UNLEASH

ED

Tag: GERM

  • Reform ‘high stakes’ primary tests, MPs urge

    As we look to the future of education in this country, why is it that we are following the trend and examples from the UK? Yet our Education Minister(s) head over there to see their awesome examples of how to destroy public education…

    Children’s education in England is being skewed by the use of high-stakes tests taken by 11-year-olds as a school league table measure, say MPs.

    Annual test results should be replaced in the tables by a three-year rolling average to “lower the stakes”, says the Commons Education Select Committee.

    The current system has led to a narrow curriculum and “unnecessary stress” on pupils and teachers, argues the report.

    Last year, new tougher tests for 11-year-olds saw passes drop sharply.

    Ministers maintain that parents have a right to expect testing in schools to show whether their children are gaining the right skills in maths and literacy.

    But the committee says the close link between the tests at 11 and school accountability can “lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and ‘teaching to the test’, as well as affecting teacher and pupil well-being”.

    It wants the current system scrapped, with three-year rolling averages for schools published instead of the results of individual year groups.

    ‘Held to account’

    The report also calls for greater emphasis in Ofsted inspections on a broad and balanced curriculum.

    Committee chairman Neil Carmichael said too much emphasis on test results had led to too much “focus on English and maths at the expense of other subjects like science, humanities and the arts”.

    “It is right that schools are held to account for their performance but the government should act to lower the stakes and help teachers to deliver a broad, balanced and fulfilling curriculum for primary school children.”

    The report says poor implementation of the new system last year, with “guidance delayed and test papers leaked online”, caused significant disruption in schools.

    The MPs want ministers to reconsider the new writing assessment which emphasises “technical aspects like grammar and spelling, over creativity and composition”.

    “The balance of evidence we received did not support the proposition that focusing on specific grammatical techniques improved the overall quality of writing.”

    They also want spelling, punctuation and grammar tests for 11-year-olds to become non-statutory.

    Ministers recently announced proposals to scrap tests for seven-year-olds, following years of pressure from teachers, parents and educationalists.

    The Department for Education is consulting on a new assessment for pupils when they first start school – but the report urges caution when introducing a “baseline” measure.

    “It should be designed as a diagnostic tool to help teachers identify pupils’ needs and must avoid shifting negative consequences of high-stakes accountability to early years,” they warn.

    Read more here.

    Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-39745884

  • Ken Robinson – Creative Schools – Chapter 1

    Last year I purchased Ken Robinson’s ‘Creative Schools’ book after viewing his highly popular TED talk video in which he made quite a lot of sense. 

    To be honest, I’m not much of a reader. I tend to stick to picture books. So I’m even less into writing about reading a book, and the idea of writing a book review is far from the forefront of my to do list. However, I was immediately blown away by how much sense Ken makes within his first chapter, that I probably could have highlighted every word as reference material.

    So as a means of collecting the best parts of his book, I’ve decided to write down and paraphrase some of the key quotes Sir Ken makes. While he writes regarding the UK and US education policies, it is quite evident that these models are being dishearteningly enforced and entrenched into New Zealand’s current education direction. At times, you could be mistaken that Robinson was in fact writing a historical account of the reform that Aotearoa is currently undertaking.

    Chapter 1

    The Standards Movement
    • “Reform isn’t new in education. There have always been debates about what education is for and what should be taught and how. But now it’s different. The modern standards movement is global… National education policies used to be mainly domestic affairs. These days, governments scrutinize each others’ education systems as earnestly as their defense policies.” – p6
    • “Since 2000, the standards movement has been turbocharged by the league tables of the… (PISA). These tables are based on student performance in standardized tests… The political impact of PISA has grown… Ministers of education now compare their respective rankings like bodybuilders flexing their biceps.” – p7
    • “Governments everywhere are now yanking firmly on the reins of public education, telling schools what to teach, imposing systems of testing to hold them accountable, and levying penalties if they don’t make the grade.” – p9
    National Curriculums
    • “Most national curricula are based on the idea of discrete subjects. In most systems there is a hierarchy to these subjects. At the top are literacy, mathematics, and now the STEM disciplines. Next come the humanities, including history, geography, and social studies. Be cause the standards movement emphasizes academic study, it places less value on practical disciplines like art, drama, dance, music, design, and physical education and on ‘soft subjects’ like communications and media studies, which are all thought to be nonacademic. Within the arts, visual arts and music are usually given higher priority than drama and dance. Often these last two are not taught at all.” – p12
    • “When it comes to assessment, the standards movement emphasizes formal, written examinations and extensive use of multiple choice tests so that students’ answers can be easily codified and processed. It is skeptical too of course work, portfolios, open book tests, teacher evaluation, peer assessment and other approaches that are not so easily quantifiable.” – p12
    • “One of the aims of testing is to increase competition between students, teachers, and schools…Students compete with each other, teachers are judged mainly on their students’ test results, and schools and districts go head-to-head to win resources. Standards-based tests influence funding allocations, staff promotions, an whether or not schools stay open or are placed under different leadership.” – p13.
    Charter Schools
    • “Some governments are now encouraging investment in education by private corporations and entrepreneurs. Their involvement ranges from selling products and services to schools to running their own schools for commercial profit. Governments are promoting different categories of public school – such as academies, charters, and free schools – in which some strictures of the standards movement are deliberately relaxed. There are several motives here. One is to intensify competition; a second is to promote diversity of provision; a third is to ease the burden on the public purse; and a fourth is profit. As I said, education is one of the world’s biggest businesses” – p13
    • “If the standards movement were working as intended, there would be nothing more to say. But it isn’t. Take the three R’s. In spite of the billions of dollars spent, the standards movement has been at best a partial success. Countries like the United States and England have sacrificed much in a desperate drive to raise standards in literacy and numeracy. Yet test scores in the targeted disciplines have hardly improved.” p13-14.

    • “The standards movement is not meeting the economic challenges we face. One of the declared priorities is to prepare young people for work. And yet, youth unemployment around the world is at record levels…
      The blight of unemployment is even affecting young people who’ve done everything that was expected of them and graduated from college. Between 1950 and 1980, a college degree was pretty much a guarantee of a good job… They don’t now. The essential problem is not the quality of degrees, but the quantity… A college degree used to be so valuable because relatively few people had one. In a world bristling with graduates, a college degree is no longer the distinction it once was.” p14-15
    Education & the Economy
    • “Yong Zhao… calculates that in the twenty-eight years from 1977 and 2005 more than a million jobs annually disappeared from existing firms in the United States. During that same time, new firms created more than three million jobs a year. Many of these new jobs needed significantly different skill sets from the old, lost jobs – and there was very little advance warning over what those skill sets might be. The work went to employees who had refined those talents already and to people with the creative and entrepreneurial ability to make career and training adjustments.” p16-17
    • “In 2008, IBM published a survey of what characteristics organization leaders need most in their staff. They spoke with fifteen hundred leaders in eighty countries. The two priorities were adaptability to change and creativity in generating new ideas.  They found these qualities lacking in many otherwise highly qualified graduates… On the contrary, standardized education can crush creativity and innovation, the very qualities on which today’s economies depend.” p18-19.
    • “The standards movement is not achieving the objectives it has set for itself. Meanwhile, it is having catastrophic consequences on student engagement and teacher morale…the teacher attrition rate is alarmingly high. In the United States, more than a quarter of a million teachers leave the profession every year, and it is estimated that more than 40 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years. Thi scenario is especially bleak in high-poverty schools, where turnover is approximately 20 percent every year.” p20-21
    Achievement
    • “The standards movement came about because of legitimate concerns  about standards in schools. There are many factors that affect students’ achievement in schools. They may include student motivation, poverty, social disadvantage, home and family circumstances, poor facilities and funding in schools, the pressures of testing and assessment, and myriad others. These factors cannot be ignored, and any attempt to raise achievement in schools has to take them fully into account.” p24
    • “The best ways to raise (achievement) are to improve the quality of teaching, have a rich and balanced curriculum, and have supportive, informative systems of assessment. The political response has been the opposite: to narrow the curriculum and wherever possible to standardize content, teaching, and assessment. It has proved to be the wrong response.” p24-25
    • “The evidence is everywhere that the standards movement is largely failing by its own terms and creating more problems than it is solving.” p24
    • “The fact is that our children and our communities need a different sort of education, based on different principles from those that are driving the standards movement.” – p24.

    And that’s pretty much the highlights from Chapter 1; and only Chapter 1! So many more to go, so I will continue making posts when I come across more in the pages that follow.

  • Post-Mortem: UK Public Schooling

    Post Mortem: UK public schooling.

    Family: UK Government – related to: US, NZ.

    Death: Terminated by family.

    Age: 100 years of publicly funded education

    References: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35814215

    General Body Condition: Diminished frame with minimal experts. Main organs shut down. Donors needed.

    CLINICAL HISTORY:

    The patient had undergone a variety of surgeries recently, and had come under attack from GERM(s) in quite a severe way. The use of GERM had become quite pronounced and at this time, the although the doctors recommended further diagnosis be undertaken from specialists, the family has asked that the life support be switched off and the body be laid to rest.

    POST-MORTEM FINDINGS:

    • Poor academic results according to nationalised testing
    • Poor performing teachers at schools with poor results. (Unconfirmed)
    • Large quantities of GERM infecting the hosts (Department of Education)
    • MGD (Michael Gove Disease) present in host from 2010.
    • Morgan-Nicky Virus spread throughout workforce from 2011.
    • Strong discomfort from Local Authorities.
    • Records show that GERM had affected only 14.5% of the 16,766 Public Schools. It was based on this data that lead family to believe that terminating public schools was a good idea.

    It is with regret that Public Schooling in the UK will be terminated, as of Thursday 17 March, 2016.

  • Steam-rolled!

    In relation to:

    Protests against education reform – Stuff.co.nz

  • Education Changes – 2008-2015

    In the last five years there has been a dramatic shift in Education. Since this government (National) came into power in 2009, they have been non-stop in making wholesale changes across the sector.

    WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND - NOVEMBER 14: Education Minister Hekia Parata announces a Government partnership with New Zealand Rugby League at Westpac Stadium on November 14, 2014 in Wellington, New Zealand. The partnership has been set up to improve the education, health and wellbeing of thousands of young people and families associated with rugby league in New Zealand. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
    WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND – NOVEMBER 14: Education Minister Hekia Parata announces a Government partnership with New Zealand Rugby League at Westpac Stadium on November 14, 2014 in Wellington, New Zealand. The partnership has been set up to improve the education, health and wellbeing of thousands of young people and families associated with rugby league in New Zealand. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

    There is an old Māori whakataukī that says:
    Inā kei te mohio koe ko wai koe, I anga mai koe i hea, kei te mohio koe. Kei te anga atu ki hea.
    If you know who you are and where you are from, then you will know where you are going.

    What I want to do is take what changes have been made since the start of the National Government, and track these changes to their logical conclusion. By using what changes have been made, we can follow the progress of the GERM in our country.
    GERM is the Global Education Reform Movement.
    The Government is trying to create a crisis in education and impose a business model on our world class schools. This model, known as the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) has infected other countries by introducing standardisation, competition and test-based accountability. – NZEI

    National’s Education Timeline

    2008

    • National releases their education policy.
    • National: Overhaul NCEA; introduce national literacy and numeracy standards; extend 20-hours early childhood education subsidy to playcentres and kohanga reos; teach more trades in schools and set up five “trade academies”; ensure all 16- and 17-year-olds are in school, work or approved training courses.
      ACT: Scrap Education Ministry and replace it with new Education Authority; allow state funding to public or private school of parents’ choice; deregulate schools but require them to be licensed by education authority; move curriculum “back to basics”.The key part of these policies is getting rid of the current education schemes, and replace them with more privatised versions of them. National Standards introduced to help regulate and narrow the curriculum, including going “back to basics” of reading, writing, and maths. Collect and monitor this data in primary school, and use NCEA “overhaul” to position schools against each other, including league tables. Deregulated schools, or Charter schools are to follow very soon after the election as part of ACT’s coalition.
    • National elected into government, using MMP to go into coalition with Māori Party and ACT.
    • Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill passed under urgency, allowing it to bypass the Education and Science Select Committee where the merits of National Standards could have been debated. Government sets precedence of limited to no consultation with parents or the sector.

    Visit NBR.co.nz for more information on government policies from 2008 election.

    2009

    • Anne Tolley becomes Minister of Education.
    • National makes large cuts to Teacher professional development services. This leads to a rise in private companies offering courses for teachers, and schools having to fund their own education development of its staff.
    • $35million additional funds budgeted over the next four years for independent (private) schools.
    • Education Amendment Bill 2009 introduces the idea of a ‘…body corporate or corporation sole may be appointed as a limited statutory manager or commissioner’
    • ‘Consultation’ with the public over National Standards. Data somewhat ignored (38% against, 14% for). Teachers vilified by the media for ‘not getting on board’ with the government policy.
    • Changes made to National Administration Guidelines to essentially make National Standards compulsory in all primary schools.
    • The Ministry begins promoting teaching and teacher supply initiatives and TeachNZ scholarships, informing overseas teachers of employment opportunities in key shortage areas in New Zealand, and awarding 1,023 scholarships to student teachers to study across the early childhood education, and schooling sectors.

    2010

    • Schools expected to begin using National Standards from the first day of school.
    • Schools that oppose National Standards forced to adopt them through threats of charter rejection, enforced ERO monitoring, or even closure.

    2011

    • Lesley Longstone appointed as Secretary of Education. Ms. Longstone had been a key figure in the introduction of charter schools in the UK.
    • National win general election by a landslide, and are re-elected into Government. Partnership with ACT and Māori Party continue.
    • Hekia Parata appointed as Minister of Education.

     

    2012

    • Minister of Education Hekia Parata announces policy to increase class sizes in order to be in-line with Treasury to save $43million each year. Continues with precedence of announcing policy with no consultation of the sector. Teachers appeal on force, and show multiple flaws in the numbers suggested by the Minister (such as making exceptions for technical teachers at intermediate schools).
    • Ms. Parata makes first mention of performance based pay for teachers as an option.
    • Minister of Education Hekia Parata backs down on class size policy, due to incorrect figures presented by Treasury, and from widespread disagreement from teachers, and more importantly, parents. “Ms Parata said the policy had caused “a disproportionate amount of anxiety” for parents and she was responding to that.”.
    • Novopay introduced for all teacher’s pay with limited to no trial or testing, despite advice given not to roll out the system which wasn’t ready. Not surprisingly, the system causes widespread issues, with some teachers not getting paid for months on end.
    • School Report launched by Fairfax Media to make National Standard data publically available. First comparisons between school’s data begins.
    • School closures and mergers in Christchurch announced following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. Limited to no consultation with those affected.
    • The Education Amendment Bill to allow charter schools introduced on October 15, 2012.
    • Lesley Longstone resigns after 13 months in the position, sighting a breakdown in relationship with Hekia Parata.

    2013

    2014

    • Government announces Investing in Education Success. $359million put into education through expert teachers and lead principals to oversee more than one school in an attempt to bring better practise across all schools. Initially accepted by secondary and principal unions. Primary school sector unhappy with the idea. Once again, limited to no consultation with the sector. NZEI negotiates changes with the Ministry.
    • First five charter schools open for the school year.
    • Government takes over ownership of Novopay. ‘All issues’ finally sorted out, two years after it’s release.

    2015

    • Removal of teacher elected Teacher’s Council. Rebranded as Education Council, with representatives selected by the Minister of Education.
    • Decile ratings changed for many areas around New Zealand.
    • Rules around teacher registration changed to align with the Vunerable Children Act 2014, introduced in light of child abuse and indecent assault of children, by teachers and those in authority. Examples: 1. 2. 3. 4.
    • PaCT tool being rolled out across the country for schools to ‘opt-in’ and use.
    • NZEI announces adjustments to IES proposal and seeks teacher vote.

     

    Where things are headed

    image-key-privatisationFirstly, your guess is as good as mine. All we can do is speculate and take what has happened and take it through to its logical conclusion. We can assume that this government what to turn schooling into a business, and privatise as many assets as it possibly can. The rich will get richer, and the poor even poorer. These are some of the natural conclusions of the moves that have been made in the reform of education in this country.

    • PaCT to become compulsory for schools to use to assess student achievement in Years 1-8, essentially becoming a Nationwide assessment.
    • PaCT data to be collected by the Ministry, and ‘failing’ students linked with their teacher so they can be monitored.
    • Teacher performance becomes linked to student achievement (or lack there of).
    • Performance pay introduced as a ‘reward’ for good teachers.
    • ‘Bad’ teachers ‘weaned’ out through lower performance pay, and increasingly difficult registration regulations and expectations. Some of these ‘bad’ teachers, however, will be ‘good’ teachers who have struggling students in their class and who aren’t getting ‘good’ results according to PaCT.
    • IES to make schools with ‘failing’ students adopt ‘successful’ school principal and lead teachers. Aligns with performance pay, and the removal of ‘bad’ teachers and principals from the school.
    • ‘Good’ principals to manage and run more than one school. Much like a CEO of a company.
    • School funding changes, along with IES, where groups of schools receive ‘bulk funding’ or ‘pooled resources time and money‘. (See 5.)
    • League tables introduced and made publically available through the media for parents to send their children to ‘successful’ schools, and avoid ‘failing’ schools; even though the quality of the teaching may be the same or even better. Schools funding also begins to be based on results of Fairfax Media’s “School Report“.
    • Failing schools to be merged into charter schools with private ‘managers’. More privatisation of the education sector.
    • Experienced teachers on highest pay packet to be replaced with young, inexperienced teachers on a lower salary, to save money in the budget.
    • Increase of class sizes to be rolled out.
    Notes

    In my opinion there are very few ‘bad’ teachers in education in New Zealand. When I make reference to ‘bad’ teachers in this post, I am making it from the perspective of the government, who would have us think that any teacher who has poor achievement results in relation to National Standards is a ‘bad’ teacher.
    In addition to this, I fail to see how teachers can be assessed in their ability to teach by the results of their students. I have had some students from struggling situations and home life who have made amazing progress in a year, but are still below where the Government reckon’s they should be according to the ‘aspirational’ National Standards. Furthermore, I have had some students who have made no progress, but I would challenge the best teacher in the country to do a better job and get that student to be At the National Standard, while still maintaining the teaching of the rest of the class as well. Therefore, this definition of ‘bad’ or ‘good’ teacher is completely flawed.

    Some may call this post ‘scare-mongering’; except it isn’t. The majority of it is laying out the facts, and then extrapolating them to their natural conclusion based on the precedence set by this government, and its desire to reform education in this country.

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