Erica Stanford with E D Hirsch Jr (second from right), the American theorist behind the Core Knowledge Foundation. Stanford says Hirsch’s 1996 book The Schools We Need played an important role in New Zealand education reforms. She is pictured with Hirsch at the Core Knowledge conference in Florida this year, where she presented alongside Paul Givan (far left) education minister for Northern Ireland, and Nick Gibb, education minister for England. (Image: Erica Stanford LinkedIn)

Who are the key influencers and thinkers behind Erica Stanford’s education reforms? Jessie Moss explains.

For half a century, our public education system has been hailed as world-leading. International recognition praised our system for being increasingly adaptive to the needs of tamariki, their whānau and communities, shifting in response like a braided river over our diverse landscape.

We developed a child-centred system focused on a broad education. Māori have led the way in kaupapa Māori education and kōhanga reo, and both our early childhood and primary curriculums have had global influence.

Why now, are we being asked to channel this river, to narrow it in accordance with the values and power systems of other colonial countries?

Recently, Te Akatea, the Māori education leadership group, called a summit of 200 kaiako and tumuaki, iwi and education leaders. The task of this group, called Te Akapūmau, was to come up with a plan to protect the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in our education system.

It was a response to the Minister of Education Erica Stanford’s education reforms, which have been a series of backwards steps for educators who’ve spent decades advancing Te Tiriti o Waitangi in education.

The reforms have been roundly criticised for removing and minimising the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori in education.

Tina Ngata reminded Te Akapūmao that “education is never a neutral space.” (Photo: Naomi Madeiros)

Kaiako have sounded the alarm, to explain that the curriculum Stanford describes as “knowledge rich”, in practice, means narrowing the focus to traditional western knowledge structures.

Chris Finlayson, a former National Party MP and Treaty negotiations minister, addressed the group, advising them to “engage in civilised debate” and to avoid using terms like “white supremacist”.

But Te Akatea president Bruce Jepsen responded that if “particular actions or systems represent a set of behaviours, then we have to describe them as they are and be accurate in the terms we are using”.

Professor Graham Hingangaroa Smith, whose work focuses on transforming Māori marginalisation, urged the summit on after Finlayson’s comments: “If we don’t understand the logic of what is being done to us, it is very hard to respond accordingly”.

Indigenous rights scholar Tina Ngata also spoke, to remind the room that education is “a powerful site of social control . . . if you control the curriculum, you can erase histories and languages. Education is not and has never been a neutral space, it either strengthens the status quo or challenges it”.

So, if a “knowledge-rich” curriculum isn’t grounded in te ao Māori and the very people and things that make Aotearoa unique, who is determining the knowledge and where does it come from?

The New Zealand Initiative, a right-wing think tank and member of the Atlas Network, has long lobbied politicians in Aotearoa to adopt, in education, what is known by conservatives and right-wing groups in the US and UK as “core knowledge”.

In April 2023, before the coalition government came to power, The New Zealand Initiative released its education manifesto, Save our Schools. It pushed for a prescriptive, nationalistic, “knowledge-rich” curriculum based on this “core knowledge”.

Pākehā sociologist of education Elizabeth Rata from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, wrote the foreword to the manifesto, claiming: “Communities are for the transmission of cultural beliefs and practices. In contrast, as the Manifesto makes clear, schools are for the transmission of academic knowledge and for the socialisation of children into the democratic nation.”

The manifesto’s recommendations now read like the government’s to-do list, having made  their way directly into coalition agreements — from downgrading Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the Education Act to gutting NCEA, and including the number one recommendation:  “Introducing a new knowledge-rich curriculum.”

Along with with Rata, Stanford appointed Dr Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the New Zealand Institute, to her ministerial advisory group in December 2023.

In March 2025, the drastically rewritten year 7–13 draft English curriculum was released. Rata, the lead writer, emailed Stanford congratulations: “It is the knowledge-rich curriculum you promised.”

In a speech written by Rata and emailed to Stanford, she made explicit her hopes that Stanford’s reforms will be the “circuit breaker” to “ending decolonisation’s success.”

President of Te Akatea, Bruce Jepsen addressing the hui. (Photo: Naomi Madeiros)

Te Akatea’s Dr Therese Ford and Bruce Jepsen note that Māori knowledge and people already had an inferior status in the previous curriculum. This has been compounded by the ministerial advisory group’s recommendation that: “Te Tiriti o Waitangi, our nation’s founding document, be removed from the curriculum and replaced with the science of learning.”

Stanford describes the “knowledge-rich” curriculum as internationally comparable. To demonstrate this, in June she travelled to the Core Knowledge Foundation’s conference in Florida to talk about her reforms.

Stanford participated in the plenary conversation with several of her ministerial role models who have implemented similar reforms since the 2010s — Paul Givan, Northern Ireland’s Minister of Education, Sir Nick Gibb, former UK Minister of State for Schools, and E D Hirsch, author, former English professor and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

Hirsch’s work influenced the education reforms of everyone on stage in Florida. Each politician thanked him.

Erica Stanford at the Core Knowledge conference in Florida, alongside Paul Givan, education minister for Northern Ireland, Nick Gibb, education minister for England and E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Stanford describes Hirsch as “the incredible US academic” whose book, The schools we need and why we don’t have them, has played an important role in her education reforms in Aotearoa. (Photo: Erica Stanford LinkedIn)

For decades Hirsch has said that multicultural and social justice education produces achievement gaps, claiming students are taught to be victims. He also contends that child-centred education creates knowledge deficits. Central to Hirsch’s work is his insistence on a set canon of knowledge that all American children must learn to be successful citizens and patriots.

Hirsch’s theory is described, and the knowledge itself specified, in his book, Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know, which has been published several times since the 1980s.

It has been roundly criticised by educationalists and social justice advocates for its sexism, and for disregarding First Nations’ knowledge and languages, and presenting a Eurocentric colonial account of history.

But the book continues to influence right-wing lobbyists, think tanks and policy makers.

When Stanford addressed Hirsch on stage, she explained the profound impact his 1996 book The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them had on her. “It changed everything. I made my Secretary of Education read it. I made my staff read it. I am now implementing huge reform in New Zealand based on your book . . . We have a knowledge-rich curriculum.”

Leading the plenary was Robert Pondiscio, Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of America’s most influential neoliberal think tanks and a member of the Atlas Network. AEI advocates for limited government, privatisation and conservative education reform. Pondiscio, a “Hirschian” and “core knowledge” disciple is one of Hirsch’s most well-known adherents, influencing education policy and legislation in America through the Atlas Network.

Pondiscio, believes the purpose of curriculum is to catalogue the “knowledge assumed by literate speakers and writers” and that for students to succeed, they need to acquire the “culture of those who are in power”.

Hirsch’s foundation produced the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) curriculum which 25 states in American now recommend, the result of intense lobbying and the passage of state by state Science of Reading bills. CKLA provides scripts for teachers to deliver tightly controlled content taught in “scope and sequence.”

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, are also enthusiastic supporters of Hirsch’s work and are informing many of the authoritarian and anti-democratic measures being introduced into policy across America.

The drastic ideologically-driven reforms the education sector is experiencing here mirror what has been happening in the US and the UK for decades.

Alongside these reforms is the claim that teaching children the same content, the same way at the same time, regardless of their community, culture, or learning needs achieves a supposed equality. Stanford’s recent claim that “every brain learns the same” was widely refuted by educationalists and disability advocates.

On stage in Florida, Stanford said: “No matter what culture . . . what family you’re from, you have the very best possible instruction, the very best possible curriculum, a knowledge-rich curriculum based on the science of learning . . . that’s the reforms we’re driving.”

Pākehā sociologist Elizabeth Rata.

This is exactly the change that Elizabeth Rata has been pushing for some time. Her influence on Stanford is well documented and has been repeatedly challenged by educators and academics.

On October 20, 2024, Rata emailed Stanford. She referenced the National Party’s Northern Region Policy Day the previous day, where they were both panellists: “So pleased to have spoken with you yesterday and to have arranged to talk again. I’ve attached the speech notes. I wrote it for you to explain the four features of a knowledge-rich curriculum.”

The speech reveals Rata’s true meaning of a knowledge-rich curriculum: “If we are to value knowledge again, we should look to the Enlightenment for the moral and intellectual courage that created the modern world and the rational individual.”

Rata laments that “New Zealand was built on this intellectual commitment and moral courage. Yet in the 21st century we are failing our founders’ vision. . . . Nowadays very few of us are prepared to defend the type of knowledge that makes us modern. To do so invites vitriol and accusations of racism.” Rata concludes: “It’s time to act. That’s something only the government can do.”

It might be possible for Stanford to distance herself from Rata by framing her as providing unsolicited advice. It is more difficult for Stanford to distance herself from Rata’s ideas when the people that Stanford cites as directly influencing her reforms network and share ideas such as “core knowledge” with Rata.

For years, Dr Elena Aydarova, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has tracked the power behind the global spread of these fundamentalist Eurocentric “core knowledge” education reforms.

She addresses the science of reading and learning theories that these reforms always cite: “Yes, indeed there is a knowledge base in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, there are journals and societies [about this], but what happens in policy around the world has less to do with those societies . . . it is much more an ideologically-driven reform that is led by conservative think tanks, curriculum publishers and tech companies.”

Aydarova concludes that the reforms can be distinguished as “a corporate movement that is really rewriting what is happening in schools . . . it is not just about profit . . . it is a much bigger project that is about social and cultural change”.

This fits with Tina Ngata’s description of what is happening in Aotearoa — that these reforms are part of a global project to restrict what histories and knowledge children learn in order to produce citizens who do not challenge injustice.

However, as Ngata says, these reformers underestimate the capacity of educators and their creativity to resist.

She encouraged kaiako at Te Akapūmau summit: “Education is resistance and can also be maintained within the culture of your schools.” She went on to say that schools can become mana motuhake sites that educators themselves can shape. Ngata added that “colonial governments don’t understand that culture can exist in the whispers between our nannies as much as in the pages of books”.

Dr Ford and Bruce Jepsen were adamant that the recolonisation of the New Zealand curriculum need not be an inevitable outcome. They said that “this is a political choice that can be resisted through informed, courageous, and principled leadership”.

Indigenous high school programme specialist Huia Puketapu spoke towards the end of the summit, urging all in the room to recognise what they are dealing with and respond accordingly with respect and mana. She explained that navigators know which sails to use because they know which winds are coming.

It is my hope that educators in Aotearoa will stay the course because they know where these winds are blowing from, and what knowledge tamariki in Aotearoa need to thrive.

Jessie Moss (Photo supplied)

Jessie Moss is a registered teacher and the professional education adviser at NZEI Te Riu Roa. She has a background in primary school teaching and national curriculum resourcing. She is also a musician and te reo Māori enthusiast. She lives in Te Awakairangi.

E-Tangata, 2025