Setting the Record Straight

A response to the Minister of Education’s comments on NewstalkZB

Last week, the Minister of Education appeared on NewstalkZB with Mike Hosking and made a series of claims about the SMART assessment tool, the educators raising questions about it, and the organisation they represent. Some of what she said was factually wrong. All of it warrants a response.

This piece does not attempt to relitigate the entire SMART debate. It focuses on three specific claims the Minister made about the Aotearoa Educators Collective — claims that misrepresent who we are, dismiss the legitimacy of our concerns, and seek to discredit a diverse group of educators simply because they disagree with her.

We think that deserves to be named directly.

1. We are not the union. The Minister knows this.

The press release the Minister was responding to was issued by Liam Rutherford on behalf of the AEC. In response, the Minister said:

“Oh look, he is the Union… I mean it’s the Union in drag.”

This is not accurate, and it is hard to believe it was a mistake.

Liam Rutherford, like a significant proportion of New Zealand’s teaching workforce, is both a classroom teacher and a union member. His involvement in the AEC does not make the AEC a union body. The AEC is an independent collective. It has no affiliation with NZEI or any other union. Its membership includes academics, researchers, school leaders, teachers, and other educators from across the sector — early childhood through to university. Anyone who takes sixty seconds to look at the AEC’s Substack or press releases will find a diversity of contributors that makes the Minister’s characterisation difficult to sustain.

It is also worth noting that the Minister chose to focus specifically on Liam Rutherford - not on the AEC as a whole, not on the substance of the press release, but on the individual who recently played a central role in negotiating the Primary Teachers’ Collective Agreement. That is not a coincidence. It is a way of associating the messenger with union activity in the public mind, regardless of the capacity in which he was actually speaking. It is a rhetorical move, not a factual response.

The Minister’s characterisation conflates an individual’s membership of a union with the identity and purpose of the organisation they were speaking for. That is not a subtle distinction. It is a straightforward factual error, and it was used to dismiss a voice that represents a much broader range of professional perspectives than she acknowledged.

Either way, the Minister has a problem. If this was deliberate, it is straightforwardly misleading - an attempt to discredit a collective of educators by misrepresenting what it is. But if it was a genuine mistake, that raises a more fundamental concern: that the Minister of Education is not sufficiently familiar with the diverse and complex landscape of groups, collectives, and professional bodies that make up the education sector in New Zealand.

The AEC is not an obscure or recently formed group. It brings together academics, researchers, school leaders, and teachers from early childhood through to university - exactly the kind of sector knowledge a Minister should be drawing on. Not knowing who they are, or assuming they must be a union because they hold a different view, would suggest a significant gap in the Minister’s understanding of the very system she is responsible for leading.

The effect in either case is the same: legitimate professional voices are dismissed, and the framing substitutes for engagement with the substance of what was raised.

2. Calling educators “bumbling” is not engagement, it’s dismissal.

The Minister described the concerns raised by the AEC as:

“a bumbling attempt at some kind of weird political hit job by a union.”

Leaving aside the factual error about who we are: the word “bumbling” is telling.

The concerns being raised by schools about SMART are specific, practical, and grounded in professional experience. They relate to implementation timelines, delays in the availability of usable data, workload implications, and questions about how the tool functions in real classrooms. These are not abstract or ideologically driven points. They are the day-to-day realities of educators tasked with implementing a new system.

Characterising those concerns as “bumbling” suggests incoherence or incompetence on the part of the people raising them. It is the kind of language that shuts down professional dialogue rather than inviting it. And it raises a reasonable question: if the evidence base for SMART is as strong as the Minister claims, then the concerns raised should be directly addressed rather than dismissed by the people raising them.

The educators in the AEC are experienced, credible professionals. Their questions deserve substantive responses, not ridicule.

3. Uptake figures do not mean what the Minister said they mean.

During the interview, the Minister stated:

“SMART got two hundred and fifty thousand in nine days. That is a ringing endorsement from a sector…”

This claim requires some unpacking.

First, the figure refers to students, not schools. The discussion began with school-level uptake - a figure the Minister appeared reluctant to dwell on - and shifted mid-conversation to aggregated student numbers. These are not equivalent measures. Decisions about assessment tools are made at the school level. School-level participation is the more meaningful indicator of adoption across the system.

Second, and more fundamentally: schools were required to register for SMART to access and evaluate it. Registration is a prerequisite for assessment - not evidence of endorsement. Many schools signed up specifically to understand what they were being asked to implement. In a number of cases, that process of exploration has confirmed existing concerns, and those schools have chosen not to proceed.

Describing initial access as a “ringing endorsement” overstates what the data shows. It conflates the act of looking with the decision to adopt, and it does not reflect the range of responses schools have had once they have had the opportunity to engage with the tool directly.

What we are asking for

The AEC is not asking for the SMART tool to be abandoned. We are asking for a conversation that is grounded in accuracy and that takes seriously the professional feedback of the educators being asked to implement this system.

That starts with the Minister correcting the record about who the AEC is and what it represents. It continues with a willingness to engage with the substance of the concerns being raised, rather than characterising those who raise them as union proxies or political actors.

What concerns us more broadly is the pattern this reflects. The educators who contribute to the AEC are not peripheral voices - they are researchers, school leaders, and practitioners who have dedicated their professional lives to understanding how children learn and how systems can better support them. They bring evidence, experience, and genuine commitment to the outcomes the Minister says she shares. And yet the consistent response to their concerns has been to question their motives, misrepresent their identity, and redirect attention away from the substance of what they are raising.

Good education policy is not made in isolation from the sector it serves. It is strengthened by diverse dialogue - by Ministers who are willing to engage with perspectives that challenge their position, who treat professional disagreement as information rather than opposition, and who recognise that the people closest to classrooms often have the clearest view of what is and is not working. A Minister who is unwilling or unable to engage in that kind of dialogue is not just missing an opportunity. She is making it harder to get the decisions right.

Robust professional debate is not a threat to good education policy - it is a precondition for it. The AEC remains committed to that kind of dialogue. We hope, in time, the Minister will be too.

Dr. Sarah Aiono, Professor John O’Neill, Professor Susan Sandretto, Bevan Holloway, Gareth Sinton, Claire Amos, Associate Professor Rebecca Jesson, Professor Vivienne Anderson

Aotearoa Educators Collective

12 April 2025