The Listener 2006: School wars By Amie Richardson provides some really good background to this debate.

I guess that’s a slam dunk, then. The newspapers are never wrong.

Another poster provided a link to a Tertiary Education Committee briefing paper, which says, in part, this:

“The 2006 results from the International Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey show that 40-50 percent
of working age New Zealanders have literacy, language, and numeracy skills below those thought
necessary for full participation in society and the economy. Raising workforce literacy, language
and numeracy is a key area of action under the Skills Strategy.”

it may be news to some here, but the above extract is not calling 20% of school leavers functionally illiterate.

The same report also says:

“Currently, almost 25 percent of young people leave school before their seventeenth birthday,
and around 35 percent of secondary students leave with less than a Level 2 NCEA qualifi cation. A
disproportionate number of these are Mäori and Pacifi c Peoples. Overall, New Zealand has a low
participation rate in education for 15 to 19 year olds compared to other OECD countries. This is
refl ected by the high number (around 10,000) of young people aged 15 to 17 in Census 2006 data
who were estimated to not be engaged in work, training, or education. This lack of engagement has
a strong negative impact on the lives of these young people and their communities.”

What more does Tolley want in terms of where to direct her energies? How will her broad brush approach solve two very specific problems clearly enunciated for her?

I think the application of the term “functionally illiterate” to the 20% is a gross misrepresentation, and, with a hat tip to Michael Cullen, the equivalent of an “ideological burp.”

I actually work with school leavers who left school without any NCEA Level 1 or even core literacy (do you know the difference?), yet complete their paperwork competently. So my anecdotal evidence says the claim is crap. But I certainly wouldn’t ask them to write a productivity improvement assessment for presentation to the board!

And those people who keep saying that the standards would show up the bad teachers are simply wrong; the opposite is the case. The standards may not be test based, but they are narrowly prescribed and the teachers, especially the less talented ones, will dumb down their teaching to maximise assessment success. The best and the brightest will be the ones that suffer.

So, briefly, your claims are the ones based on belief; I prefer evidence.

They are parents, doing a thankless job, many of whom are likely to support teachers, who do another thankless job. Add in the fact that a world reknowned expert on assessment is calling for trials AND the recent OECD reports and Tolley is walking a very fine line, one which she would be wise to reconsider.

I was away from my computer until an hour ago (yes, some of us can tear ourselves away, painful as it is), so I have only just picked up Luc Hansen’s challenge to me on Saturday night to prove my point that 20 percent of school-leavers are functionally illiterate.

Luc, you might need to go back and have another look at the thread and the posts that defined the term ‘functional illiteracy’ and where it came from. Another poster, if I remember correctly, said the problem was worse than you appeared to believe.

Failing that, go and find out for yourself. The statistic has been in the newspapers.

I hope Tolley wins on this.

The best teacher in the world is not going to have much success in explaining logarithms to a class of 15 year old girls from South Auckland – it is totally unrealistic to expect otherwise.

What we need to do is identify kids with potential and make sure that they receive the education they deserve and that everybody receives the education that most benefits them.

A one size fits all approach is doomed to fail everyone

If this suceeds in getting parents on baord then it will reduce the current problem

Best of luck Mrs Tolley

No, it’s going to expose children who aren’t learning. This may be a result of bad teaching, or may be the result of other factors – eg, bad parents, glue ear, foetal alcohol syndrome, you name it. Given that “bad teachers” and “other factors” are both present to some unknown degree in decile 1 schools, the testing will tell us nothing reliable at all about the teachers.

Teachers say they already know the children who are failing. I think many do – in which case why don’t the parents know too and why are so many children still finishing school without sufficient numeracy and literacy skills?

The parents do know. But they either don’t care or they’ve created kids who they have no control over. There are still reports and parent-teacher evenings.

Show me a parent who doesn’t know their kid can’t read and I’ll show you a bad parent. Plain and simple.

However it will provide new Government programs and jobs for the boys girls and interminable news releases on how badly we a failing our children

But what is actually going to happen is the exposure of the useless teachers. They are mostly in the low decile schools (because they cant get jobs in better equipt schools), and thus the programmes for low decile schools will change from “throw lots of money at them” (and believe me its lots) to “how can we get better teachers to go to them”
That will be progress.

National standard parental aptitude testing would certainly be more useful for educational outcomes than what Tolley’s proposing, but you gots to stick with what’s politically feasible I guess. In this case, we’ll spend huge amounts of money, waste huge amounts of teachers’ time and add another lay of back-office bureaucracy (nice one, John Key – way to stick to those principles, mate) to establish that, strangely enough, kids in decile 1 schools don’t do as well as the ones in decile 10 schools. The big question is, having blown our dosh on finding out confirming the obvious, what might Tolley and her colleagues do about it? My money’s on “not a whole lot, really.”

Hmmm, that’s what I sorta did by not liking the anti-smacking bill and voting in National.

[DPF: National voted for it and never promised to change it.]

The tests and reporting will formalise what most teachers may already know and ensure parents are informed too. But the success of the policy will rely on what happens next to ensure the children who are recognised as not being up to speed early get the help they need to succeed.

The only way change for the better will ever be achieved in this country is for the Government to outlaw the membership by Principals of the Teacher Unions

How is that going to change the illiterati class problem for the better?

Same old same old from the old Party.

Some people are never happy – you give them massive amounts of consultation and they quibble about the form that it took.

…outlaw the membership by Principals of the Teacher Unions…

Yes, that would certainly demonstrate the govt’s commitment to freedom and liberty for all.