieved, Achieved with Merit, and Achieved with Excellence) that could be awarded in order to distinguish levels of achievement against each standard, the NCEA was a relatively pure form of standards-based assessment.

Philosophically, it appeared to sit comfortably with the outcomes-based New Zealand curriculum that had been introduced for seven essential learning areas from 1992. The curriculum, which specified outcomes for student attainment at each curriculum level, could now be summatively assessed, with national qualifications awarded accordingly. The Tomorrow’s Schools reforms, energetically championed by the Prime Minister and Minister of Education, David Lange, between 1987 and 1989, had led to a vastly reduced educational bureaucracy. The Picot Report argued that many educational decisions should be made at the level that was most affected by them—the school (Wood, 1993). The state would maintain control of the curriculum and set National Educational Guidelines and National Administrative Guidelines (NEGs and NAGs) to point schools in the right direction. School inspectors were replaced with reviewers from the Education Review Office (ERO), who were to perform audits, ensuring that the boards of trustees were doing their job and that the government was getting value for its money. An era of “evidence-based” research about teaching and learning began and has escalated ever since. Boards of trustees and teachers were required to explain how they knew they were “adding value” to the education of each student. To this day there is an unquestioned commitment throughout the education sector to the idea that we need evidence to justify what we do.

Since the second term of the Fourth Labour Government (1987–1990) until the launch of the revised New Zealand curriculum, there has effectively been a bipartisan commitment to the scientific management of education by New Zealand’s political parties. The political debate around NCEA has focused largely on problems with student motivation and the quality of examination papers, marking, and moderation rather than the legitimacy of standards-based assessment for high-stakes qualifications. Public debate about the revised New Zealand curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007), and the draft curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2006) which preceded it, largely centred on its content and omissions rather than the philosophical underpinnings of an outcomes-based document. There has recently been a shift in emphasis in the work of the ERO, but the audit style of their visits and reports seems to be entrenched. Over the last decade we have operated in an educational environment where the application of SMT has largely been accepted as the norm.

The birth of SMT is generally attributed to Fredrick Taylor, a 19th century American engineer who developed his management framework in order to improve industrial efficiency. He showed that the industrial process could be broken down into component parts, and that each part could be scientifically analysed so that it could be carried out in the most efficient way (Neyland, 2007).

The impetus for the wholesale application of his model to education in the Western world came in the 1980s. Governments, often influenced by business leaders, began to question the ability of schools to develop in their students the skills and knowledge needed to sustain their nation’s “competitive advantage” (Wood, 1993). There was an assumption by advocates of this approach that educational tasks could be deconstructed, scientifically analysed, and reconstructed, and that each element could be put in its place one step at a time. Consequently, so-called “experts” were given the task of developing a curriculum, and it was passed on to teachers as a product for them to implement (Cornbleth, 1990). This approach appealed to specialists, funding agencies, administrators, and the general public because it created an impression of value for money, efficiency, and effectiveness (Cornbleth, 1990).

History and the scientific management of education

SMT assumes that learning is a linear process that functions like a machine, and that every piece can be taken apart, analysed, and then put back together (Cornbleth, 1990). Can the subject of history (or any other knowledge-based discipline) actually be disassembled and reassembled in this way? History is a subject where a student’s progress depends on the depth and breadth of their understanding about the past rather than isolated, measurable, and transferable skills. Certainly there are historical skills such as analysis, perception, and critical thinking that underpin the discipline, but these skills are themselves dependent on how much content a student understands and in how much depth (Elley, 2004). History cannot easily be reduced to a series of curriculum outcomes that are applicable to a variety of topics. The history achievement objectives in The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) refer to student understanding of the causes and consequences of past events, but history is full of apparently similar situations that have vastly different outcomes. For instance, Geoffrey Partington (1998) points out that an arms race in the period up to 1914 contributed to the outbreak of the First World War, but another arms race in the period after the Second World War, arguably, prevented a Third. In short, success in history relies on knowledge of an historical context rather than the understanding of generic concepts and the ability to apply historical skills.

History also suffers under the SMT model because its technocratic approach undermines the teacher. Good history teachers are passionate and knowledgeable about the past. Much of their integrity as teachers, both in the classroom and in the staffroom, comes from their wide base of knowledge about history. The scientific management approach casts them into the role of passive implementers or managers of expert design. Worse still, historical knowledge itself can be trivialised when it is packaged into awkward shapes and sizes so that it can meet the outcomes specified in the curriculum or an assessment task. This leaves little room for a teacher or a student to follow a worthwhile tangent, which they and others might be interested in pursuing in order to gain a wider understanding of the context (Cornbleth, 1990).

History and the New Zealand curriculum

As well as this uneasy fit between the scientific management of education and the teaching and learning of history, in New Zealand this problem has been compounded through a series of local decisions and historical accidents that have been to the detriment of the subject. In New Zealand, history is an optional subject for students in Years 11–13. (Schools are expected to cover some historical content in their social studies programmes in Years 1–10.) The content of the senior history courses in New Zealand received its last major overhaul in the mid- to late 1980s. A major review involving teachers and university historians, led by David Wood from the Curriculum Development Division of the Department of Education, culminated in the release of History, Forms 5–7: Syllabus for Schools (Ministry of Education, 1989). This was a series of broad statements that outlined the purpose of teaching history and a process by which historical topics could be studied.

The syllabus was accompanied by a series of prescriptions for School Certificate, Sixth Form Certificate, and University Bursary, which provided the specific detail of the topics that would be included in each course. Each topic was centred on a series of focusing questions, with bullet points to outline the content the teacher was expected to cover. Within this framework these prescriptions provided a great deal of teacher autonomy. There was a vast range of topics to choose from and teachers were promised that resources and professional development for the new topics would follow (M. Sheehan, personal communication, 28 May 2007).² This promise was never delivered.

As a result of the recommendations of the Picot Report, the Department of Education was abolished and replaced by a much slimmer ministry. The ministry’s approach was to put out to tender contracts for the development of resources and professional development (Wood, 1993). History, as a senior subject only studied by a minority of students, was not seen as being important enough to justify expenditure.

With the election of the National Party government in 1990 and the appointment of Dr Lockwood Smith as its Minister of Education, it quickly became apparent that the curriculum was to be totally revamped and organised according to an outcomes-based model. It appeared as if the life of the history syllabus and prescription statements would be very short. Wood (1993) has shown that the syllabus statements were dismissed as being useless by the Minister because they lacked attainment targets for the different levels of schooling. They were also disregarded because they had been produced in the context of the unfashionable Curriculum Development Division of the Department of Education, where they had supposedly been subject to “teacher capture” (Wood, 1993). But, as a relatively small optional senior subject, history was seen to have a very low priority and a stand-alone outcomes-based curriculum for history was never written.

The study of history should have played a major role in meeting the goals set out in the new curriculum framework. Principle 8 of The New Zealand Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Education, 1992) referred to the bicultural identity of New Zealand society and its multicultural makeup. The rationale for curriculum change emphasised the importance of understanding the culture and heritage of New Zealand’s major trading partners that were increasingly found in Asia and the Pacific rather than Europe. An exciting new history curriculum could have been built around the history of Asia and the Pacific. This could have examined New Zealand history in relation to the histories of other countries in these areas.³

Instead, The New Zealand Curriculum was organised around seven essential learning areas. Development began on the new outcomes-based Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1997). When this document was finally released in 1997, it contained achievement objectives for social studies for students from Year 1 to Year 13. This was an astonishing development. Social studies had a long history in New Zealand for students in Years 1–10, but in the senior school students usually specialised in history or geography. Strangely, there was no School Certificate or Bursary examination or Sixth Form Certificate prescription provided for senior social studies, so only a small handful of schools that were trialling the new unit standards paid any attention to the social studies achievement objectives for Levels 6–8 of the curriculum.

The release of the new social studies curriculum had virtually no influence on the teaching of senior history. Many history teachers were suspicious of the senior levels of the new curriculum, and some became convinced that there was a plot to do away with history as a subject altogether. Most just continued teaching their senior history classes as they always had. At a time when their colleagues were grappling with curriculum levels, processes, and strands, history teachers had time to read yet another book on, say, Garibaldi’s unification of Italy, which they hoped would provide a new angle on their favourite topic.

Actually, history teachers found themselves in a difficult situation. They didn’t have an outcomes-based curriculum, but this anomaly didn’t provide them with immunity from the other aspects of the scientific management of their school. The quality-assurance policy of the school I taught in during the late 1990s demanded that the head of each department submit schemes of work to senior management that identified the achievement objectives (unpacked with specific learning outcomes) that each unit of work covered. Looking back, it is little wonder that I found this task so difficult. History didn’t have achievement objectives.

Worse was the experience I had at another school, where I was required to attend a meeting of the board of trustees in order to report on the progress of students in my department. The board members took considerable convincing that we didn’t have “achievement objectives” as such in the history “curriculum”. (I didn’t even try to explain that we didn’t actually have a history “curriculum” at all.) One of the recommendations ERO made to the board of trustees at this school was that the student reports that parents received should be based on the curriculum levels. It seemed as if even the ERO didn’t understand that some subjects didn’t fit neatly into their scientific management framework.

History and NCEA

For several years, then, the subject of history operated in a bizarre twilight zone, governed by the assumptions of scientific management but without a curriculum that followed those same assumptions. It was not until 2002, through the introduction of NCEA, that SMT hauled history into line. History educators now faced another major problem. How could a standards-based assessment framework be established to assess a “curriculum” that was not outcomes-based and contained a huge range of topics for teachers to choose from? The solution was to focus on skills and generic understandings rather than content. All the history achievement standards are decontextualised. Some assess skills such as research, the communication of “historical ideas”, essay writing, and source analysis, all of which can be used to assess a student who is studying any topic. Others focus on “historical perspectives”, “historical forces”, “significant decisions made by people in history”, and “significant historical situations in the context of change” (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2007a). In some ways this decontextualised approach was a clever solution. It meant that teachers could continue to teach the topics they always had without being tied to a certain topic to meet the requirements of a particular achievement standard. Consequently, history has not suffered from the same fragmentation that has been the curse of standards-based assessment in some other subject areas.

Had the NCEA qualification been entirely internally assessed, this solution may have been adequate, but as a traditional subject, history was expected to have at least half of its achievement standards assessed in external examinations. This proved to be difficult, particularly in the Level 2 external assessments. Because history missed out on the curriculum development in the 1990s, the Level 2 history examination is effectively assessing a Sixth Form Certificate prescription which was intended to be internally assessed.

There are 32 possible topics for teachers to choose from. Each year the examiner is faced with the unenviable task of developing questions that allow students who might have studied any of these topics the opportunity to reach the standard. Their solution has been to construct generic questions. The sources chosen for the source analysis part of the exam are drawn from a totally obscure historical setting that no students have studied. In 2007, NCEA Level 2 history students answered source-based questions on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2007b).

Clearly, source analysis has become merely a comprehension exercise that fails to examine any high-level historical thinking. Genuine assessment of historical thinking requires the students to have an understanding of a particular source within the context of a topic they have studied. The situation is arguably worse in the essay-writing component of the examination. For instance, candidates attempting the essay question in the 2006 NCEA Level 2 history examination were required to:

Choose ONE historical force or movement that relates to a government’s or a leader’s rule AND that influenced people’s lives in one of the topics that you have studied this year … Describe and explain the background and events that led to the end of a government’s or leader’s rule. How did an historical force or movement related to these events have an influence on people’s lives at this time? (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2006, p. 2)

Here, the examiner appears to have simply shifted the problem of framing a question that meets the standard and is applicable to a range of topics on to the students sitting the examination.

The controversy that surrounded the setting of the 2004 NCEA Level 1 history examination further underlines the difficulty of assessing a non-outcomes-based “curriculum” through standards-based assessment. In a question that examined their understanding of different historical perspectives on the issue of Māori land claims in the 1970s, candidates were asked to provide a response on behalf of a “National Party MP, not sympathetic to Māori concerns” (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2004). National Party politicians were outraged, claiming political bias in the setting of examination questions. In 2005 the Education and Science Select Committee⁴ held an inquiry. In my presentation to the Select Committee in my role as Chairperson of the New Zealand History Teachers’ Association, I argued that this question was the result of applying standards-based assessment to an outdated “curriculum”. The topic had not been designed to allow for the assessment of different historical perspectives; it had been devised in the 1980s in order to illustrate a broad theme of race relations. The examiner had been forced to simplify the history in order to make it fit the requirements of the achievement standard. They did this by specifying a range of perspectives, including the one that caused the controversy. I suggested that an update of the history “curriculum” was urgently required (Education and Science Select Committee, 2005).

History and the revised New Zealand curriculum

So, the scientific management of education has had a detrimental impact on the teaching and learning of history in New Zealand, and some of the problem has stemmed from a lack of alignment between the “curriculum” and the assessment. Does the philosophy and direction of the revised New Zealand curriculum and subsequent decisions made about assessment and evaluation represent a big enough shift away from the scientific management model of educational control to allow for a revival in history education in New Zealand?

For the first time the New Zealand curriculum contains specific achievement objectives for history in curriculum Levels 6–8 within the Social Science learning area. History teachers are pleased that their subject finally has official status within the curriculum. They are still waiting for detailed curriculum guidelines about what they should teach in a much anticipated “second-tier” history curriculum document, but there is no longer talk of a plot to get rid of history. Although some decisions about the senior secondary school curriculum still need to be made, the new document provides a great deal of autonomy for schools (and therefore history teachers) to shape a curriculum around the needs of learners in their communities. The pedagogical emphasis on the creation of a learning community within the classroom has exciting potential for history education as teachers and students work alongside each other in pursuit of evidence about the past. All this represents a major shift away from the assembly-line model, but it will be up to teachers to make significant shifts in what they teach and how they teach it.

Significantly, rather than relying solely on curriculum and assessment “experts” chosen by education agencies, teachers (through their subject associations) have been given autonomy by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Ministry of Education to oversee the process by which the achievement standards are aligned to the revised curriculum. One aspect of the standards review is a reduction in the number of externally assessed achievement standards in each subject (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2008).⁵ An increase in internal assessment provides teachers with more flexibility to choose contexts that suit their students’ needs and interests without fear of the contexts being irrelevant to the questions in the externally assessed examination. In the future it is my hope that all of the history achievement standards that are currently externally assessed will be made available for internal assessment. This would grant teachers the flexibility of choosing contexts that meet the interests and needs of their students (and creating their own assessments to meet the standards), or following the more prescriptive content requirements of the external examination. History teachers must take the opportunity available to them to put an end to the nonhistorical generic approach to question setting which has plagued the external assessment of their subject since 2002, even if this means a reduction in the range of topics that can be externally assessed.

As long as government is funding education, schools are going to be monitored, but the ERO is placing a new emphasis on schools’ self-reviewing and increasingly sees its role as reviewing a school’s self-evaluation processes (Stoop, 2008). This change in emphasis should give reflective and creative history departments the confidence to explore a range of content possibilities and teaching approaches. Ideally, the effectiveness of teaching history would be judged in the long term. Often the true impact of learning can only be seen years after a student completes a course of study. What the student does with the knowledge and skills after the course reveals more about the ultimate success of the course than their examination grade. Another indicator of the quality of history programmes should be the way in which society at large engages with issues surrounding New Zealand’s nationhood. For instance, the remarkably poor level of debate concerning issues such as the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process or the abolition of the right to appeal to the Privy Council, as well as the longevity of the myths surrounding Moriori in New Zealand, reflect the poor state of history education in this country. If history teaching is successful in schools, the level of informed debate on such issues should improve over time.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that for both philosophical and practical reasons, scientific management models have not served history education in New Zealand well since the 1990s. As a result the subject has been marginalised. With history finally gaining a place within the revised New Zealand curriculum, and with teachers being given increased autonomy to make decisions about curriculum and assessment, there is an opportunity for history education to claim back lost ground. If they are going to take this opportunity, history teachers must embrace the teaching and learning possibilities that are available through increased internal assessment. They must reject the nonhistorical generic approaches to external assessment that were forced on them while their subject was caught in between contradictory models of curriculum and assessment.

Notes

1&;&;The original version of this paper was submitted as an assignment for Victoria University of Wellington’s EDUC 521 course, Curriculum and Assessment. Course lecturer: Dr Jim Neyland.

2&;&;Mark Sheehan’s forthcoming (and fascinating) PhD thesis Defending the High Ground”: The Transformation of an Academic Discipline into a Secondary School Subject: A Case Study of the New Zealand History Curriculum in the Later Twentieth Century focuses on the process by which the history syllabus statements and prescriptions were developed and captured in the 1980s.

3&;&;The syllabus and prescription statements actually provided plenty of scope for developing courses around this sort of framework, but because there was no professional development of teachers or resources to help them tackle these topics, most teachers kept teaching the European-based topics they had taught prior to the syllabus and prescription reviews. Hunter and Farthing’s (2004) Waikato case study shows that history teachers totally disregarded the curriculum framework (Ministry of Education, 1992) in their programme planning.

4&;&;The Education and Science Select Committee was chaired by New Zealand First MP and Associate Minister of Education, the Hon Brian Donnelly.

5&;&;The New Zealand Qualification Authority’s standards review document states that for standards that are to be assessed in time-limited examinations, a minimum of one hour must be available for the assessment of each standard. In practice, this means that no more than three standards can be assessed in any one three-hour examination.

References

Cornbleth, C. (1990). Curriculum in context. New York: Falmer Press.

Education and Science Select Committee. (2005). Inquiry into the setting of National Certificate of Educational Achievement examination questions. Retrieved 27 May 2007, from http://www.parliament.nz/NR/rdonlyres/EFFB3D85-A901-4473-84E4-42844D84BB70/15158/DBSCH_SCR_3228_2301.pdf

Elley, W. (2004). Curriculum reform in retrospect: Was it forward or backward? In A. O’Neill, J. Clark, & R. Openshaw (Eds.), Reshaping culture, knowledge and learning (pp. 91–108). Palmerston North: Dunmore Press.

Hunter, P., & Farthing, B. (2004). Talking history: Teachers’ perceptions of “their” curriculum in the context of history in the New Zealand curriculum 1980–2003. Hamilton: Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research.

Ministry of Education. (1989). History, forms 5 to 7: Syllabus for schools. Wellington: Learning Media.

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New Zealand Qualifications Authority. (2007a). Level 1–3 achievement standards. Retrieved 27 May 2007, from http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/ncea/assessment/search.do?query=History&view=achievements&level=01

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Partington, G. (1998). Social studies in the New Zealand curriculum. In P. Benson & R. Openshaw (Eds.), New horizons for New Zealand social studies (pp. 83–102). Palmerston North: ERDC Press.

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The author

Gregor Fountain is the Head of History at Wellington College. He previously taught history and social studies in secondary schools in the Waikato and Auckland. Between 2004 and 2006 he was chairperson of the New Zealand History Teachers’ Association. He is very slowly working towards a Master of Education qualification through the School of Education at Victoria University of Wellington.

Email: g.fountain@wellington-college.school.nz