Why New Zealand schools will continue to fail
Efforts to get more male teachers failing
Schools are failing our children, especially boys. That’s another debate but it’s a simple reality that has existed and has been worsening for more than 20 years, and directly impacts the male teacher issue being raised in this article.
The headline can be read two ways; firstly that we are failing to attract more males to teaching (which is not true) or that there are efforts to get more male teachers to fail (which not surprisingly is exactly what this feminist country does).
It was not male teachers who were removed from schools. It was men who were teachers. These men came under attack for being men, still are, and are still being driven out of the profession.
For those ‘men’ that remain, they are mostly older and in senior positions. These men are considered legitimate targets of the feminist regime, because they still occupy much more than 50% of the principal and senior management positions.
This is considered unfair; an unacceptable state of inequality, which must be remedied so women have their fair share of higher paying jobs and leadership roles.
That, while it is constantly bitched about, is a situation that exists because of the numbers of men who did previously teach as a lifetime career, and is not a situation that will last in perpetuity as those who are not bullied out of the education system are ageing and will retire.
In the past 10 years the number of male teachers in both primary and secondary schools has dropped. Last year men made up only 16.5 per cent of primary school teachers and 41.2 per cent at high schools.
As usual we get the dodgy statistics approach from a journalist and sometimes you simply can’t tell whether they are feminist thinkers, too lazy to do their job, or just plain dumb.
What the article doesn’t talk about is gender ratios of teachers through age groups. For teachers under 30 years of age, across all sectors males constitute about 12% and women constitute about 17%.
What this means is close to 50% more female teachers are being brought into the profession, yet there is an oversupply of teachers, where male teachers are qualifying but not being employed.
He said despite male teachers being in a minority, scholarships were only available for women, disabled people and those from varying ethnic backgrounds.
Not only are male teachers being deliberately excluded, female teachers are also being given financial assistance to ensure there is never a short supply of female teachers.
Not all out teachers qualify in New Zealand. About 20% of our teacher numbers are imports. What the gender ratio of employed teachers is I don’t know, but I’d put money there being far more foreign female teachers than male.
When you arrive at the mid 30’s age group, there are slightly more male than female teachers (obviously because of female teachers having children) but the imbalance is quickly back by age 40.
There are different reasons for men not being employed in junior schools, but when you factor in the greater number of female primary school teachers into these numbers you can see that high school teacher gender ratios are being deliberately managed to ensure a dominance of female numbers in all age groups, on a continuing basis.
Male teachers are being excluded as newly qualified teachers to ensure that female teachers remain the dominant number in all age groups in secondary schools, except in the older age groups where that process has yet to take effect.
The current peek of majority women teachers is around 45 years of age, so the wave of imbalance has about 10 – 15 years to roll before the bubble of older male teachers is removed and female teachers have an all-age-group majority in numbers.
While the majority of retiring teachers are male and the majority of graduate teachers are female; how can the number of male teachers increase? It can’t, the number of male teachers must lower.
The ministry planned to address gender disparity in the teaching workforce “but will always do so within the law and will work with the Human Rights Commission, where appropriate, to ensure this happens”.
The Ministry has no intention of addressing the gender disparity, quite obviously, they are doing the opposite and justifying their inaction by saying we cannot break the law.
We’ve discussed the handy work of the ‘Wimin’s Rights Commission’ here before:
Rotorua principal and former Secondary Principals’ Association president Patrick Walsh recalled the drive for scholarships but said a decision by the Human Rights Commission halted the initiative.
When you get past the propaganda and crap reporting, you can see that our secondary school system is being designed this way, it’s not an accident.
While our secondary schools are being manufactured this way it’s not the only reason why our schools will fail. It’s well known that our primary schools are undisciplined environments that suit the entitled attitudes of the little female brats this country now pumps out.
Primary schools fail boys and as more mothers realise this they are and will keep their sons away from that environment. You don’t send boys to school five days a week to fail.
The roll on effect of this to secondary school is that the undisciplined entitled environment is deteriorating and even dedicated female teachers are finding the stress and workload is not worth it, financially or emotionally.
Good teachers don’t get paid enough to cope with the stress and accept failing students, as a lifestyle. Even female teachers want out.
Any sensible male student who has been through the public high school process, experienced and witnessed the model first-hand, isn’t going to be any hurry to pursue a teaching career. If you were a male with a tertiary qualification you’d probably want to work in another country with a better school system; why would you want to be a teacher?
We are not going to attract the quality of teacher, mostly men (but also women) we saw in our schools a generation ago. And those ‘male teachers’ that enter this now feminist environment will be expected to behave, not as men, but to conform to feminist ideals and expectations.
In 20 years time we will see our secondary schools, across all teacher age-groups, dominated by females with the majority of principal and senior positions held by women.
We will see far less males in teaching than we have now.
We can expect the failure rates that we see for boys at primary level to roll into secondary schools.
We can expect these schools to become more undisciplined female oriented cesspits of failure.
We can expect the quality of both male and female teachers and their teaching standards to drop significantly.
We can expect the failure rate of students to increase especially for boys.
But that’s what feminists want, and if they have to destroy our education system to do it, they will.
They already have, and in time our tertiary institutes will follow suit.
You sound like you care Downunder. Why?
Comment by rc — Wed 24th December 2014 @ 5:41 pm
@rc
Because I had three sons who learnt more from what I taught them on a Saturday morning than they did from 5 days a week at primary school … and the story goes on.
I publish my opinion.
It’s up to the reader what they take from it.
Comment by Downunder — Wed 24th December 2014 @ 6:12 pm
I went 50 years through that same system, and only realised recently that what it taught me was mostly of no real value.
The school’s are an industry – no different in their objectives than Chrisco, or jewellery chain stores, or hamburger restaurants. Or court systems.
It’s an industry that hires and fires, and defines itself by nebulous success criteria, and funds itself by “self evident” purpose of need – ie you and me pay for it, without much of any a priori objection. So long as we accept the necessity of universal, publicly funded free schools, this is how they will look.
I suspect you are asserting that the schools could be better directed, and could “deliver better public social goods”.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but do so to hasten an end to any deficiency of understanding.
Comment by rc — Wed 24th December 2014 @ 6:28 pm
I have no problem with the schooling I received or the environment in which it was provided.
In fact I’m very grateful for the dedication and effort of those teachers that made our school a place I can look back on and appreciate for what it was.
Sure, education is an industry that has to be managed, but like any industry it can only survive in the surrounding environment.
No education system is going to succeed in a failing society.
You may have read the post as being critical only of the education system alone and not of society as well.
Comment by Downunder — Wed 24th December 2014 @ 6:55 pm
Thanks rc and Downunder for the challenges to our education system. As you discuss, I hear We Don’t Need No Education singing away very loudly in the background. Another Brick in the Wall
My son thought he didn’t need it at the time it was freely offered. I was unable to show him otherwise, other role models were just tooooo convenient, at the time.
He didn’t either, for a decade. Ups and Downs in the building industry showed him that an education could have substantial value and he then had to regain what he had frittered away. And regain it as fast as he could, while studying fresh topics. Pretty stressful territory. Dad was suddenly able to help at this point, but not it seems the other role models.
Maybe for 5 hours “wasted” in class, he had to put in an hour to get back to where he now needed to be. A huge number of hours on top and much stress too.
Anyway, I like the song now, as much as I ever have.
If people are willing to share, I am very interested to hear others’ experiences?
I am intrigued at the range of comments hinted at above?
My local primary school has averaged 1.5 male class teachers out of about 20 in the last 15 years. That scares me, for girls as much as for boys.
When the issue is actually children’s welfare, then why is it not possible to offer male teachers any scholarships?
It looks like a kneejerk reaction that we musn’t privilege men over women, as men are already more privileged?
That is hijacking the agenda and manipulating the analysis: –
The present agenda is protecting equal learning and mental health development opportunities for boys and girls, nothing about men and women as such.
But, in any case, once children’s interests have been protected, then it is still important to address the men versus women argument. There is more variation in men’s welfare and well being generally than women’s (largely due to XX and XY effects on genes and sexual competition effects).
So the real well being issue is individual men and individual women’s welfare. This consideration shouldn’t preclude offering scholarships to men, where their employment is an important (maybe essential?) ingredient to protecting boys and girls welfare.
Maybe the moaning women need to be put on antidepressants, rather than sacrifice our children’s welfare?
it seems that there is some unsatisfactory and sick analysis going on inside the Education Department. I have been highly concerned for over 20 years and it seems to only be getting worse.
If we had to offer enough pay to men teachers, to make up for the risks and hazards of a destructive, punitive and dangerous caught$ system, the costs would be prohibitive.
Maybe we need to rethink the ways the Government manages caught$. I suggest that the Government has to accept responsibility, where the legal workers refuse to be responsible for the social costs of their performances and micromanage the caught$ until they work successfully.
Like on the waterfront and civil work gangs in 1930s, foreman lets go 10 or 20% of the workforce of judges each Friday lunchtime, based on performance through the last week. A bit of successful, hard work went on in the old days and could now too……The slackers won’t even have the chance of further employment for several months.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Thu 25th December 2014 @ 9:11 am
One of the key ways that feminists and feminist collaborators are disposing of male teachers is through ‘zero tolerance’ policies by the Teachers’ Council concerning sexual rules. This policy is based largely on a superstitious belief that if a man breaks sexual rules he will do so again and cannot be rehabilitated. So we never have to look far beyond recent news to find male teachers deregistered for relatively minor transgressions such as
or breaking sexual rules in a situation the teacher believed was private and in a way that was not intended to involve students at all,
or having a relationship with a student who was old enough to participate legally in a sexual relationship.
In the first case above, the teacher’s communications were unprofessional and may have escalated to real offending, but a warning and referral to counselling probably would have been sufficient for him to desist from such behaviour and to clarify the boundaries. Instead, the heavy-handed response showed no compassion for the normal, strong male sexual drive that can make it difficult for him to maintain the best judgement when he is flattered by personal interest or adoratioin shown by sexually developed young women who are his students. And one cannot assume that his behaviour was all (or at all) ill-intentioned. We don’t know the details but some of it may have been an attempt to be supportive, reassuring or accepting of the girls’ own concerns and interests that no doubt they discussed openly around him or with him.
In the second case above, the teacher’s action (one assumed he was having a scratch or wank in his empty classroom) only became a problem when some students lifted another student up to look through the window of the upstairs class. Teaching is a stressful occupation and teachers no doubt find various ways to provide some stress release! Of course, even personal sexual activity in a classroom is inconsistent with professional expectations and probably the employment contract, and if discovered is appropriately dealt with through an employment conduct process. However, such behaviour will usually stop through some intervention and deregistration is over the top.
The third case above involved the most serious transgression because he allowed a sexual relationship to develop that became distressing for the student when the teacher felt unable to continue it. With cognitive-behavioural treatment his risk of repeating any such action could be reduced to a level comparable to any other man’s risk, but instead he was thrown on the scrap heap by an industry that badly needs to retain male teachers. The authorities’ response was a denial of normal male responses of attraction and affection, and a denial of the challenge that anyone faces in subjugating those instincts to remain within invented sets of human rules. Instead of compassion and support for men in this, men are readily demonized and written off. A male’s error, lapse of judgement, becomes the mark of the beast and he is treated like a witch. Masculinity is demonized rather than understood and worked with.
We don’t know whether teacher training provides adequate assistance for males to prepare them for the temptations and challenging feelings they are likely to experience in their job. It’s unlikely, given our society’s denial and derogation of maleness and expectations that men’s behaviour and interests should simply conform to female preferences.
Of course, the zero tolerance policies of the Teachers Council are applied in misandrist fashion. So we see that Council (and everyone else involved) more often treating female transgressors with compassion and kid gloves. For example, this female teacher had sex with two students and we hear the police whitewash it by asserting that no crime was committed because the students were of legal age. We don’t hear such pronouncements in relation to male transgressors. The female teacher resigned but, unlike male cases, there is no early word of deregistration. The article is interesting in that it refers to a number of cases of female teachers breaking sexual rules with students but for most of them there is no mention of deregistration.
And here is a case of a female teacher who engaged in numerous instances of inappopriate sexual-related conduct with her students but was allowed to keep her registration.
Even when the Teachers Council deregisters female teachers there often seems to be minimization or excusing comments, such as a case when a female teacher’s behaviour was described by the Teacher’s Tribunal as not being sexually motivated! (The Yahoo link – http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/17862230/teacher-sent-student-at-least-1500-texts/ – appears to be expired, but here are some excerpts from the article:
Comment by Man X Norton — Thu 25th December 2014 @ 1:22 pm
I think there is the accompanying suggestion that female teacher sexual impropriety is something new.
I had a high school music teacher (we’re talking 1970’s here) who would sit on a desk in front of the class with her legs apart advertising her undies. (She always wore white by the way.)
She got caught screwing a 7th form boy in the music cupboard at the back of the classroom (which I have no doubt wasn’t the only occasion and most probably not her only conquest.
She left the school and that was the end of it.
Comment by Downunder — Thu 25th December 2014 @ 3:59 pm
Excuse me, dear men,
I have learned the male teaching issue is a bit more complicated than first thought.
………….
It seems, the majority of male teachers and male students doing teaching degrees don’t want to work with small children. They want to work with older children.
BUT that doesn’t mean the MRM or antifeminists can’t get males to look after babies, tots and young kids. From my learning, All the online MRM/antifeminist movements have to do is find males wanting to change nappies, bottle feed every 4 or more or less hours, rock to sleep, toilet train, teach the alphabet to, deal with tantrums, and so on.
Once males wanting to do the 3-4 years degree to do the above are found, they simple need to speak up about the discrimination they endure to the Human’s Rights Commission and the wheels will turn by themselves. Before you know it, a whole lot of changes will be made to assist males wanting to work with babies, tots and young kids.
………….
OH,
I think it also worthwhile to point out that it’s not just women and girls on give-a-little asking for society to pay for their cancer treatment. Men and boys are also affected by health cuts.
………….
Excuse me, dear feminists,
I have a new bitch.
……about male governance…
Women now have to pay for pregnancy blood tests themselves that cost $1,000 plus. I think, from what I am seeing, that women have to pay to find out if their unborn babies have Down syndrome & holes in the heart plus other conditions. In turn, this means women have to hope they can get from one hospital around the country to the specialist Auckland hospital during childbirth itself. What a disaster.
I would be eager to lobby with women wanting to take this on.
NOTE: I know I am hated for not being antifeminist but I think I should be allowed to speak for I also do things for men in the community.
Comment by Julie — Sun 28th December 2014 @ 8:18 pm
Dear Julie, I think you are right, but the reasons are important. I suspect that the reasons are:
1. general social prejudice against men working with young children and babies
(What’s wrong with you? Are you a real man?)
2. concern at the parental abuse hysteria, especially in religious areas (COE in particular)
3. generally lower pay, thus cannot support family on primary teacher pay
If I am right, then items 1 and 2 are wider social prejudices, rather than inherently internal to the potential man teacher. They are basically a sensible concern for self preservation in the man teacher (although of course these forces for teacher destruction are impacting quite a few women teachers too).
Any principal who wanted to deliver a balanced teaching balance to his/her students, would need to apply public pressure to address items 1 and 2, ie ensure that teacher advertising shows men and women teachers, invites men as much as women and also apply public pressure to address the problems that criminal caught$ and familycaught$ have with weighing evidence professionally.
Even item 3 should be addressed by school principals.
I have never heard of a principal addressing concerns about the performance of caught$ in NZ and its destructive impacts onto recruitment of both women and men teachers! (My only personal experience of principals actions, were to aid my ex-wife taking our children from my care into her care by abduction. This was achieved by applying the enrolment rules differently by sex of parent, to enable the abduction to proceed to suit my ex-wife. You can guess what I think about NZ school principals, in terms of gender equity.)
Man X Norton and Downunder’s comments above, give good illustrations of lack of proportionality.
If caught$ were to have social value and be taken seriously, they would need to be able to weigh evidence and to respond proportionately in terms of outcomes or punishments. These comments are perhaps worst case examples, but in my opinion they are relatively commonplace examples and fairly typical.
Deliberately getting evidence wrong, is a very powerful way of acting non-proportionately.
It also hides the non-proportionate issue from being easily visible in the paperwork left after the hearing. It is only possible to realistically judge the quality of the hearing, by being there and hearing all of the evidence. (No member of the public or even family can do that. Even if they attended the hearing, intimate type evidence results in the public being cleared from the caught anyway.) If we ever wanted to restore public confidence in caught$, we would have to go back to open ie not secret caught$.
Downunder says:
Sexual relationships between caregivers and charges is as old as the hills, just denied by authorities and swept under the carpet. It always seemed to me, that they used the illicit relationships as part of their inadequate pay structure?
Sure, there is an impression that older woman on boy is less harmful than man on young girl. Often half true – but this still leaves a lot of truth that there is significant damage. This damage should be addressed competently and proportionately.
The devil is in the detail and that rarely gets out to the public. Many of the victims are not as innocent as portrayed, so there is plenty of opportunity for destructive, harsh responses to occur. Management of these situations does need to take into account human responses.
The extreme hazards created and fuelled by excessive, non-proportionate responses, drives excessive fear. This can easily lead to perpetrators putting huge pressure onto victims to not disclose. These pressures may be far more damaging than actual sexual acts. This is why it is important to respond correctly and not just punitively.
Victims may feel that the official responses will do more harm than good, so not want to initiate an official investigation. Authorities can only make constructive responses, when the public have confidence that authorities get it right and act appropriately.
I believe that the caught$ and school or CYFs authorities will only respond proportionately to the actual damage caused, when the public fully understand child development and abuse/neglect issues. And then the public can teach the authorities about child neglect, so they can do their job. When the public stop stupid clamouring for heads to roll, then the authorities will have the freedom to respond properly.
The [women] authorities seem to hang men out to dry, to show the world that they are doing something. (This then lets them let women that get caught, off the hook, as shown above.)
The discussion has focussed on perpetrators. However, the quality of the school management does need to be considered.
Good supervision would keep people within their areas of safe competency. (Oh that this idea be applied to the familycaught$?) When teachers are in vulnerable life situations, they should be able to discuss these issues, with some confidence that they will receive useful help, in time to be useful. Over proportional responses leave a situation of fear, distrust and waiting for the jackals. This is not the way to get the best out of our teachers.
Too many good teachers have been sacrificed on the altar of holier than thou.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 29th December 2014 @ 10:16 am