Update*** I’ve updated my thoughts on this issue below the initial post.
I’m a primary teacher into my third year. I haven’t quite been able to grasp the debate around National Standards but I have had a feeling that I supported them despite the vitriol being generated amongst many of my colleagues towards NS. I googled the issue to find out more and found the NZEI’s (Teacher’s Union) critique of them in pdf. The link for this document is here:
www.nzei.org.nz/site/nzeite/files/misc%20documents/Frequently%20asked%20questions%20from%20PC%20teachers.pdf
Turns out I do support them and I find the arguments against them to be loaded with other agendas and assumptions. So I have put in my responses to the NZEI’s critique of the National Standards and here it is. By the way I am not a National supporter – far from it – I’m left and green leaning. In my experience parents seem lost and confused by the increasing diffusion and subjectivity of learning goals and clear achievement objectives seem to have been lost in a morass of different assessments, subjective interpretation and PC reporting language.
The following document is published by the NZEI. It presents commonly asked questions about the National Standards and then gives the NZEI’s response to each. Below each question and response I have put in my own response to the question and to NZEI’s response. My responses are all in blue text.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
RAISED BY PRIMARY CLASSROOM TEACHERS
Q The Ministry argues that the national standards in reading, writing and mathematics fit within the New Zealand Curriculum. Why then are teachers concerned about implementing national standards?
A The national standards policy is the antithesis of the vision, culture and spirit of the New Zealand Curriculum.
The New Zealand Curriculum provides a breadth and richness of a variety of learning, seeks local answers and innovative response. it nurtures individual talents, cultivates creativity, celebrates diversity, inspires curiosity, acknowledges the importance of a student’s personal learning journey. All these are basic building blocks for life‐long learning.
In contrast the national standard policy encourages more standardisation, treats learning as linear and age related, encourages more centralisation of decision making, “…and is the first step down a slippery slope towards high stakes testing and test‐based accountability” [Hattie 2009 ‘Horizons and Whirlpools’].
Or it’s a move to emphasize that schools’ focus should be the outcomes of learning in literacy and numeracy.
Q The Minister says we need national standards to solve the achievement gap between groups of students. Is this true?
A There is no evidence that national standards will narrow the achievement gap and neither will national standards solve the issues sometimes created by poverty, or dislocation from the student’s own country culture. National standards distract the focus from more constructive government policies which could have long term benefit for children.
. A smarter move by Government would be to target the 20% of under‐achieving students they aim to help, instead of applying a new system to the whole country without trialling aspects to identify the unintended negative consequences.
A standardized achievement bar will help to un-clutter learning expectations that have been lost or diffused by local issues and different school cultures to the extent that children, parents and schools have no clear sight of what they are aiming for or are expected to achieve.
Q Reading, writing and mathematics are the most important learning areas in primary schools, so what’s wrong with setting national standards in reading, writing and mathematics?
A If you have national standards that carry high stakes consequences, the content in the standards become emphasised in school as more important than other areas of learning. Tests become a way to ensure schools pay even more attention to the content of the standards. Students come to school with different strengths. It is unlikely that teachers will believe they have the time or authority to build on those strengths if they are not in reading, writing and mathematics. Overseas when standards are enforced, it is been found that teachers focus more on the test results than on the whole student and his/her development and learning. This is what standards do.
This is an example of how the diffusion and loss of clear learning outcomes has occurred. Schools have attempted to create success for students through claiming success at whatever level and area a student can produce. This has meant a shifting of focus away from essential skills in literacy and numeracy that the world beyond school requires.
To argue that schools will teach to tests is rather a slur on NZ educationalists who generally aim very high and who collectively know that teaching to test content is unprofessional and leads to dull lessons.
Q The Minister says that students can learn about other curriculum areas like science through working on the literacy standards. Teachers know that many young children learn science best not by reading about science, but by actively doing science, through practical work like experimenting and exploring. Where is the support teachers need for this?
A The Minister says that in some future year, the Government may consider offering resources specifically for some other curriculum area.
NZEI believes this response shows a lack of understanding at how long it takes for learning programmes to take effect. These specialist support teachers will be lost to the system.
It is mischievous to suggest that an emphasis on literacy means the exclusion of hands-on learning or that such learning is dependent on further resourcing from Government. In fact current school practice seems to lack a real hands-on approach. A strong emphasis on literacy and numeracy brings the potential for rich hands-on learning in bite-sized chunks appropriate to children’s motivations, attention span and interests. Current practice tends to drag out a hands-on experience with reporting and presenting that is tedious to most kids whereas these skills could be covered more intensely within literacy leaving hands-on to be just that – hands-on.
Q What exactly are schools expected to do THIS year in terms of implementation ‐ what are the ʺpenaltiesʺ if they donʹt?
A In 2010 schools are expected to use the standards to guide teaching and learning report to parents about their child’s progress and achievement against the standards at least twice a year. At least one of these reports should include:
‐the student’s current learning goals
‐the studen’ts progress and achievement against the National Standards
‐what the school will do to support the student’s learning
‐what parents, families and whānau can do to support the child’s learning
use analysed progress and achievement data to prioritise the allocation of resources for 2011 develop their 2011 charters including baseline data and targets against the standards.
The Education Review Office will be reporting on individual school’s use of national standards during 2010. Generally ERO collects its information from those schools in the current review cycle.
The Minister has the power to dismiss boards of trustees and place a commissioner in the school if the school fails to implement the requirements of National Standards. This seems unlikely to occur in 2010.
Q How will special needs childrenʹs data be reported on ‐ will ORSS‐funded student data be excluded or included in the data?
A Boards will report on progress and achievement for all students against the national standards, including students who have special education needs. The only difference for special needs students is how their progress is reported.
These are students who have very significant learning disabilities, and are funded through the Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Schemes (ORRS) or are receiving Supplementary Learning Support, and are likely to learn long‐term within Level One of the New Zealand Curriculum.
Progress for these students will be assessed against the standards as part of their Individual Education Programme processes.
Boards will report on these students’ progress separately in their annual reports.
Q Once the children who have been ʺfailingʺ have been identified, how much money will the Government have to put into these students and/or schools, and when and how will that be done?
A In its election manifesto the Government “set aside $18 million for the next three years to provide extra resources to help schools lift the literacy and numeracy skills of students who are not meeting National Standards.”
The Government said it will “work with schools and teachers to develop the fairest and least bureaucratic way of distributing these funds. Schools were to have the option of using this targeted funding as they see fit. They might, for example:
•expand their Reading Recovery programme
•provide professional development to teachers to help them teach children with dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties that may hamper progress towards National Standards
•fund remedial tuition at another school or provider
•work with other schools to hire a specialist literacy or numeracy teacher.”
Professor Terry Crooks has worked out that students struggling under new national standards will get the equivalent of only half a dayʹs tuition to help them improve.
Any funding the Government provides needs to be considered in the light of cuts that are being planned for education. Since coming to power the National Government in the 2009/10 budget announced there would be $95million savings made over four years from the staffing budget and has also given $36million to private schools.
Students “struggling under new national standards” are students struggling to be ready for the world beyond school. National Standards just shows us that as opposed to the current system which hides it in positively worded reporting until the student leaves. Schools already do their best to give extra support to students who are lagging – extra support may or may not be eaten up by funding cuts but schools will continue to do their best to provide this support.
If the above is meant to imply that there will be many more students who now fall into ‘below’ or ‘well below’ and thus be made to be failing by NS the rational response from schools would be to address their whole class delivery rather than try to provide more one-on-one support.
Q The Minister says she knows how many toilets there are in schools but not how many students are failing and where they are. What exactly do schools have to report now? Why isnʹt this sufficient?
A New NAG[2A] covers the reporting requirements that relate specifically to National Standards. Schools are required to report to parents in plain language and in writing at least twice a year on the student’s progress and achievement against the national standards but not specifically on whether students are above, at, below, or well below the standards and consult with parents to understand what information they would like to see in progress and achievement report. Report the numbers and proportions of students above, at, below or well below the standards in their Annual reports but only on an aggregated basis There is no requirement to report a student’s ranking, individually, on this four point scale to parents.
There should be. My school does so.
Schools current practices are very similar to what is being required except that in the new regime progress and achievement will be reported against national standards.
Why isn’t this sufficient? Education is political; the national standards policy is political. The government uses the theme of supposedly ineffective current reporting to support its agenda. Some teachers and parents believe this is a “manufactured crisis” to justify a policy the government wants for political purposes.
“[E]xcept that in the new regime progress and achievement will be reported against national standards. “ This passage implies that schools currently report achievement subjectively or against nothing which could be seen as the reason parents do not clearly understand how their child is progressing (and must ask teachers for advice-on-the-side) and why divergence in achievement may be increasing across different regions. This response implies the possibility that the sector’s hostile response to NS is in fact based on educational practice having become parochial and incohesive and boards and principals resistant to change.
“The government uses the theme of supposedly ineffective current reporting to support its agenda.” This critique needs clarification – what political purposes are served by NS? This response seems more likely to be evidence of NZEI’s politically distorted view than an inherent political agenda in the National Standards – parents and the community simply want clarity and NS is an attempt to provide it. This glimpse of NZEI’s own political agenda implies that the rejection of NS may be more to do with the kneejerk response of a politically left union to a politically right government.
Q. The Minister says the Government will provide further funding for teachers’ professional development to help implement national standards. Where is this money coming from?
A. This funding is being redirected from other professional development uses, for example major cuts are planned in the provision of advisory services in science, the arts, social studies, PE and health. This means there will be limited help available to schools wishing to implement programmes in these curriculum areas.
Q Will the National Standards increase teacher workload?
A. The Minister does not believe there will be increased teacher workload. The Minister said in parliament that she had received an extremely large amount of advice on national standards since November 28. The Ministry of Education has worked through that advice and said that teachers who are following best practice should not experience an increased workload as a result of national standards. The national standards are about setting goals for students, using formative assessment, and providing regular progress reports to parents in language they can understand. That is core business for all teachers and for all schools. It is not an optional extra.
Currently the national standards do not fit with the curriculum levels (what is taught), or the norms from existing assessment tools (what has been learned). The national standards have been grafted on to The New Zealand Curriculum with rhetoric. This will create a challenge to teachers and require considerable moderation within the school. In addition, there is no national information to assist with alignment of current practice and the national standards.
The curriculum levels themselves are somewhat unclear particularly as maths has other stages as well. NS appear to provide a clear and measurable set of outcomes for each stage of a child’s learning in numeracy and literacy that are more intuitively based on years at school. Simply put, NS provide a measure by which to say: After X years of schooling a child should have achieved a), b), c) etc learning outcomes. In a very important sense National Standards define the obligation a school has to each child on its roll. For example after 2 years schooling a school should have assisted a child to be at a certain level of reading, writing and numerical skill, after 3 years they should be here and so on. This bar then clearly identifies children ahead of or behind expectations (or how well a school has fulfilled its obligations to a child) whereupon (in the case of behind) the school should investigate factors including its delivery and the child’s learning needs.
I imagine that parents would have hoped this would have always been the case. Schools say they have always done this and that NS are a needless imposition which amplify the impact of being behind by making a more glaring comparison against a national average. However I think schools have become disconnected from parents’ need and desire to clearly understand how well their children are achieving and that currently this advice is given to parents more informally by the teacher rather than through formal reporting by the schools. There is within the standards a four level grading system which allows a child to be identified as: “Above”, “At”, “Below” or “Well Below”. This system allows a child’s progress to be monitored and the success of remedial interventions to be gauged. Children assessed as “Below” or “Well Below” are able to be highlighted and targeted by the teacher who can keep extra tabs on the child’s progress. If a trend appears where for instance in writing a large number of children are assessed as “Below” the school is then able to review its program and delivery to raise achievement in this area.
From outside the school system one might have assumed and hoped this had always been the case and it has. But the degree to which any school has done this may have varied widely for a wide number of reasons that include resourcing but also awareness and perhaps expectation levels as well. National Standards seem to be an attempt to somewhat harmonize, simplify and clarify the process, make clear to all what the expectations are and reinforce the idea that educational outcomes must be egalitarian – all children deserve the right to an equal quality of schooling. Where this becomes contentious is perhaps in schools where socio-economic factors mean that these expectations are unrealistic for perhaps most students. The standards will – it is argued – then have the effect of showing both the school, the students and the community to be under achieving. I understand this concern but I believe that if viewed from the child’s needs (as they should primarily be) the standards provide a goal for the community and the school to work towards fulfilling their obligations to their children. I realize that this is significantly easier said but I think the emphasis on education as an obligation to each child should be taken as a beacon of motivation for all communities and all schools.
Summary of My Response
Some self-critique by educationalists opposed to NS might be needed in order for them to first separate NS from its political context and its promotion by the National Party because traditional Labour alignment within the education sector seems to be colouring the debate.
Secondly the notion of comparison needs to be separated from the notion of stigmatization because the two seem to mean the same thing within the education sector’s hostile response to NS. National standards do not need to be stigmatizing unless the adults delivering the teaching and hearing the assessment data act as if it is so.
It appears that NS are a response to the trend in schools to remove comparison and comparative data. This trend might be built on the mistaken assumption that comparison and comparative data create a less emotionally supportive environment for children by creating stigmatization. In reality comparative data are simply an assessment tool. They can inform an intelligent and compassionate approach to delivering a safe, supportive and positive learning process. They can also assist schools to identify a need to check their wholesale delivery if many students are shown to be lagging against NS for their age and school year. This should be seen as a learning opportunity and treated as such by both schools and Ero.
Perhaps the opposing argument to NS is that the goal should be to educate each child as well as possible in which case comparative data are only stigmatizing. We know that teaching to tests is poor practice that does not encourage independent expression or inquiry. We also know that students who achieve highly in tests do not necessarily match that success in the economic world. These understandings combined with advances in our understanding of optimal learning environments lead us to aim pedagogical practice at supporting learners to be positive, happy, excited and motivated. A key part of this approach involves celebrating each child’s achievements. Within this context National Standards seems to be a return to the bad old days of percentile rankings and the whiff of social stratification they carry but, in the move away from stigmatization that we can see generally in the rejection of competition, and in schools as the shift to subjective assessment the baby has likely gone out with the bath water.
Many schools, and parents more so, have found this lack of clarity and comparative data frustrating and excessively PC hence the take up of systems like the Cambridge Exams. The challenge then for educators is to separate comparison from stigmatization in their minds and practice and to use National Standards as an exciting challenge by which the achievement of NZ students can be lifted across the board. It is also to remove any political colouring from the debate and view NS as a useful and powerful tool for providing clear learning steps towards achievement. Learning steps that now seem almost entirely to have been lost in Curriculum Achievement Objectives that provide only diffuse and broadly interpretable learning outcomes.
National Standards do not in any way have to mean that we celebrate a child’s individual achievements less or that we will lose the focus on supporting students to feel happy, safe and excited. They should instead be received as a great way to complement these approaches. It is up to educators to move their thinking forward to a position where positive educational experience is complemented and enhanced by a national assessment framework such as National Standards. Most importantly National Standards gives us the opportunity to strongly define education as the school’s and community’s obligation to each child.
Adrian Tyler
Update: After chat with my Principal I’ve recognized that a genuine concern will be the possible creation of league tables. A newspaper gets hold of attainment data and publishes it showing that perhaps one school in a district has higher results than another, or one school has distinctly lower results. This then will create a preference for one school over others in parents. Now the big problem with all this, aside from the narrow minded bias that overlooks the broad goals and challenges of a school, is that the results from schools are interpretive especially in writing where teachers spend a lot of time collating their evaluations to try and get uniform agreement on what level a piece of writing is at. There is plenty of scope for differences between schools, both in assessment and in cultural/socio-economic influences, to really mean that the levels reported will be ambiguous.
Doh! I have to think about this further…
Ok I’ve thought about it and I say – do it. Yes league tables may be created but let’s allow parents their share of intelligence. There may be problems like this but I think a clear assessment bar is worth that.