Rupert Murdoch is to blame

A short post this one.  We are all watching the journalists going down for their heinous unethical behaviour tapping phones and hiring private detectives while Mr Murdoch and his family stand by acting appalled.

I’m sorry but can the real slim shady please stand up!

Mr Murdoch has gutted out his media organisations of any credible journalism.  HE has set the tone and culture within them,  HE has pushed for cheap, dirty, sensationalised journalism, HE has created a climate of fear and extreme pressure under which journalists can only produce material that ultimately drags society down.

Let’s be clear the person truly guilty of tapping the phones of the family of a murder victim and even deleting those messages to recieve more – is Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch’s media organisations have specialised in creating polarising and rabid right wing rubbish – he is a monger of ignorance, prejudice and hatred.

Like his cronies this man is a waste of space on the planet.

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Charlie Sheen defines Loser?

Wow.  What must be wrong with a person who is attractive, wealthy and famous that he feels the need to make a series like Two and a half men?

To me the show is a portrait of an individual who is suffering from deeply ingrained misogyny and profound esteem issues.  I find the show embarrassing for the guy and here’s why:

He doesn’t act.  He just sits there and makes dry one liners. He needs another character who is presented as physically unattractive, impotent, a dweeb, socially and sexually inept to make him look good.  Then we have the show presenting him as the object of desire for endless streams of women whom he has constant sex with. Does he have STDs?  Doesn’t he get bored?  Why isn’t he panicking about the deep vacousness of his life – oh yeah I forgot – the alcohol and drug fueled sex binges – he is.

I know the show was made to appeal to the lowest common denominator – emotionally retarded, misogynists.  We get phrases like “He did not tap that” “I’d tap that” where the “that” is used in it’s teenage male sense to refer to – a female.  Note – teenage – Charlie is over 40.  Uh oh, a 40 year old sporting the sexual identity and attitudes of a teenage boy = saddo.

By the way misogynist means hatred of women and I bet a great swathe of the show’s audience including its star think they just love women.  So how does the show portray women – they are sexualized, dumb, crazy, neurotic or overweight and ballsy.  Of course the likelihood of Charlie’s character/actual self getting hooked up with an attractive but intelligent woman who’s not suffering from deep self esteem issues is virtually nonexistent.  And that’s the thing; Charlie is a great big vacuous hole in the middle of the show.  He does nothing except basically parasitize the other actors who, but for their need for a star audience puller – would hold the show better without him.

As far as acting contribution, or contribution to anything of value for that matter, is concerned, the “half” of the title obviously refers to Sheen.

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Shortland Street scripts leave much to be desired

I confess to being a sometime watcher and follower of Shorty.  Very enjoyable.  Lately however and perhaps because I now feel a sense of proprietary interest I find myself getting quite annoyed with the scripts.  Yes I can see that to create drama the characters must get themselves into binds and I’m sure it is quite a feat to generate continuous story lines but…  I’ve started wondering if more gratifying drama couldn’t be generated from characters who make strong, clear, honest and assertive decisions.  Not life like might be the argument to that idea but then life-like it sure aint now.  In fact characters have of late been acting rather, well, out of character for the sake of a story.  It is this corruption of characters who have been defined as honest and assertive for the sake of getting them into binds that I find annoying.  I’m sitting there saying – everything we know about this character says this response is uncharacteristic.

Let me try and think of a few:

TK dealing with the new Emergency HOD.  TK is smart enough to have recorded the guy with his harrassment well before now – and we could have seen him get his come uppance.  But all of a sudden TK has lost his assertiveness.  His dealings with Sarah seem unrealistic too.

Last week we watched Jonathon and Gabrielle get knocked by the slimy Shane.  That either of them took his opinion seriously enough to try to pull out of the relationship was just ridiculous.  I would have loved to see them laugh him off and then watch him stew in his own bile afterwards.

Now Bella has just lost her room this week.  She turns up and asks for her room back and Murray and Wendy say sorry kiddo we’ve just let it.   Really?  Whatever, they ring the new tenant and say sorry we’ve gotta house our daughter.

Going back a bit – Tracy dealing with Scotty’s psychosis episode – here we watched the normally very clear thinking Tracey become a blithering idiot who kept rolling back into doubt about the relationship when what we know of her suggests she would have stuck in there and dealt with the issue much more assertively.

Now I know that the writers need to drag out story lines but I would love to see a bunch of assertive honest people dealing with the manipulators and bad apples in a surprisingly punchy no nonsense approach instead of crumbling into doubt, fear, shame and guilt.

I’m gonna try and identify a few more of these inconsistencies over the next little while.  I really think it would be wonderful for Shorty to model relationships and conflict resolution based on strong assertive reactions rather than these emotional collapses we get treated to everyday.  We’d be cheering at every show rather than going – oh God you’re kidding me, s/he’s really doing THAT?!

 

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The Emperor’s New iPad

I just bought an ipad and now I just reset it, repacked it and am gonna take it back.

Wow I got caught by the hype on that one!  I really thought it would offer a professional level illustrating tool but after buying about $40 bucks of different apps – all the most recommended design, paint and illustration ones – I have discovered its got horribly limited function – for example none of those apps have a select or magic wand function!  Compared to Adobe Photoshop they all seemed lobotomised. In fact they all seem like doodle pads to be used in conjunction with a full blown graphic program on your other computer.  So disappointed.

The swishyness of the screen is such a huge novelty that even though I have no need for almost all the preinstalled apps I just want to have it for some reason – it’s pointlessly beautiful.  Literally it is like a crippled laptop – no keyboard except the clunky virtual one.

The whole wow factor of the touch screen has ignored one huge glaring problem – the human finger is one giant leap backwards in terms of accuracy, precision and control.  Yeah you can take an image and twirl it with two fingers – cool! – but actually not anywhere nearly as precisely as you can with a keyboard and mouse – which suddenly makes the whole point of digital art apps a contradiction.  If you want to do it well and with a whole lot more control and features – use a mac/pc.

I can see a new highly anticipated apple development in a few years – ipads with keyboards – and we’ll all go “Wait a minute” – and Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Further to this post I am going to actually review the preinstalled apps and the ones I bought.

The iPad comes with the following apps installed on the home screen:

Calendar: Useful but if you have a laptop with it – pointless duplication.
Contacts: Not useful for me but even if it is to you then ditto to the above.
Notes: Who cares. You really have an ipad to write to-do lists?  Hmmm I might buy that if it had any kind of real usefulness that might induce you to actually pick it up for a purpose – I couldn’t detect any usefulness.
Maps: I’m already using my laptop for everything else  with more functionality, multitasking etc and maps are the same.  It is nice to swish and drag and bump a high resolution map image around – but $800 dollars nice?
Videos: Why? Because you bought it for holiday movies or kids in the car – I guess if $800 is nothing to you may be you did.
YouTube: With less function and options than a computer? – Nah.
iTunes: Obviously.  I have found the iTunes store rather bereft of apps I would want.  Try finding more than 30 ibooks for instance – where are all the others?  Do you have to search by title or something – there was no book search function.  In fact having browsed through all of itunes offerings there was very little if anything I thought was of any value – novelty yes, value…?  Apparently doctors are using them as treatment aides – I will become uncomfortable if my doc pulls one out (not ‘out of me’ obviously – but that would be uncomfortable too).
App Store: See iTunes above.
Settings:  Functional.

These four applications are displayed in the dock by default:

Safari: Straight forward if you’re using iPad to go online but again – why not a laptop?
Mail: Laptop.
Photos:  A great way to display photos – yes an $800 dollar photo Album.  Except I don’t have photos to display.
iPod: syncs with it.  Get the ipod and be done with it I say – that is a functional device that I do get a lot of value from.

Now for the Apps I bought or got free:

Battle bears: Loved it on someone else’s iphone.  Made me violently car sick on the ipad and please don’t tell me you would seriously spend $800 for arcade apps.

Adobe Ideas: Features a crude set of drawing features which like the other apps below were reminiscent of kidpix e.g. preset options with little ‘customizability(?)’.   No customizable or parameter settings available.  No transperant layer I could find – I suppose you insert a layer and drag the opacity to 0 but then anything you draw is invisible so I don’t know.

Inkpad:  The only one with a selection tool of any sort but for a photoshop user the tangent sections with the lines and the anchor point boxes you get when you draw make little sense.  I accept I’m being an ignoramus here as I recall Corel Draw had the same annoying style and obviously better artists than I use it.  However – no magic wand and apparently no area selection or multi layer selection so basically useless.

Sketchbook Pro:  I held out hope for this one but although it has the closest thing to a fully functional set of drawing features they’re still very limited.  Again no selection tool.  Also and this goes for all these apps – without a keyboard you have a one button interface – your finger or stylus – so getting around the features you want is a clunky and annoying process.  SBPro makes a lot of hooplah about its 3 finger press which brings up a wheel for opacity and thickness but again all this back and forwards between editing and tools is far more clunky than simply selecting from a fully stocked toolbar.

Pen Ultimate: Perfectly imitates a nice looking notebook in which you can scribble with a selection of black, red or green vivid markers.  Its not a graphic editing tool – simply a virtual scribble pad – but I liked it the most mainly because its simplicity matched the ipad’s lack of function – it worked well for what it was.  Still not sure what anyone would actually use it for – concept notes for digital transmission perhaps?

Procreate: I got a huge manual with this one and thought ‘Yes, this is it!’ But it wasn’t.  Again it simply lacks so many of the features you take for granted with Photoshop.  Anyone who spends a long time making paintings with this – and there are a large amount of Procreate galleries out there – could I think probably make the same paintings in half the time with Photoshop.

And that’s it – those were the major graphic art programs I downloaded and trialled before finally giving up.  There are others like Inspire – but the reviews led me away from those – I hate to think what a poorly reviewd ipad app is like given that this lot had high praise.

Lastly I will reiterate the major problem for all of these apps – a finger or any commercially available stylus is a stubby and useless appendage for drawing accurately with – I don’t care how much of a starving artist you are a finger is a crap substitute for a pen.  I had dearly hoped to bypass pen drawing and scanning to going straight to work on a virtual surface but due to the nature of ipad’s capacitive touch technology styluses still have to be thick – think an unsharpened pencil.  I have seen DIY designs for fine point styluses that use a ring of tin foil suspended like a foot pad at the tip of an old pen.  So there is proof of the need – I simply decided that given the vacuum of useful features and the seven day return window it was all stacking up to mean this:  The iPad is an $800 novelty toy.  If you have $800 to throw at such a thing you should give it to charity because that is an obscene amount of money to pay for a toy.

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Suffer the Children

Of course it’s reasonable to worry about our kids.  To push for the best quality of education. To protect them from, well today, everything.

150 Years ago families had 10,12,13 or more children.  It wasn’t until relatively recently that more than half of all children born made it to adulthood.

With that change, brought about by medical and nutritional advances, families have had fewer children until wealthy and educated parents are now having one or two children. Correspondingly the desire to protect children has increased.  One child is far more of an emotional and material investment today than the several children, for whom parents of 100 years ago would have expected a degree of mortality.

Such was the likelihood of dying young it seems no wonder that parents and society should have hardened themselves to the suffering of children.  The treatment of children has changed dramatically over time so that we see a landmark moment that has yet to be recognized as such in the anti smacking bill passed by Labour in 2005.  This bill represents the moment at which a long shift from the normalization of serious violence and abuse of children reached its zenith.  After centuries of the norm gradually shifting towards gentler and gentler treatment the Anti-smacking Bill represented the moment for the first time in all of human history that a society said no physical violence at all was acceptable.

I remember at teacher’s training college reading authors who pointed out in incredulous tones that it was not until the Victorian era that children began to be recognized as – children – rather than just small adults.  I have since found modern cultural bias to be looming large in these researcher’s responses to earlier perspectives of children.  For one thing the lack of education probably meant that emotional and intellectual maturity was not much different from the childhood state for many adults.  For another, prior to oil consumption the economics of survival would never have allowed for children to remain out of economic activity for very long.  The very reason why only the children of the wealthy could become educated.  However there is one much more significant aspect of the analysis of childhood that modern researchers seem to rushed past in their redefinition of childhood.  This is that the greatest goal and objective for all children is to be like adults.

Fantasy play, it may turn out, is simply a means of simulating adult roles and activities before it happens. As with all mammal young play is an evolutionary adaptation that prepares children for real life.  I think adults have been largely responsible for exaggerating the fantasy aspects of childrens’ imaginary worlds.  It is not possible to overstate the importance of adults to children.  Their power and activities are deeply craved and admired by children.  Children I think strive to be adults as quickly as they can and I believe that our modern definition of childhood is creating a lot of problems for young people by sentencing them to a childhood world far longer than they want to be in it.  I think that in dispelling the old world’s view of children as small adults we may have thrown the baby out with the bath water.

The most significant and obvious of these problems is the area of youth drinking, drug use and driving.  These activities are amongst the most sacred of adult activities because they all involve the use of dangerous forces – things that children are strictly separated from.  As we have, by virtue of oil and the automation of labour via fossil fuels, been able to extend the length of childhood, young people have become both dependent and angry at the same time.  I have a strong sense that grossly excessive and unregulated drinking behaviour and wreckless driving derive from a mix of having been locked in childhood limbo, being deprived of real responsibility, developing a false sense of protection, a distorted sense of self worth, a lack of experience with real risk but most of all a complete absence of adult modelling as to how to drink and drive in a moderate and mature way.  This suggests that the answer, or at least part of the answer, to youth drinking issues lies in the opposite direction to policing and age limits.  Children and young people need to be inculcated into responsible drinking practices from an earlier age.  15 Year olds should be able to go to the pub with their parents and friends and have one beer.

 

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On why Facebook, LinkedIn and other online networks suck hard

Oh I’ve had this one brewing!  The vacuousness, the deception, the big slimy lies, the insanely annoying email reminders to (sniveling whiny voice) “Be my friend”.

I’ve had a stark realization recently. You know how there’s this wonderful human ideal out there, you know it’s in movies and literature and the speeches of great people; it embodies the notion that humanity has this great potential for compassion and vision and justice.  Well what I’ve realized is that even though the grand ideals of this ‘noble human’ idea actually dominate our movies and literature – the idea of human nobleness is mostly untrue for most of humanity.  This idea has been being pushed by a very small number of people – intellectuals – who feel that they are resonating with the bulk of humanity – but they’re not.

Just like how white 30 to 50 something middle class people think the news media is telling everyone’s news when in fact the news is just them talking securely to themselves…

Well so are the intellectuals who peddle the grand vision of human nobleness – the ones who think enough humans might take genuine action to improve the environment or animal conditions or climate change.  If you’re one of them, like me, you will tend to largely rub shoulders with the same ilk.  You will also tune in to the same ideas and literature and messages and concerns and you will then think that’s the world.  These thinking types have also have dominated the media world – I mean broadly – right or left wing at least they are thinking types – language and debate and ideas are their currency.  This sounds like everyone right? It’s easy to think that this is everyone – but it’s not.  I think there are at least 10 times as many humans on this planet who don’t think much at all.  The intellectuals, the thinkers, be they left or right, have convinced themselves they represent a good slice of humanity with a fringe of the more dull witted causing the problems.  My realization is that the thinking part of humanity – for all that they may utterly dominate the media – are only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.  How do I know? Well amongst other things – Facebook.

Perhaps the ultimate proof of what a waste of space our species is, its hard for me to know where to start describing what is wrong with Facebook and LinkedIn and whatever other plastic veneers of socialisation exist out there on the internet.

Let me throw a few thoughts at you:

One of the interesting if sick phemomena of the internet is the weird projection and amplification of sexual/emotional identities people become involved in.  I know because several years ago I did it myself and I have seen many others do it since.  People on the internet seem so much better than the real thing. Is it because of the distorting impact of communicating in text and pictures?  Written communication certainly allows people to produce versions of themselves their friends and relatives would hardly recognize. These versions are far from the truth and sport a whole wardrobe of witticisms that might be clever or funny amongst people you actually know but when cast out there into cyberspace are just meaningless parroted tripe.  All shreds of reality are filtered out and somehow the knowledge that the person you are talking with is not a luminous winged creature but a flesh and bone person who has any number of shitty moments goes out the window.

So what is it that we are actually saying and showing to each other when we post our comments and pics to the web because it seems to have exactly zero basis in reality?  Put it this way – all the friends who are all admiring each others’ statuses and pics etc, and all the flirters who are stoking their fantasy life into hyperdrive – lock them in a room together and see how long the mutual admiration lasts before they all realize they have no idea who any of these people really are, and that fundamentally they mostly can’t stand each other.

Text based communication allows us to bypass honest and real communication even more than we, largely emotionally dysfunctional, people already do. That of course is why we like it so much.  It’s communication with any reality and its based on a neuro-chemical addiction to being liked. At least that’s my theory.  You see human relationships are governed by neuro-chemicals.  These are substances the brain produces and they are addictive – endorphins – but there are probably others.  As an example – the infant brain rewards the infant for seeking its caregiver by feeding it endorphins.  This strategy ensures the baby’s survival because when it’s close to its caregiver it gets a natural high but when the caregiver leaves it goes into withdrawal.  It is this chemical withdrawal that causes the infant to cry and get distressed when its mum goes away.  This is evolution’s way of keeping infants and caregivers in close proximity.  All the babies that didn’t give two shits where mum and dad were got eaten – probably well before humans even evolved. We actually carry this mechanism throughout our lives and it accounts for the intense feelings of love we can have in a blooming relationship and the despair we experience when we lose a relationship – even if it was the relationship from hell and our rational mind  knows this.

Coming back to Facebook, LinkedIn and all the dating socializing sites out there – what a way to amp up the powerful endorphins of being liked/loved/wanted.  Which is exactly what it is.   Have you ever thought about the pictures people choose to publish of themselves?  These are always very well selected.  I don’t know maybe I’m wrong but I get the feeling that rather a great deal of self-voyeurism (peering at yourself from without) goes into the production and selection of these pics and that tells me something.  This is more than just an online neighborhood – you don’t get to choose how you look when I bump into you in reality – the bad hair, the ‘I didn’t think I was going to the shop in these pants but here I am’, the runny nose, the bags under the eyes; cool that’s you sometimes. I kind of cringe now when ever I see the avatars of people – mainly young and hoping to be attractive – staring intensely into the camera.  To be fair there are plenty of people who just bang on the only pic they have of themselves and get on with the business of sharing their sincere thoughts, but that’s maybe more on forums than on network sites – what do you think?

Anyway there’s something just insidious about Facebook that makes my skin crawl.  Maybe its the excessive formatting of the site which thrusts all these things in your face – I like to have a lot of control of my creative and published space but Facebook offers a seemingly very mandatory format which emphasizes making trite comments about status or taking random preference tests to see who you’re like.  That stuff just seems so desperate and I really don’t give a shit. I can’t understand a) why anyone else does and b)why they would spend the time – what vacuous creatures!  Seriously could any other life form be found performing such utterly useless activity!?  Then of course there are all the friend requests which turn up in your inbox from I don’t know and I don’t give a shit who.  Facebook is to me the ultimate in superficiality.

But now let’s consider the darker, diseased side of the issue – online dating, flirting and hookups.  Hyperdrive is a good description of what happen’s to people’s fantasy worlds once they begin using social networking and dating sites. There are some serious real world problems arising from this and I’m not talking about getting locked up in Argentina for being a drug mule when you thought you were arriving into the arms of your true love – but that is a cautionary tale and my heart goes out to the poor woman involved.

I’ve figured out that in a world addled with highly manufactured images of beautiful people associated with consumer goods it wasn’t going to take long for old brainy to get a widdle bit mixed up and start thinking that the message was – get next season’s lover, last seasons is well – so last season.  Indeed who can compete with a beautiful image wrapped in a beautiful idea – hell we can’t actually compete with our own image which is why such huge dissapointments and mix ups are caused by the vast but artificially sucrose networks of people we can so easily contact via web and text.

I am not greatly convinced of the workability of monogamous long term relationships long since stripped of their communal context.  However I do believe they hold more potential for greater personal unfoldment than ‘swinging’ ever could.  Standing firmly in the way of deeper connection and growth through the crucible of a commited relationship is – Facebook, Findlove, Singles.com, Eurofriendfinder, Chinabrides, Affairs.com, DateMe, Russiangirls, Thaiwifefinder, nzdating, Mylove.com, etcetera, etcetera. and of course, porn.  Its out there, ready at the click of a button to offer a wonderful, exciting, tittilating, mysterious, intriguing, intense, sexually fulfilling, alternative to old shittybritchers.  Except it turns out to be old shittybritchers 0.2.  Oh what voyeurs we are becoming in the pursuit of – what exactly? Something more.  We can always get something more online can’t we.

Now let me come to the useful function that I am told Facebook has.  It does actually provide a great way to share pictures of distant friends and family so we can track their journeys and growth.  I’m not going to deny the value some people find in this function. Personally I don’t really want to see a whole lot of photos of anyone I’m related too far less anyone I’m not. This must sound terribly heartless but it’s just not me.  I love my family deeply in my own way.  I think the women of the clans take a lot more from this than the men perhaps.  But of course you know you don’t have control of these pics.  You can, after several dire warnings of being socially ostracized, actually delete your account (those warnings remind me of a dealer trying to offer a rehabilitated addict – just a little more) but any photos you publish through Facebook apparently remain online – forever – or at least until Armageddon when God and Facebook will battle for supremacy and Facebook will be cast Down! and Smitten! and Caused to Writhe on Its Slimy Belly! Apparently that’s in October sometime.

Well I hope I’ve given you cause to reflect, maybe even to experience the glorious “F**kyou Facebook!” feeling of vaporizing all those vacuous, pathetic and inspid ‘facewits’ masquerading as friends and… DELETING YOUR ACCOUNT!  Do it now.  I dare you.

 

 

 

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Response to NZEI’s critique of National Standards

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 lifelong 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 testbased 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 underachieving 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 ORSSfunded 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 longterm 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.

 

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