Dave Armstrong: You can combat truancy with a stick, you can also use a carrot

Monday, 13 March 2023

When an expert monitoring report comes out, as one did recently, saying that achievement rates in the arts in schools are plummeting, there’s hardly a murmur, writes Dave Armstrong.

Dave Armstrong is a playwright and satirist based in Wellington.

OPINION: He was the school’s newly hired itinerant brass teacher and played in bands in town. Every week he turned up in bare feet, or occasionally sandals, floral harem trousers, a muslin shirt, and a flowing beard. He softly introduced himself by first name only, which he later changed to something more ‘spiritual’.

He formed a school band. For a fourth-former (Year 10) raised on a diet of orchestras, this rocked my world. We played jazz, ragtime, gospel, hippie pop – you name it. A piano – brilliantly played by our jazz-loving science teacher – joined in.

We were rough, raw, raucous, and had the time of our lives. Rehearsals didn’t just lead to a school concert, but a tour. Our tutor – surprise, surprise – owned a bus, styled on the famous Blerta bus. We all piled into the psychedelic Health and Safety nightmare and for a week played to commuters at the railway station then on to primary schools throughout the region.

* Media drongos and inside the 'Grumpy Old Men' WhatsApp chat group

* For those struggling, the rates rise is a big hit

Stuff senior political reporter Anna Whyte interviews Opposition leader Christopher Luxon.

A gig with Red Mole followed, then we played for a party in Mt Vic in which Dave-a-rella had to swear to his parents that he would be home by midnight.

Anything resembling this style of ‘education’ would be verboten today, but this was the 1970s. My semi-liberal parents half-expected the devout Salvation Army school principal to close it all down, but he was an excellent euphonium player, so joined in on occasions, when he wasn’t too busy defending his liberal school from it’s many ‘focus on numeracy and literacy and get a proper uniform’ detractors.

Yet when I attended science with our jazz-piano-playing teacher, I stopped being a such a pain, and shut up when he explained hydrogen bonding. For the first time, I had to concede our principal wasn’t the bigoted fundamentalist I’d made him out to be. He was almost human – and had a beautiful tone. And I started going to school more.

When a report comes out saying that our school numeracy and literacy standards are plummeting there is an outcry. Someone who has never taught in a New Zealand school, but has rich friends tells us how to fix the problem – usually aping whatever is done in Hong Kong and Shanghai, or in English and US charter schools. Yet standards continue to fall.

But when an expert monitoring report comes out, as one did recently, saying that achievement rates in the arts in schools are plummeting, there’s hardly a murmur. Forget that primary teachers only receive a few hours of arts teaching in their three-year training. Forget that despite the curriculum stressing the importance of the arts, many schools, for various reasons, don’t teach them.

Shouldn’t we focus on numeracy and literacy, just like water pipes should be the sole focus of all local body politicians? Funnily enough, when New Zealand schools focussed on the arts, our numeracy and literacy was world-class. Now that we are focussing on numeracy and literacy, standards are plummeting. It’s the educational equivalent of ‘don’t date someone who wants to talk about your relationship all the time’.

Our Opposition politicians – the same ones who abolished the Creatives in Schools scheme – tell us that we currently have a truancy crisis. Our Government has addressed it by hiring 82 attendance officers in a package costing $74 million. In these Covid times, I think the truancy problem is a complex one. However, has it occurred to anyone that while you can combat truancy with a stick, you can also use a carrot?

Could a comprehensive, well-taught arts programme – especially in low-decile schools, which the report says often miss out – give more students reasons for attending school? A mid-decile school I taught brass at for a short time (no, I’ve never owned a psychedelic bus) established a large multicultural choir that involved kids who’d never been part of such a group, outside church, before. The school noted a marked increase in attendance and a decrease in bad behaviour amongst those who belonged to the choir.

The way the arts improve cognitive development, develop leadership skills, encourage co-operation, teamwork, excellence, literacy and a whole lot of other things are well documented by people far more qualified than me. The Trouble with a capital T (and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for pool) is that much of our population just doesn’t care.

No-one ever burst into a school parents’ meeting yelling, ‘did you hear how out-of-tune the cellos were in the school production?’. But the parental cry of ‘back to basics’ or ‘we need to spend more money on computers,’ is louder than a school band playing Liberty Bell March to commuters in the Wellington Railway Station.

Maybe the situations vacant for all the truancy officers that the Government is somewhere going to find should read: ‘applicants with artistic ability, who can recite poetry, sing, paint, play an instrument, perform kapa haka, improvise and with bare feet preferred. Rather than chasing truants they could be Pied Pipers attracting truants back to school.