That's interesting, what makes you say that? Everyone I have talked to in the New Zealand education system has seemed to me to be genuinely trying to get the best outcomes for students, given the constraints imposed by pretty severely limited resources and the challenges imposed by out-of-school circumstances.
We have a pretty decent history of being relatively early adopters of evidence-based changes to our education system in New Zealand. That's reflected in, for example, the high desirableness of New Zealand-trained educators in the prestigious international-school circuit.
The postmodern curriculum theorists influencing these ideas are fundamentally anti-science.
They criticize presence and origin, they deny that there is a inherent truth
behind phenomena, criticize the idea that anything is really there, really exists, or can be directly apprehended if it does exist. Furthermore they see the natural sciences itself as product of the social relations that they serve to judge, that is,the idea was created at a certain time and place, to serve certain interests, and is dependent on a certain intellectual and
social context, specifically one that that serves the "status-quo" of patriarchal oppression maintained through an active process of "exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization" that is inevitably embedded in the scientific method itself.
The "situating" and "holistic" approach, while in theory neutral, is in practice presented to facilitate the introduction of relationalism, placing "power and suppression" as the fundamental paradigm in which to contextualize every element of the curriculum and the teaching interactions.
The choice of current contexts with far from more settled science and and highly divisive narratives is no accident, meant to deconstruct and displace science rather than convey it.
I'm confused about your objection to feedback during the early stages of a process. Later stages tend to be less about fundamentals and strategie, and focus more on technicalities and detail. Surely late stage would suffer more from the 'sunk cost' bias and be reluctant to change course?
As for 'evidence', the presented framework, objectives and tactics come straight out of postmodern curriculum theorist literature. They would see nothing controversial in the above.
You could argue that the proposed drafts do not intentionally align with the presented ideological framework, but are merely accidentally aligned or enabeling. Not sure that would make it better.
We have a pretty decent history of being relatively early adopters of evidence-based changes to our education system in New Zealand. That's reflected in, for example, the high desirableness of New Zealand-trained educators in the prestigious international-school circuit.
What do you think the politics is pushing for?