Seriously. How ridiculous?
Mum is running late for work, driving over the hill to her 9 til 5 job in the city centre. A notification comes through on her phone at 9:01am, and although she knows she shouldn’t, she checks her phone anyway. The message preview reads “Sally Burgess*: Reading – Below, Writing – Below, Mathematics – Wel…” before it gets truncated to fit on the screen. Opening it up to see the $45 million dollar app in all it’s glory, Mum forgets about the upcoming corner and drives off the road into the fence of the unfortunate homeowner. This instantly lands her in hospital. It could have been so much worse though. She probably counts herself lucky not to have plowed through multiple crowds of children at the local school 300 metres down the road.
That’s right. The government would have parents being updated in real time every and any progress their child is making in National Standards throughout the school day.
They’re calling this ‘National Standards Plus’, largely because of the additional time and energy that is going to be chewing into teachers already busy schedule. The additional testing, the additional data gathering, the additional reporting and notifying and uploading to the app’s system. All this PLUS actually teaching the children.
National Standards Plus would allow parents to track their child’s progress in more detail online.
“We will show you your child’s progress on your mobile phone, English said. “Some schools have already rolled out tools that support this approach.
The benefit to this will be of course that parents are kept up to date with their child’s progress as it happens.
Of course, to get this, teachers will be required to input data as it happens. Which will have to be regularly for it to be a worthwhile app to keep on your phone. So now instead of teaching, teachers will be in a constant state of testing, assessing, marking and upload results to the app, for each and every child in their class, each and every day.
What the government is forgetting however, is the cost of equipping each classroom in the country with one of these:
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Using these scales to weigh the pigs is one thing, but teaching children so that there is progress to notify parents about is another.
Labour education spokesman Chris Hipkins said National was ‘”doubling down” on its National Standards system which was not improving student achievement.
“Kids in New Zealand are over assessed. What we need is less reporting, more teaching.”
And he questioned how teachers would find the time to update assessment records for continual online access.
Education union the NZEI said plans to spend millions building a computer tool to track children’s progress as it happened,” based on shonky National Standards, is an obsession with data gone mad”.
“Requiring teachers to input standardised assessment data across a range of subjects in real time for 30 or more students in a class will reduce the time teachers have with children and increase children’s anxiety about learning,” NZEI Te Riu Roa President Lynda Stuart says.
“No parent wants their child’s teacher sitting entering data for hours when they need to be face to face with kids.”
Seriously. How ridiculous?
Oink.
In relation to – Stuff – National launches official campaign with education bid