What went wrong?
We incentivized Teaching the wrong way, and what we incentivized we got. It's as simple as that. Forget national standards, and the expert teacher status upgrade and all that nonsense, none of it makes a difference. All that these so-called reforms do is entrench the drop. It doesn't even arrest the decline in standards.
The main problem as I see it is - as teachers become better they do less teaching. The more promotion, the more administration, and the less classroom time. In the end, all that are left in the classroom are teachers unable to get promotion, or younger ones with less experience.
Wouldn't it make sense to incentivize good teachers to stay in the classroom teaching?
The next step is to have in place external exams that a provisional teacher must pass while training. This removes the obvious problem with teachers of lesser ability using their social skills to convince their peers they make the grade. I'm not saying no peer review, but there needs to be some external assessment of provisional teacher abilities as well.
With the above in mind I'd condense teacher training to 3 months prior to employment for those wishing to enter teaching with other professional qualifications; such as engineering, law, commerce and science. Taking a year to train is a serious disincentive to those thinking about making a career change (this has been partially addressed with TeachFirstNZ but is not available across the whole country).
And lastly, I'd pay classroom teachers more than teachers in administration. Then open up those administration jobs to anyone qualified, teacher or not.
Summary:-
* Pay more to teachers who teach, less to teachers who administer ( must be 90% of teacher load as a minimum to qualify );
* Anyone with senior management experience can be a Principal, Associate or Deputy Principal;
* Externally test provisional teachers.
* Condense initial teacher training for those with parallel professional skills.
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