PPTA on Investing in Educational Success

The PPTA has a blog post on some of the misinformation on the Investing in Educational Success initiative.  They state they are supportive of it because:

IES is a political initiative because it comes from the party that is in government and because it’s election year but its aims are entirely consistent with PPTA professional policy around such things as:

• collaboration between schools

• openness and the sharing of expertise

• career paths –  especially for new and beginning teachers.

They deal with five myths being put out:

1. That the proposal in the cabinet paper is the same policy that is now being negotiated – it has changed.
2. That it will be mandatory – you can’t force people to collaborate
3. No such role as a super principal – now called community of schools leadership role
4. It is not performance pay – they are regular roles with an allowance
5. There is no final agreement, just an interim agreement, which may lead to a proposal to take to members

Now the PPTA don’t say who is putting out the misinformation, but pretty easy to do a search on the Internet and find this release a few days ago from the NZEI:

The IES policy proposes the creation of four new roles, including an extra $40,000pa for “executive principals” and “expert teachers”, who would mentor and manage across a cluster of 10 schools, with the aim of lifting student achievement. “Change principals” and “lead teachers” would also be created.

So the NZEI is using role titles which they know are outdated, and no longer part of the proposal. But as they are acting in bad faith, they try to hoodwink their members and the public on what the current proposal actually is.