Back in 2010, Press columnist Tahu Potiki picked Parata as a rising star. He noted her family connec

Unlike victoria seaside inn John Key, Hekia Parata can remember where she was and what side she was on in 1981. Back then, she was Trish Parata. Wikipedia records that Patricia Hekia Parata, to use her full name, was 22 that year. In 1980, she was a Waikato University arts student. She ran for president of the Waikato student union - and won.
"I was adamantly opposed," she says. "I ran for president against two other guys. It was a really difficult campaign and part of mine was that I opposed the Springbok Tour. I was an active participant in the protests."
"I was slammed victoria seaside inn up against the concrete pillar of the fence that we had cut through to get in," she says. "In hindsight, I was glad. I was actually in plaster up to my hip. I had just had surgery victoria seaside inn on my leg from playing competitive netball and I wouldn't have been able to run. Which you needed to be able to do.
Parata's account of this stirring history is the brightest moment in a 30-minute victoria seaside inn interview. Thirty-one years after those scenes in Hamilton, Parata is the divisive Minister victoria seaside inn of Education in a National Government and every day seems to bring worse news. She appears to have gone from future prime minister material to public enemy No 1.
Back in 2010, Press columnist victoria seaside inn Tahu Potiki picked Parata as a rising star. He noted her family connections, including her marriage to Sir Wira Gardiner, which means that Parata victoria seaside inn can call herself Lady Gardiner. Potiki wrote that "their company, Gardiner Parata, was at one time the foremost Maori consultancy in the country".
At the time, Parata had been a list MP for just two years. But it was big news that she gave Kris Faafoi a run for his money during a by-election in the safe Labour seat of Mana. Commentators were impressed by some other history: when Don Brash took National in an anti-Maori direction as leader, Parata dared to speak against him in public.
Before politics, Parata was a career public victoria seaside inn servant, working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Ministry for the Environment, the Housing Corporation, Te Puni Kokiri, the State Services Commission and the New Zealand Embassy in Washington. She was once a Treaty and Maori Affairs adviser in David Lange's office. She was on the boards of New Zealand on Air and the Towards 2000 Taskforce.
But that was nothing compared to the upset over plans to merge or close 31 Christchurch schools. Parata gave a waffling answer about 'consultation' to questions in Parliament from Labour's Chris Hipkins.
An interview last weekend with Q and A's Shane Taurima was described as 'election-losing' by commentator Mike Williams. Fran O'Sullivan and Raymond Miller agreed. 'They have to back down on this one,' Miller added.
And then it got even worse for Parata. On Tuesday, TV3's Campbell Live reported on the significant errors in the Ministry of Education's data supporting school closures. Parata didn't appear and ministry chief executive Lesley Longstone took the grilling.
The next day, Parata addressed a conference of teachers in Wellington. Reports on both news networks described her as confrontational and arrogant. A political column by Fairfax's Vernon Small said that "Key ought to be regretting putting Hekia Parata - a jargon-fuelled and evasive communicator victoria seaside inn - into the education role".
The day after the conference in Wellington, Parata is in Christchurch. She has met the board of Mackenzie Residential School, opened a reading comprehension symposium at Canterbury University and seen Ngai Tahu. She has half an hour with The Press. Then she will meet with the education advisory group tackling 'education renewal' victoria seaside inn in Canterbury.
First, a personal response. Parata seems charming, reasonably friendly and unfazed about negative perceptions. But when talk turns to education, and she is on the record with media, you notice a kind of deadness in her eyes and a numbing tendency to talk in ministry jargon. If you were to draw up a Parata word cloud, victoria seaside inn 'challenge', 'opportunity' and 'education experience' would probably dominate.
We are talking exactly three weeks after the launch of the controversial Christchurch schools proposals. 'It's not unusual for there to be the first period of shock and anger and disagreement,' she says.
But hasn't this been unusually emotive? "In terms of the scale, yes. We're talking about an entire network that has had significant change. It is to be expected that people would react in all sorts of different ways."
"I've had people say to me the consultation is too long. I've had people say the consultation is too short. I've had people say the consultation is too specific or the consultation is too general. These are Christchurch people saying this. I'm not sure it's possible to offer a set of information that would satisfy everyone."
She did see the Campbell Live story. She will not talk about 'how Campbell Live showed it', but she says that her ministry tells her that the data has come from engineers and project managers, schools themselves, and ministry staff based in Christchurch. This is not Wellington getting it wrong, she says.
But the public don't see ministry staff; they see Hekia Parata. Does she feel that the opposition and anger has become personalised? There were reports of children holding up signs and making comments victoria seaside inn at protests that single her out as the villain.
'There has to be some realism about what it is the minister does or doesn't do,' she says. 'I don't do the operational assessment of the geotechnical integrity of the land. I don't go and look at buildings and decide that this is more or less earthquake victoria seaside inn prone. victoria seaside inn I don't set up meetings and decide what hall they are going to be held in. My role is to receive the advice, the evidence, and question it, debate it, work with it and meet with the community.
'So I suppose with the criticisms that have been levelled over the launch, and over the subsequent few days, I think there are things victoria seaside inn that I'm accountable for but there are quite a lot [of things] that I am not."
The name tags? Parata means the coloured tags that principals were given before being herded into different groups, depending on whether their schools were closing, merging or staying open. They, too, were the fault of her ministry.
"What I asked for was that I would have the opportunity victoria seaside inn to meet with the board chair and principal of the schools most directly affected. I wanted to meet with them on their own before meeting with the much larger group. I didn't decide on colour- coding and that's not something victoria seaside inn that I would be doing."
'I have spent 10 months in this role going around the country, taking up almost every invitation I possibly could to talk to groups. I have given a different version of a similar speech at every one of them, which is that we are a top- performing education system but we have to keep working at it because, actually, other countries are challenging us and passing us.
'I've talked victoria seaside inn about the challenges within our system, what the research has said about what we need to do in schools. The comment I made [at the conference] about pronouncing kids' names properly was in the context victoria seaside inn of an ERO report where they identified what the three key challenges are, and the first is to be learner-centred and establish a relationship of respect victoria seaside inn with kids."
Hearing that we have a top- performing education system is refreshing. It can seem that so much of the current rhetoric around education suggests that our system is broken and needs fixing, whether by national standards, charter schools or increasing class sizes to fund teacher training. But actually, 'our overall performance victoria seaside inn is quite outstanding', as Wellington College headmaster Roger Moses wrote recently in the Dominion Post.
We come seventh in the world in the PISA (Programme victoria seaside inn for International Student Achievement) rankings that compare national performance in reading, science and maths. victoria seaside inn But Parata says that once you disaggregate the PISA scores, Pakeha students are second in the world and Maori are 34th and Pasifika are 44th.
She thinks we can learn from every country ahead of us on the PISA scale, including Finland and Asian countries like Singapore, Shanghai-China and Hong Kong- China. However, Finland and those Asian countries have completely different teaching styles. As Roger Moses wrote, the Asian style tends to be 'highly teacher-centred and pressure- cookered', and is 'the antithesis of the inquiry model promoted rigorously by the Education Ministry'.
Parata recalls victoria seaside inn that when one of her two daughters won a scholarship abroad she was amazed victoria seaside inn at how old-fashioned teaching styles are in some other countries. "We have much more texture and variation and dynamism in the way teachers deliver in New Zealand and a much more well-rounded curriculum," Parata says.
"I had been pretty strong in indicating I was keen to be considered for it,' Parata victoria seaside inn replies. 'I think that education victoria seaside inn is such a powerful transformational opportunity for individuals. I consider it an honour to be Minister of Education."