It is said that if something is not broken you should not try to fix it. Fair enough. But what if it only appears to be working? What if it is wasting away below the surface and you just don’t see it happening? Or at least not until it is too late?

It is a common story. Doctors see it every day with cancer patients. Pancreatic cancer is even called the silent killer. And it’s not just cancer. We saw the same phenomenon in 2008 when financial markets imploded and interest rates plummeted – less than a year after former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had predicted the world would soon need double-digit interest rates to control a rampant global economy. Even the most glorious of empires are susceptible to decay from within.

Despite protests to the contrary from our teachers’ unions, this affliction is gripping education in New Zealand. We are fiddling while Rome burns.

It is true that schooling in New Zealand was once the envy of the world. Were you to ask our teachers’ unions, they would claim it still is. They would rightly point out that in international tests such as PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS, the best New Zealand students perform just as well as those in the highest ranked countries. The best students, yes. But what about the rest?

Digging a little deeper reveals a troublesome decline. Since the early 2000s, the average performance of New Zealand students in maths and science has been steadily falling. In maths, where the drop-off is most alarming, our year five and year nine students now rank below the international averages, alongside countries like Croatia and Romania.

The fall in student performance is not just compared with their international counterparts.  The average performance of New Zealand students is falling compared with the performance of New Zealand students in previous years. We are not only performing poorly against our peers, but also against our past.

The averages are one thing, but the extremes reveal even worse. In 2015, 1 in 10 students left secondary school without a formal qualification, and 1 in 5 left without NCEA level 2, a qualification designed to provide the foundation skills required for future employment.  And though their performance is improving, Maori and Pasifika students continue to be over-represented in the underachievement statistics.

If there is anything we can do to improve New Zealand’s prosperity, arresting the slide in educational achievement is surely at the top of the list.

Last month’s annual Sir John Graham lecture, delivered by acclaimed educationalist Professor John Hattie ONZM to the Maxim Institute, was a call to arms. He told us that New Zealand’s performance in education over the last decade is the third worst in the world. When once we were on the podium, we now no longer even rank in the top half.

Professor Hattie called for an end to sideshows and shibboleths. Instead, we need accountability, and a relentless focus on teaching impact. We know what works, he said. We must measure teachers’ performance. We must share best practice. And we must eradicate failure.  

Anyone listening to Professor Hattie could not fail to be concerned. At the same time, they would be encouraged that Professor Hattie knows what needs to be done: we need to put aside all else and focus on results. We need to measure the impact of teachers and schools on student progression, we need to learn from the data what works and what doesn’t, and we need to share best practice among teachers within schools and from school-to-school.

For anyone not familiar with the education sector, the fact this needs to be articulated is barely comprehensible. In every other profession, indeed, in almost every other field, it is outcomes that are measured, and it is outcomes that matter. It is not enough to try hard.

In our market-based economy, the incentives for delivering excellence are strong. There is no prize for inventing a methodology that doesn’t work. Success breeds success. Strategies that work are rewarded, and failed ones consigned to the dustbin of history.

If our local supermarket does not provide the food we need, or the quality we want, we go to another one. As a result, we can safely anticipate the same level of excellence whether we are shopping in South Auckland or in the Eastern suburbs.

If only it were so in education. Imagine a world in which the same high standards of education, with the same quality of teachers, and the same school-leadership were available to students in Papatoetoe as they are in Epsom.

Like Professor Hattie, at The New Zealand Initiative, we believe this goal is attainable. But the solution is not as simple as knowing what needs to be done. Centralised and politicised monopolies like our education system, do not change of their own accord. We need to give our school boards and school leaders the tools they need to achieve change. And we need to establish the right incentives.

We also need the courage to take on the teachers’ unions.  They may claim to be the guardians of the education system, but the reality is different. They exist to protect their members, and they will stop at nothing to protect their interests.

There is no better illustration of this than the coordinated industrial action taken earlier this month by the Post Primary Teachers Association, in concert with the primary school teachers’ union, the New Zealand Education Institute.

Their target is the Ministry of Education’s Education Funding Review. The Review’s primary purpose is to solve the shortcomings in the school decile mechanism for funding schools. The teachers’ unions have no quarrel with this.

However, the Review also recommends schools be given a global budget covering salary costs and other operational costs of running a school. The global budget will give school principals the flexibility to innovate. For our teachers’ unions, though, this is anathema. They do not like change. Change might see technology replace jobs, and protecting jobs is their reason for being.

If the teachers’ unions object to something as benign as global funding, what chance have we of introducing the type of accountability measures proposed by Professor Hattie?

The answer is: none. Not unless parents wake up to what is happening. It may look healthy, but our once great school system needs surgery, not snake oil. This is no time for denial. It is broken. Let’s fix it.