New Zealand Minister Parata visits US and Israel for education insights
New Zealand Education Minister Hekia Parata is travelling to the United States and Israel to assess leading education systems and to discuss training with scholars and academics.
Hekia Parata
Ms Parata is planning to meet with a number of educational leaders this week, in Massachusetts and New York.
Ms Parata says: “The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education manages one million pupils in 2000 public schools, and yet just two percent of its high school students leave school prior to graduation. In addition, its student’s math’s and reading scores are among the highest in the country.”
Her research trip includes meeting senior faculty members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to discuss the innovation programmes for teaching training and development. Harvard is well known as an elite school of education in the United States, it is also the first to establish a Doctorate of Education.
While in New York, Ms Parata will take part in a series of discussions at the Asia Society Center for Global Education. Ms Parata has been appointed to its new advisory council alongside education leaders such as UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.
The center has a focus on building education systems that produce young people with skills to thrive in the 21st century economy.
Ms Parata is keen to further explore this future-forward thinking when she leads a session on The teachers in the innovative world at the Global Education Industry Summit in Jerusalem, Israel. While there she will also meet a number of Ministers of Education and experts on digital technologies in education.
On her return, perhaps the Honourable Lady could educate her country’s foreign minister on the history of the internationally guaranteed right of the Jewish People to “close settlement ” on the land which that guarantee calls “the Jewish National Home, the heart of which are Judea and Samaria, as the guarantee acknowledges.
She could start with the 1922 Mandate for ‘Palestine.’
Being an education minister, she, unlike her foreign minister, might be more sensitive to law, justice, equity and veracity…without her Honourable Colleague’s impertinence and arrogance.