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Tag: national standards

  • National Standards Plus

    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.

    – Stuff, 28 August 2017

     

    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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    Find out more here.

    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

  • Future of education in NZ for National freightrain

    In response to NZ Herald – Every child’s chance to learn second language: National’s education policy – 27 August 2017.

    Whilst some schools are struggling to get students to learn a first language, we’ll be teaching them coding and a second language as well should National get through to it’s fourth consecutive term.

    National Standards will be extended.

    And low and behold, surprise, surprise, they will be pumping money into improving the teaching of maths to primary schools.

    Seriously. When will they get the message?

    The second part of the package was a $126 million investment to raise maths achievement for primary school students. English said National Standards showed New Zealand needed to lift its game in maths. “So we’ll provide our students and teachers with the tools they need to do that… We’ll help 1200 teachers a year complete extra university papers targeted at teaching maths to primary students… We’ll also provide intensive classroom support for students, where schools have identified the need to improve their maths.”

    Obviously teachers are the reason students aren’t achieving in Mathematics. Rubbish teachers and ineffective teaching. Ignore the fact that there are other factors at play for many students, it MUST be the useless teachers we have that are failing our students.

    So to fix this problem, we’ll send teachers back to university to learn how to teach Mathematics more effectively by ex-teachers-turn-lecturers who couldn’t hack it in the classroom 15 years ago with some kind of trendy fad way of teaching. Probably after school, in teacher’s own time.

    Teachers work out of their skin. Anyone who has visited schools that are supposedly ‘struggling’ knows that there are other factors in any underachievement.

    It’s made even more a joke when you begin to look at the reason behind such a policy. A simple search on our favourite search engine shows that Education Counts has the data for National Standards Results, 2016 (PDF). On the very first graph of this document we see that Reading sits at 77.8%, Maths at 75.4% and 71.2% for Writing. So why are we targeting Maths?

    Quite simple actually.

    Maths is the easiest to address. It has a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’. It’s measurable. It’s quantifiable. It’s the easiest to show progress. It’s assessments are stable and data rich. This is something that Reading and Writing don’t have, being largely subjective – especially Writing. The government want to ride on some success. By investing in Mathematics and measuring the future success of their education budget, they can prove that National Standards work, and legitimise all three subjects.

    However, what teachers really want, and really need, are some resources, assessments, and some structure around how Writing is assessed and taught, and to see how this can impact on all other subjects (including Mathematics). Pumping more money into Mathematics is an easy out for the Government, whilst appearing that they are putting in resources and funding into education before an election, whilst in reality, they are plugging a hole that isn’t leaking (or not leaking as much).

    Are any teacher’s actually excited about this? About having more money put into Mathematics, even after ALiM and other initiatives? About the prospect of having to go back to complete some additional university papers?

  • Primary schools to measure student progress

    In response to https://beehive.govt.nz/release/primary-schools-measure-student-progress – August 26, 2017.

    Measure. Measure. Measure. Weigh. Weigh. Weigh. Data. Data. Data.

    “The Government has made a decision to shift towards a system that measures student progress, alongside National Standards / Ngā Whanaketanga Rumaki Māori, to help ensure every student gets the support they need to achieve…
    Monitoring student progress gives teachers more data on which to tailor learning plans for their students – and we want to roll this out to all primary schools and kura.”

    says Education Minister Nikki Kaye.

    More data. More weighing. More testing. More assessment.

    Guess what. Teacher’s already monitor progress. I can show you the progress each of my students are making (or not making) in each of the three big subjects that now dominate the New Zealand Curriculum. Obviously not enough though.

    “Measuring progression means teachers will be able to see how far children have come in the specific learning areas that make up National Standards.”

    In some regards, it is good that the Minister has acknowledged what teachers have been saying for a while. Some students make incredible progress within a year, but are still below or well below the expected standard set by the Standards.

    “The change also reflects the education sector’s observation that we don’t adequately show a student’s progress over time, particularly for students who may be below the standard, and this will help address that.”

    This is all well and good, but as schools have come to know through the berading from ERO and senior advisers, progress don’t mean jack when it comes to achievement, which is all ‘the Ministry’ and ERO actually care about. 85% At or Above. 85%. 85%. 85%.

    Ultimately however, this will actually just lead to the mandatory use of PaCT.

    To support teachers the Ministry of Education has developed progress tools, such as Learning Progression Frameworks, the Progress and Consistency Tool and Whakatupuranga, that help show how children are doing and how they can progress. These have been developed in a number of areas including reading, writing, maths and digital technologies.

    The Government wants to roll out tools like these to all primary schools and kura as evidence shows they deliver real benefits for teachers and kaiako, by streamlining paperwork and reducing their reporting workload.

    There has been copious amounts written about PaCT and it’s potential. Just have a look at the following

    Education continues down this reform, with National determined on making National Standards legitimate.

     

  • Community of Learning: Devoid of Individuality

    Over the last few nights, I have worked away going through all 61 of the accepted and approved Achievement Challenges that active CoL’s have put out.

    I spent time going through each one and noting down the key aspects of each. This included noting if they were based around National Standards, NCEA, Curriculum subject, and any other factors, such as Ethnicity or Gender focus, or a mixture of everything.

    These Communities of Learning are all unique. They all represent different parts of the country, and the schools in them reflect the communities and whanau who they serve. They are made up of a myriad of individuals who teach and lead within them and who work tirelessly at solving a range of different achievement challenges daily.

    Yet, out of the 180 CoL’s, only 61 have been accepted so far. Many, many of them have had to be returned with a “FAIL” on the grade paper, and asked to resubmit. Countless have been adjusted and modified to include certain aspects that the Ministry and the Government want to see in them. The following infographic shows this beyond doubt, that there is a definite agenda behind what the Ministry will accept as appropriate achievement challenges. Very few of them take into account any kind of individual or creative focus in which a Community of Learning might wish to operate and instead, pushes and prods until that CoL fits into the pre-determined box, ready to be shipped off.

    [su_box title=”Communities of Learning – March 2017″]View the enlightening infographic I made here.[/su_box]

     

    In the initial stages, schools were gun ho, with vast varieties of creative innovations for what these challenges could be and what would lead to set one community aside from another. Many delved into what was important to them and their community when deciding on their achievement challenges.

    In a quiet hush of excitement and trepardation rolled into one as the response envelope was opened. A quick skim to see if the achievement challenges had been accepted.

    No. Instead what many CoLs got was a rejection letter of their achievement challenges, with some suggestions and examples of what might be a better challenge.

    The result of this is quite evident where two years of returned achievement challenges until the CoLs came up with one that would fit into the box that the Ministry aresqueezing is all into.
    Of the 61 CoL’s that have currently (March 2017) had their achievement challenges accepted, I worked out the following stats:

    83% have something about Maths.

    88% have something about Writing. Of those, 60% are about National Standards.

    70% of CoLs want improvement at Achieving Level 2 NCEA.

    36% are focussed on Maori achievement in some way, and 29% on boys achievement.

    10% focus on additional learning needs.

    Next to none have anything holistic, such as Hauora (wellbeing) or creativity, mindfulness or community focuses, or other curriculum areas such as Science or the Arts.

    Make what you will of that.

     

  • NZCER – National Standards in their seventh year

    National Standards in their seventh year – NZCER

    At the mid point of 2016, we were presented with a survey which was sent off to NZCER for the current views of teaching proffesionals views on National Standards. 6 months later, and NZCER have done the collation and inquiry around the survey results, and have presented the following report.

    National Standards in their seventh year (PDF 2.9Mb)

    As one of these teaching professionals who completed the survey (selected at random by the school principal) I was quite interested in the results and findings. Below are some of the key quotes from the report, and hopefully it provides a good summary and synopsis of the entire article for you.

    Key Quotes

    • While (the National Standards) are part and parcel of teaching and school decision making, questions continue around their impact for students, differences in their interpretation and their impact on the rest of the curriculum.
    • Over half of teachers and principals still feel they have not had the support they need to work with National Standards.
    • Over two-thirds of teachers reported a narrowing of the curriculum they teach, associated with National Standards
    • Many teachers indicated that their school has a shared understanding of National Standards that means that overall teacher judgements (OTJs) at the school are consistent…
    • Only 41% of the principals and 49% of teachers thought they had had enough support and guidance to feel confident about their work with National Standards.
    • Only 16% of teachers agreed the impact of National Standards on students’ achievement overall has been positive.
    • Most parents and whānau reported receiving clear information in their child’s mid-year report about their achievement of National Standards… Fifty-one percent of parents thought National Standards provide a valuable record of their child’s learning.
    • Nine percent of the teachers who responded to the survey had used PaCT to support their OTJs in 2016. PaCT is a Ministry-funded online tool that was developed to support teachers to make consistent judgements of students’ performance in relation to the National Standards.
    • Teachers’ support for National Standards remained around the same as 2013, when it was 35%. The proportion who agreed National Standards provide a valuable record of student learning was stable at 23%

    Principal Comments

    • In the comments made by 43% of the principals about National Standards, the unreliable nature of National Standards data was the most frequently mentioned theme (18% of all principals).

      NS are a joke. Data coming to us from schools when students enrol here is highly unreliable. Our view is that without a National Test (WE DO NOT WANT NATIONAL HIGH STAKES TESTING!!!!) there is no accurate way of assessing whatever the data schools are submitting is truthful/correct. We are hard in our marking, we do not overstate student achievement, most probably we understate it. It is obvious that schools are not being truthful in their reporting of data because of the high levels of inaccuracy. OTJs cannot be accurately moderated within a school, let alone between local schools and definitely not between suburbs/cities etc. NS data being published by the MOE on Education Counts cannot be trusted.

    • Nine percent commented that the focus should be on students’ achievement, rather than their achievement of given standards.

      (National Standards) Do not acknowledge the progress of students who are not achieving at the Standard but are making progress, but it is not enough to move out of the ‘below’ categories.

    • Seven percent of principals voiced concern about the negative effects of National Standards on students and their learning.

      Good idea but each child will have different abilities. What about the child who is ‘below’ from 5 years–12 years old. How do they feel?

      It is soul destroying for students who are well below—we used to celebrate their small achievements—now they are just well below! 🙁 Overall, National Standards have led to a deterioration in the educational deal our children are receiving.

    Teacher Comments

    • Forty-four percent of teachers wrote comments about National Standards, and concern about negative effects on students and their learning was a main theme (13% of all teachers).

      Labels children from an early age. National Standards has helped label our Pasifika and Māori students as ‘below’ achievers, it doesn’t take into account the added value of the child’s own learning.

      I find the whole push for acceleration very dangerous as many children are getting insufficient consolidation and fall down later because they do not have a solid grounding.

    • The other most frequently mentioned theme in teachers’ comments was that the focus should be on identifying and reporting a student’s individual progress, rather than their achievement—or not—of a set standard (10% of teachers).

      National Standards do not accurately recognise the progress of some students, in particular ‘well below’ and ‘below’ students. A student can arrive at ‘below’, work as hard as they can all year and still be ‘below’. National Standards do not acknowledge or show this progress. This can be very demotivating for these students.

      National Standards are a terrible way to measure student achievement as it does not include specific progress within a level. Students may make huge individual progress within their own ability, however parents/caregivers are only concerned if their child is ‘AT’ National Standards.

    In Conclusion

    • Overall, the picture from the 2016 NZCER national survey responses indicates that, while the National Standards have been incorporated into teaching and learning and used by school leaders as indicators of student need, experiences of using them continue to raise questions about their role in student learning and performance, more than 6 years later. To make the National Standards more productive for teaching and learning, it would seem that the recommendations from NZCER’s 2013 analysis of its national survey data (summarised on p. 6 of this report) are still applicable.

    Your thoughts?

    What are your thoughts on National Standards and their role in today’s education? Are they relevant or are they a distraction from your teaching?

    What did you think of the report above? Anything stand out for you? Please Comment below.

  • Hekia Parata: Let’s be better learning

    I do love it when the Minister writes an open letter. It means she says what she thinks people want to hear, rather than what she actually does when people aren’t looking, taking the leadership stance of “Do as I say, not as I do”. In it, the minister harps on about providing better learning – a term that is so contrary to it’s original use. To learn is to aquire, receive, be given knowledge. To teach is to give, present, or to pass down knowledge. But there seems to be this trend to use “learning” instead of “teaching” which I disagree with; probably in an effort to degrade the skill required to be a teacher.

    The legendary Boonman took to his usual satire in response to this article, and as can be expected, didn’t hold back with the comedy; which although is somewhat hilarious, is also true – which is why we laugh (because if we didn’t; we would cry).

    However much I would like to be as satirical, I figured I would merely provide some teacher feedback, some next learning steps on the writing sample provided to us from Ms Parata’s pen. I hope that she will take the feedback on board, and work with her teacher to address some of the errors in her writing.
    Read the original letter here: Hekia Parata: All ears to anyone ‘seriously committed’ to improving kids’ learning.

    Let’s begin learning.

    New Zealand has a very good education system. That’s beyond debate. Can we make it better? Yes, we can and we must.

    We need to either work on your use of tense, or your spelling. You’ve used “has”, where as you need to have used “had”. Your sentence should read “New Zealand had a very good education system”. In addition to this, I’d probably shy away from Bob the Builder quotes, and rely more on tried and true cliché such as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

    As a passionate New Zealander and as a mum, I want to see an education system that delivers quality learning for every child and young person every day. Their achievement matters, to their families, their communities – and to me.

    There is a chance that this paragraph may come across as bragging or somewhat arrogant. I am a New Zealander (and one might question my passion for the title under the current government) but I am not a mum. But I still want to see a quality education system in this country. Is my opinion not as important or passionate as yours because I have not been with child? Yet becoming a teacher without this does make my level of passion for education and learning far greater than most given most don’t want anything to do with schools unless they have children.

    As a teacher, I can safely say that if we have a “very good education system” that you stated in part 1, then we have very good quality “learning” each and every day for each child or young person. However, to presume that their achievement matters to their family is a bit much, unless you have personally interviewed them all. Likewise, communities usually don’t focus around the achievement rates of their young people. From my experience, families are focussed on raising young children to be the best they can be in all areas of life. Sometimes sports become more important than achievement rates, as much as overseas holidays or trips do. They tend to want to provide experiences that will assist with creating well rounded individuals. Communities also tend to focus not on achievement rates, but solutions to keeping the young people off the street, running groups, clubs, or catching up with the latest gossip or what not. They tend to focus on them as people, instead of as data, numbers, and test takers.

    I visit schools right across New Zealand on a regular basis, seeing for myself what’s happening in our classrooms. I speak to teachers, principals and parents about what I, as the Education Minister, can do to support them to ensure our kids are achieving. 

    It’s refreshing to hear that you get to travel around the country visiting schools. It would be such a wonderful experience to go around and see what a hard job teachers actually have, and what a great job they are already doing.

    I would suggest the use of a wider vocabulary instead of “speak to”, you could use the term “ask”. However, as I know, you have very little interest in hearing what teachers, principals, and parents have to say about what you can do to support them. I suspect you would just tell them what you will do, and leave it up to them to change what they do so that what you’ve decided to do will be of benefit to them.

    The proposed changes that we’re making in education are all about putting our kids at the centre of the education system, lifting the educational success of every young New Zealander. 

    Once again, this is an incredibly presumptuous statement, that a) kids weren’t at the centre of previous education systems, (which would be somewhat bizarre if that weren’t the case) – and b) that the changes that you’re making with or without the support of the education sector will lift the educational success of every child, more so than what the current system is and has already been doing before you stepped into power.

    This means ensuring we get the right funding for the right children at the right time. That there are a wide range of education options that reflect our modern era, and that schools are supported in the best possible way to ensure that every child is learning the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life.

    I applaud your efforts in providing the right funding for the right children. However, your actions speak louder than words, and so far, you’ve shown a tendency to waste money on failing charter schools rather than investing in children. I suspect also, that the “right funding” that you talk about will, in turn, mean more funding, which your fellow minister in finances may wish to have a few words to you about.

    Schools also need to be supported to know this learning is taking place to make sure they’re doing the best job they can for our kids.

    Another presumptive statement Hekia. You are obviously not very aware of your audience when you write, a skill taught and learned in Level 3 of the curriculum by 9 and 10 year olds. Schools are already very aware of the learning taking place and the knowledge and skills required of students in this modern age. However, the basics of reading, writing, and maths are unlikely to change, and while you continue to maintain the expectation that schools assess against the National Standards, schools will unfortunately be forced to spend their time teaching and “learning” in these three curriculum areas.

    Our education system is well funded. At $11.04 billion this year it is the biggest ever investment in early childhood education and schools. That’s more than we spend on police, defence, transport, conservation and foreign affairs combined.

    Please refer to my earlier comment regarding charter schools. Maybe that might free up some of these funds for police, defense, and transport all of which are asking for more government funding.

    As I’ve often said, “that’s a shipload of money”.

    A very good attempt at the use of a familiar phrase or “kīanga”. However, it is not a ship full of money that is coming into harbour, because ships can carry a full load worth a lot more than $11.04b in notes alone.

    And that “shipload” is growing. Funding hasn’t been frozen. Schools’ operational funding has increased by $12.3m for next year taking it to a total of $1.35 billion.

    Once again, please refer to previous comment about ship load. It’s “shitload”; meaning a heck of a lot of excreetment.

    Also, I’m not sure coming out with fictional information in such an open letter is appropriate. Please read this article re: funding freeze.

    Spending has also increased by more than inflation, and I’m not expecting that to change any time soon.

    Yet the teachers who teach the children who you have now put at the centre of your education plan and the support staff who help them are given minor increases that do not keep up with the increases of living? I strongly suggest rewording or even removing this statement from your piece.

    The Funding Review currently taking place is focussed as much on whether we are getting the best for all these taxpayer bucks, as well as what more we might need.

    I’m not sure if using the colloquial term for “money” is the best use of your Thesaurus, Hekia. By using “bucks” it makes it seem unimportant, unvalued, taken for granted, or even rudimentary to your audience. Once again, you should consider your audience when writing this, considering the majority of them will be taxpayers themselves and probably would like you to respect their hard earned money a little more than calling it “bucks”.

    There are seven proposals being looked at as part of the Review and leaders from right across education have been included in the early development of these potential changes.

    The legislation currently making its way through Parliament is about providing more flexibility, not only to schools and early learning providers, but to parents as well.

    That is one thing it is providing – more flexibility. However, you need to add more details about the other things that it will bring. Details such as larger class sizes, more work for teachers, a national database of students that will track them through every year of their schooling. It’s details like these that your readers are interested in, even if you are not too keen on them yourself.

    New Communities of Learning, or Kahui Ako, are also helping schools and services to work together for the benefit of their students.

    Once again Minister, you need to add more details to how this is happening, and how it is benefiting the needs of individual students in their individual schools. Maybe alluding to the fact that this will lead to one principal and one board running multiple schools. No doubt this will free up some more of that “shipload” of bucks the education uses.

    I’ve consistently listened to the teacher unions since I came into the education portfolio, regularly meeting with them and working with them on a number of important initiatives.

    For the first time you have considered your audience, though it is important that when you do, you come across as sincere and truthful, rather than making things up. Also; I don’t believe you come “into” a portfolio. I suspect you were given it. Maybe you could reword your sentence to be a little less fictional by saying “I’ve consistently listened to the teacher unions bleating on since I received the education portfolio, regularly seeing them banging on my door, and ignoring them on a number of important initiatives until they give in and I do what I want anyway.”. I also find it ironic that hours after writing this letter, you leave on a trip meaning, for the third time in five years, you have declined the invite to said teacher union (NZEI Te Riu Roa) conference. That’s another example where actions speak louder than words.

    I will work with any groups or individuals that are seriously committed to improving children’s learning and raising achievement. 

    This sentence is somewhat contradictory. I would say that it would be almost impossible not to work with yourself or your team on this. Will you have to demonstrate to yourself that you are, in fact, serious and committed to improving children’s learning before you will work with yourself? I know for one that the under-secretary of Education has no commitment to improving children’s learning, and if he does, it’s certainly not serious.

    Everything I’m working towards is about putting children and their achievement at the centre of the education system.
    It’s about lifting the learning potential of every child, so we can continue to grow as a nation, and prosper. It’s about preparing young New Zealanders for a contrary, challenging, exciting world.

    I’m not sure you have to continue to make things up and over-exaggerate about child achievement. I also think you should further consult your thesaurus regarding the words to describe the world. Contrary for example is a word that I would have thought you would be all too familiar with, especially with the number of backing down you’ve had to do in your time as Minister of Education. Maybe a “better, challenging, exciting world” might read better, especially as it provokes some sort of inspiration or hope for the young people who are lucky enough to be able to read this far into your letter without drifting off to sleep.

    Kids learning to flyI want our education system to ensure that every Kiwi kid can fly!

    That is a bold attempt with the use of metaphor  in your writing, Hekia, and definitely a great concluding sentence that really brings a climax to your points. However, I suspect that this will lead to some confusion as to the literal meaning of your sentence.For instance, if you’re wanting children to fly, they will need to evolve into a creature with wings, or maybe you are intending to use some of the shipload of bucks to subsidise the cost of airline tickets for children? Your intentions are not clear.

    * Hekia Parata is the Education Minister

    I suspect with Writing this poor with so many clinical errors, at this time in your political career, that in due course, you should be prepared to amend this line, using the past tense “was” instead of the present tense “is”.

    Teacher’s Note: I apologise for the over analysis of this Writing sample, though as you and your advisors have said in the past; data is the key to success. The more data I have on this Writing sample, the better success you will have. Though at this stage, you are still falling well below the expected level and unfortunately, this will result in you being required to find another school who are prepared to put up with your poor achievement rates. Maybe the charter school down the road will take you in.

  • Do as I say, not do as I do – Consulting the Community

    A rising trend is occurring right before our eyes, and it’s  more than concerning. It’s definitely poor role-modelling, and is more than just a little unfair.

    For years the Education Review Office has been wandering around the country critiquing schools on their community engagement and consultation in an effort to get schools to get parents interested in their child’s education; supposedly to address the supposed “long tail” of underachievement that has hindered our nation for the last countless decades. Schools have then gone above and beyond to engage whanau, caregivers, kindergartens, churches, and more, in an effort to get the ERO off their backs… Oh, and try and address any under-achievement.

    The reality is, that schools have worked incredibly hard on this and have invested their time heavily, and the same problem remains; the difficult parents are still hard to get a hold of, and the ones who already support their child and value education are only too happy to support the school.

    So while the ERO and the Ministry would have teachers invest heavily in consulting the community, the same does not happen from the Minister at all.

    Consultation

    This has been highlighted on numerous occasions at the lack of consultation within the education sector during the reign of Ms. Parata (and her predecessor, Ms. Tolley). One shouldn’t have to remind people of the introduction of National Standards. In recent times; there has been the Novopay botch up, the reneg on class sizes, the closure of some Christchurch schools (1,2,3), and the announcement of IES, all of which had little or no consultation with schools.

    Even when the Minister does decide to consult the sector, it is done in less than ideal ways. Take the latest consultation around the Education Act. The changes were announced six weeks before the deadline; and while this is seemingly enough time, one cannot ignore the irony that the consultation has been conducted at the busiest time of year for teachers, principals, and schools alike, and this is even before we find out if submissions that do make it through are heard and listened to. Add to this, that the closing of Parliament in upcoming weeks for the Christmas break, for this Education Act to be passed through in the new year. Why would you not allow submissions to be made over Christmas and January, when teachers would be able to voice their concerns or ideas? Well – simply because they don’t want to hear from their community.

    Community

    As of this year, the Minister now hand picks who is on the Education Council; the overseeing body of teacher conduct and registration. There is no longer any member on the council that is elected by teachers. This is hardly democratic, and is indicative of things to come, such as Ministry appointed school boards. In a sense, there is no one who represents the community on the community board.


    In the announced changes to the Education Act, it is quite clear that the Minister wants to centralise a lot of different parts of the school community. Boards of Trustees will eventually be phased out in favour of a Board that runs several schools. This will be in conjunction with the introduction of “Communities of Learning” and the selection (somehow) of lead principals. I’m not sure how a selection of principals when put in a room would decide who will be the lead principal and get a nice sum as a bonus. No doubt, eventually, the Ministry will have to select or appoint a principal to be the lead principal.
    As each school becomes part of a bigger community, the community will grow. But that’s not always a good thing. As a community gets bigger, it becomes more difficult to organise that community, or even get a sense of community. Imagine, if you will, a board in charge of your school with parents you never see, and don’t recognise because they don’t have children at your school and don’t even live in the same area. The same thing will happen with lead principals, as they get tied up with more leadership in other schools, there is the high possibility they’ll never be seen in their own schools. Students already have a hard enough job seeing their principal as it is, let alone if they’re going to be running other schools as well.

    In conclusion

    So while the ERO and the Ministry would have schools consult their community to address issues within schools, the Minster is busy removing the sense of community within the education sector, and also to make it impossible to have a community to engage with once they’re finished. If a community is too large, it no longer keeps its sense of community, and becomes untenable to organise and maintain. Eventually, the “top-down” model imposes its ideas on everyone else and they are told to put up or shut up. As for consultation, it would be safe to assume that the Minister has only recently found the definition of it in her dictionary. Up until now, it hasn’t even been a consideration. We are still waiting to see what is done with whatever number of submissions the Minister receives, but if past experience is anything to go by, there is a rather large rug being lifted up to sweep them under.

  • Student achievement to be used to fund schools under new model

    How well students perform in the classroom will soon play a part in how much funding a school gets.

    Source: Student achievement to be used to fund schools under new model | Stuff.co.nz

    Here we go. All the haters out there get ready. This isn’t going to be pretty.

    Essentially this has been on the tables for a while.

    Now, before all the scaremongerers get going; this is not Teacher Performance Pay, so we’re safe for now. As soon as Teacher pay is based on student achievement, we will see a both mass exodus of teachers, and a massive push of teachers towards ‘successful’ schools with ‘successful’ students. It will also lead to a complete demolition of the National Standards, as teachers will be forced to resist temptation to inflate their own results. What teacher in their right mind is going to mark students as well below, when that could affect your pay?

    An interesting side note, as I check out the glorious photo of the Minister in mid speech, I can’t help but notice the Public Achievement Information (PAI) in the background. These have been recently released, and I have it on relatively good authority from someone in the profession who has gone through the data with a fine tooth comb, that the data in the PAI are inaccurate with that which schools have sent in. Go figure!

    Credibility long gone…

    As has come to be expected from the Minister’s office; a big contradiction 18 months after making this statement:

    “This morning, Parata said there was no shift to performance-based funding, instead it would be a “recalibration” of the decile system.” – 17 March 2014

    I’m guessing, by “no shift” she meant “no shift today”, and “recalibration” should have been “complete removal”. Can we believe anything the Minister says, if in 18 months time she’s going to renege on any decision she’s made?

    Are you listening?

    There is an incredibly beautiful editorial in the Listener that was written around the last time the idea of performance pay came about, back in March last year.

    It puts forward the arguments much better than I could ever hope to. So I’ve picked and chosen some of the key points below:

    With the changes still hypothetical, it’s important not to lose sight of the brick wall such a policy would have to hurdle: the dearth of appropriate data. As Treasury warned Bill English in 2011, if we want to go down the performance-pay route, we need to collect a different sort of data. At present, “the ministry cannot identify which schools add the most value to their students”.

    Unless Parata has some secret assessment system waiting in the wings, she will be relying on NCEA and National Standards.

    Both are unusual in that they are largely set and marked by teachers. The OECD’s highly influential education frontman, Andreas Schleicher, whom Parata bounced the last performance-pay policy off before it was publicly announced, has flat-out said they can’t be used for anything resembling performance pay. Doing so would “distort” the assessments, he warns.

    …

    There’s a good reason why police, lawyers and judges, for example, are not incentivised on the basis of securing convictions: it would make a mockery of the justice system. The same precautions need to apply in education.

    Stumbling blocks abound. How to compare a school where all the students sit NCEA with one in which half the kids opt for Cambridge or the International Baccalaureate exams? How to compare a school where a large proportion of NCEA credits come from exams and traditional academic subjects with one that leans heavily on less-demanding vocational courses?

    It is possible that this is what PaCT will essentially become for the Ministry – a way of quantifying National Standards and the “OTJ” to make it an “OCJ” – or Overall Computer Judgement. This might be the “secret assessment system waiting in the wings”.

    Poorer Performance needs the help

    One gets the impression from Ms. Parata’s statements today, that the “Performance Pay” she is hinting at is to give greater support to the schools that need it. This is actually one thing that I as a teacher can agree with; possibly the first thing she’s alluded to that I can say that since she has been in office. But the Minister did not come out and actually say it. But by reading between the lines, she alludes to how they can support students to do better.

    “You can’t have a funding review of a New Zealand education system where how well kids are or aren’t doing wouldn’t be a part of it,” she said following the conference on Thursday.

    “Obviously where we end up might be a very different place but my desire absolutely is to take count of how well our students are doing in the system and how we might support them to do better.”- 1 October 2015

    It is definitely interesting times in education. We all need to be aware of the decisions being made, (or not being made) and be careful not to assume too much. As Parata says, it is still in it’s infant stage of being developed.

    Who knows, in 18 months she might change her mind again.

  • The Other Side of the PaCT Coin

    Last time I was here

    Last year I wrote an article about the Progress and Consistency Tool. I tried to take a fairly positive approach to it, and tried to advocate as best I could for schools getting involved.

    This time, however, I follow NZEI’s warning against getting involved with it, after recent discussions with other professionals in education.

    My statement still stands when I said

    “I think that if the government wanted to align student achievement with teacher salaries (i.e. performance pay), that they would already be able to do so without using the PaCT tool anyway.”

    However, the PaCT will just make this more streamlined, more direct, and easier to access and/or distribute.

    How it works

    From the workshops that I have attended, ‘The Tool’ works as a bank of illustrations in different areas of Mathematics, Reading, and Writing. Mathematics was developed first, and so most of the examples are based around this. The teacher matches up their student with the illustrations and, after adding all of the different aspects together, the Tool will recommend an Overall Teacher Judgement for the teacher to use. More info on this can be found here.

    The recommended judgement is not set in stone however; but is just a recommendation. If teacher’s are unhappy with this judgement, they can ‘override’ the Tool’s recommendation, and insert a different OTJ, before saving it off to their School Management System (SMS) and the Ministry.

    How it REALLY works…

    I am very much used to working with databases, such as in MySQL. Many website utilise such a database, and I have used both pre-packaged databases such as WordPress, as well as building my own. Building your own is quite an involved process, but very worthwhile when you get all the functionality that can come from using them.

    Putting my IT skills to use, I can see how PaCT will become a threat, and how it will be used beyond what it is heralded to be.

    Firstly, every student will have their NSN as a unique ID in the database. This will ensure that the right student always has their OTJ made against them, and not another student.

    Each of the aspects in Maths for example, will have a dedicated column, for each year of the student’s schooling. For example: lets say there were only 3 aspects, it would be: aspect1-firstyear, aspect2-firstyear, aspect3-firstyear, followed by – aspect1-secondyear, aspect2-secondyear, aspect3-secondyear etcetera.
    When a judgement against an aspect is made, it will be noted in these columns. Then there will be a calculation made from these values, and based on that calculation, the recommendation will be made.

    This is where I’m going to stop for now, because this is when it gets interesting.

    At this point, the data is in the database, and is accessible by two parties – the teacher, and the Ministry. With this data, the Ministry can access both the assessment that the teacher has made, as well as the values, calculation, and the recommendation. Collate all the student’s under this teacher’s care for the year, and you have yourself a picture of that teacher’s class, and their achievement (or non achievement). They also have the recommendation that the Tool has made.

    The more devious of us will then take this to the next step. The Ministry, now that they have this data, will be able to produce a picture of the school from all its students. These will undoubtedly be published in the likes of Public Achievement Information before you can blink. They will then be able to target under-performing schools, and begin their next round of teacher bashing. Because as we all know, poor student results is not a reflection on the student, their environment, their home life, poverty, culture, family priority; instead it is definitely the quality of the teacher that these students are struggling. This will be the case until all the teachers get tired of the treatment, and vote with their feet. These schools are more than likely become charter schools, run by private companies with their own agendas which extend beyond just education.

    To add to the case on the ‘poor teacher’ policy, there is a direct link back to the database that will be quite startling for some.
    You see, whilst there is the opportunity for the teacher to ‘override’ the Tool’s OTJ, the original recommended OTJ will still exist in a column inside the database. The calculations made will automatically do this. The database will then also record a) that the teacher overrode the recommendation, and b) what they changed it to.
    This data is the startling bit. Not only do they have the “original” OTJ, but they have whether the teacher changed it (and let’s face it, it will always be to make it better – because no one in their right mind would disagree with the tool and mark students down – they would go, “Oh okay, maybe I’m being too harsh…”). This will give the Ministry the original OTJ which they would just use anyway, and they have records of teachers that change results; and can pick trends of teachers, or purely select individuals that that regularly change results, and label them as poor teachers. It thus will make it difficult for any teacher wanting to keep their job to change the OTJ recommendations that the tool makes, even if they are inaccurate. Suddenly the professional opinion of teachers means nothing, and instead, a computer programme is making the call on the overall achievement of students in the class, as opposed to the teacher. Yes, the teacher still has to align their student with the illustration, and this is a professional judgement call in itself, but its not the final call on where the student is at.

    Trialing

    I have been rather annoyed at the lack of trialing by this government, and have mentioned this in the past as well. First it was National Standards which were rolled out on the country without any trial or input from the teachers who had to be running it. Novopay is another issue all together.

    However, the Government is now trialing PaCT, ironing out the creases, and getting schools involved in using it. As mentioned, it has started with just Maths, with Reading and Writing coming in later on. This will eventually mean that there can be no complaint on the way it was trialed and implemented, and so making it compulsory for schools will become a lot easier for the Government to do. This of course was their intention back in 2013 when the PaCT was announced, but they had to backtrack on that when principals around the country rejected it.

    In Conclusion

    So regardless of what my previous post said in terms of “you may as well get involved”; I’d like to make an amendment. You may as well get involved because they’re going to make it compulsory eventually. You may as well get involved if you’re sick of making your own OTJ’s and would like a computer program to do it for you.

    Just saying!

  • No to League Tables

    “Have we introduced league tables? No.” Hekia Parata said this in a meeting at a school as she rattled off a number of things ‘scaremongers’ had said would happen in regards to GERM. This included things like Performance Pay. This statement on league tables is also in addition to this article from 2012.

    League tables: Hekia won’t take on teachers

    Obviously however, John Key wants them; and so he gets the media to do the dirty work, even encouraging them to do so in the aforementioned article.

    And respond they did. Whilst Fairfax’s “School Report” has been out for a while now, it is now being advertised, with words like ‘rate’, and ‘compare’ being bandied about like red paint on a fire engine.

    Why are teachers and schools so against league tables?

    David Shearer (Labour Leader at the time) touched on a few of the concerns in the earlier article. It goes further than just what he addressed though.

    Take a small school. Decile 1 or 2. Even 3. Lots of poverty in its community. Health issues due to poor living conditions, damp houses and cold, harsh nights in the middle of winter. Families split, both parents working full time to break even. The kids love the school.

    The teachers work hard. They’re trained. They undertake PLD. They genuinely care and want the best for the kids; not just the ones in their class, but all tamariki that come through their gates. There are major success stories, but are generally few and far between.

    The teachers are good teachers. Children who have started life on the back foot and who are facing continual struggle in life are making amazing progress each year, but are still “below” the untrialled and untested National Standards that this government hangs its hat on. The children wouldn’t make the same progress if the teachers weren’t any good.

    But along comes Fairfax media and their “School Report”. It shows that this school is ‘failing’ compared with School B down the road (who may or may not be inflating their National Standards results). Their teachers may be good, but also might have a community where students aren’t walking down struggle street, and achieving at school is the number one priority. The amount of progress that they have to make is minimal in comparison, and their teaching staff may be able to relax and not work as hard in order to maintain certain results.

    Parents of the first school compare and begin to buy into the league table problem. They leave school A with its hard working teachers, whose progress and dedication to their students is unrivalled, yet don’t show up in the broad umbrella of “below”, and go to greener pastures.

    School A loses students. The roll decreases. They lose a classroom and a teaching position. Eventually another leaves, and another. The school gets smaller, and the results don’t change, to the point where it is forced to merge or become one of the government’s heralded Charter Schools.

    This is why league tables are dangerous. They compare apples with shackles, oranges with hairties. They force assumption that schools with poor results have bad teachers, when quite often the opposite is true. A lot of teachers would simple cave under pressure, give up, or be eaten alive in School A with the requirements of it’s akonga. They would equally struggle to not only raise the achievement level, but just maintain it.

    So when I see an advertisement to compare schools while I’m reading the latest news, I get annoyed. Frustrated. Because I am a good teacher. I work hard for my students and my students work hard for me. They are a challenge, but the hard work brings reward. They make phenomenal progress each year while they are in the shadows of elephants in the room that no one wants to acknowledge; but these improvements, no matter how amazing, fail to show up in a simple pie graph showing banded results. Some of these students will go from a reading age of 5 and a half, to a reading age of 7; yet because they are 8, are still below.

    The public compares schools. School A must be rubbish, with dead-beat teachers. I don’t want my child going there.

    Thanks Fairfax. I’m sure John Key appreciates the dirty work you’ve gone and done for him.