NZ Principals’ Federation Newsletter
From their latest newsletter:
The NZPF took the approach of engaging with the Minister to find a solution including a complete review of the National Standards system in partnership with the sector. Our preference remains still to work with the Minister and sector but until there is a commitment to work in a true and meaningful partnership, we can’t, in good faith engage with her. We do however leave the door open if the Minister should ever want to enter a partnership with us and the sector in the future. But we can’t just wait, doing nothing.
This is hilarious. Do you know why? The NZPF is refusing to actually detail their concerns about the standards. They keep saying they are flawed, but have declined every request to detail how exactly they are flawed. They say they will not detail the flaws, unless the Government agrees in advance to suspend the standards.
Their idea of a partnership, seems akin to a bank robber asking the bank manager for a partnership – hand over all your cash and then we will lower our weapon.
During last weekend’s executive meeting it passed a motion in respect of our moral obligation to our children which read NZPF encourages schools to take a principled stance on National Standards until such time as concerns are successfully resolved. By ‘principled stance’ the executive means making decisions and taking actions in the very best interests of the children of New Zealand and these may include moral and ethical considerations.
A principled stand – ha ha ha ha. And “best interests of the children of NZ” – they should write comedy. They are going to disrupt as many schools as possible to prevent parents from knowing how their kids are doing against a national standard, and claim this is to protect the children. My God.
National Standards are the most serious issue that the NZPF has encountered in its 27 year history. From many quarters there are warnings about hurtling down this path.
The most serious issue? Incredible. They are in fact a minor additional requirement, that school reports have an extra page where current reports are moderated so they can be measured against a national benchmark.
August 19th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
The national standards are tremendous.
I’ve two examples. Firstly, our own child.
We had no idea how he was doing relative to other kids in the country. With the new report we received, it gave us an exact indication of where he rates against other New Zealand children. Now we are confident he is doing just fine.
A friend of ours, her child received a great end-of year report and thought everything was fine . But, when he moved into a new class this year, in actual fact he was so far behind he needed remedial lessons to bring him up to the level of his classmates.
If national standards were in effect last year, this would not have happened.
I just don’t understand the Teachers objections. One objection I have heard, is that it will make some schools look bad and no parent will want to send their students to that school.
But surely transparency is a good thing? I expect that schools in poor socio-economic areas will receive poor results. This does not mean the teachers are performing badly because student performance will be a reflection of the local community.
But, if we see a school performing above or below what is expected (maybe comparing schools with the same decile rating ) then we can investigate that school to find the reasons behind the results.
For schools performing above expectations, maybe they are doing something which can be implemented at other schools .
August 19th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I would have thought the most serious problem facing this narcisistic idealogically bound bunch of socialists would have been the appalling statics relating to numeracy and literacy standards reached by so many school leavers as evidenced by employers and others trying to effectively advance these unfortunates. However I guess they have sufficient skills to place an x in the “correct” box at election time.
August 19th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
So their idea of a “true partnership” is their way or no way.
Good to know.
August 19th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
It is not a partnership to go on strike when you don’t get everything you want. That’s quite apart from the fact that teachers do not set education policy.
August 19th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
The other day a 13 year old child bought a kilo of weed to school to sell (given to him by his parents) and they say National standards are the most serious issue they have faced? That is an absolute disgrace. How can people in charge of our childrens future be so damn ignorant?
August 19th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
“The NZPF is refusing to actually detail their concerns about the standards.”
Except, of course, on their page of resources here: http://www.nzpf.ac.nz/national-standards
“and claim this is to protect the children. My God.”
Your outrage would be more believable were you not trying to argue education policy with an organization of 2300 principals. But hey, what would they know, eh?
August 19th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
2300, Crikey. At an average of $100,000 that is quarter of a billion dollars per year plus the costs of them attending meetings and coferences etc etc. Given the appalling standards achieved in our schools one has to wonder if that $230,000,000 is well spent.
August 19th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
These people are criminally negligent. They should be locked up.
August 19th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
But do the principals themselves actually buy into this horseshit? Or have they been hijacked? How is the NZPF constituted and how often are the “executive” elected?
August 19th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Your outrage would be more believable were you not trying to argue education policy with an organization of 2300 principals. But hey, what would they know, eh?
I’ll see your 2300 Principals, and I’ll raise you 500,000 parents.
August 19th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
@thedavincimode – yes there’s some hijacking going on here. As a recently retired BoT chair I gave our principal no option but to implement the standards, and the option of recording recommended improvements which we would socialize with the staff and then send to the ministry. The principal did both, against the advice he’d received from NZPF.. and the results has been some kudos from the ministry, and lots of positive feedback from the parent community. The NZPF need to wake up and smell the roses.
August 19th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
kk
But from what you say, it sounds as if your principal was resisting. Was he, and if so was it NZPF pressure?
August 19th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
As I recall Ms Gillard introduced similar standards across the ditch when she was Minister of Education.
August 19th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
alex Masterly didn’t you realise that according to socialists we are supposed to catch Aussie by not implementing anything they have done (i.e. mining, nat standards, work trial)?? Oh that’s apart from removing GST which has been shown to be an absolute disaster but hey lets do that here because surely it will just magically work here with no problems. I am sure Labour are going busy working on an election pledge of a $50 an hour minimum wage so we can catch up to Aussie that way.
August 19th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
@thedavincimode – yes he was initially resistant … because he’d been fed all sorts of scare stories IMO. Our school has a high number of refugee/ESL students and the fear was the level of achievement would be lower than national average and therefore reflect badly on him as principal. The NZPF hadn’t done a good job of highlighting the mechanisms that exist for dealing with achievement exceptions, but to be fair the principal hadn’t done his own reading either. I’m a bit out of the loop now as no I’m longer BoT chair, so have to get my info from Mrs kk who is at the coalface on all this.
August 19th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
From the NZPF ‘fact sheet’ http://www.nzpf.ac.nz/sites/default/files/NS_Fact_Sheet.pdf
The Minister’s claims: “Literacy and Numeracy are what school is all about.”
The Truth
“This early 20th Century attitude is blind to the kind of vision that is needed for our
children who face a very different world to what it was. Literacy is essential and
numeracy is useful, but so too are other areas of the school curriculum.”
Oh how I yearn for early 20th century mores.
The Minister’s claims: “A lot of schools are not doing and using assessment effectively.”
“The Truth”:
The Minister got this idea from a 2007 ERO report which covers both primary and
secondary schools. That same report says over 80 percent of teachers in primary
schools were using assessment information effectively to identify learning needs in
literacy. Also, seventy-five percent did this effectively in mathematics, especially in
numeracy. This clearly disproves the exaggerated claim of the Minister.
So 20% and 25% respectively for literacy and mathematics are likely not doing this effectively. Would I be right in calculating this out at the equivalent of 460 and 575 schools (assuming 2300 primary schools) NOT doing effective assessment? Sounds like a strong case for someone to introduce National Standards.
August 19th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
a combination of deliberate misinformation and poor implementation at a political level perhaps.
Tolley should have done a roadshow for the principals and dealt with them in manageable numbers – the misinformation programme was predictable and in fact had already started before the election from what I recall.
August 19th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
‘The NZPF is refusing to actually detail their concerns about the standards.’
Really? There is a ton of stuff on their website.
[DPF: I don't mean the generic claims. They say there are specific deficiencies (such as Standard x in maths is too hard for this age group) but refuse to detail them]
August 19th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
@RightNow – the truth is probably that ERO sugar-coated those stats.. because poorer performance would have necessitated more effort from ERO to provide remedial support to schools that were not using assessment well. More effort means more budget, and asking for more budget is a career limiting more.
Also, there is a large range for the word ‘effective’ in terms of assessment activities lead to improved student achievement. Mrs kk’s job has her helping many teachers learn how to improve their own assessment methods. National Standard are about improved assessments (the method), as much as ther are about publishing reporting of student achievement (the results)
August 19th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
kk, even without any sugar coating the figures they supplied confirm Tolley’s claim rather than disprove it. Perhaps the NZPF are opposed to numeracy standards because they don’t want people being able to work out this stuff for themselves.
I wonder if principals would accept an 80% SLA for their electricity supply, or internet connection, or if their cleaners only cleaned 80% of the school toilets each day.
August 19th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
@thedavincimode (829)
The NZPF was 27 years ago a voluntary association of principals of Schools who joined to challenge the supremacy of union directed issues in Education. In the earlier days they concentrated on curriculum, issues regarding pupil progress, and establishing an independent view of the Principal’s’ task. After Bolger let a number of them down by capitulating to the NZEI and removing the opportunity for Principals to have an Independent Employment Contract, based on Performance in favour of the much loved “Collective”, the NZEI infiltrated. using the fact that Principals were often members of both organisations. The NZEI Stalinised the organisation.
If you looked today, the same faces would front both the NZPF Conference, and that of the NZEI.
And BOT’s would pay both for them to be members of the NZPF their, so called, “Professional Organisation” and their attendance at Conference on the grounds this was “training” for them.
There is a huge rort going on here, and the losers are as always the pupils.
August 19th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
thx
August 19th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Teachers are a bunch of 2 faced fools. On the one hand they judge the students abilities but on the other they refused to be judged on their own abilities.
the reason is they are scared witless of being found out to be at best a mediocre lot who conceal the worst of their failures amongst themselves,
They are the last of the dinosaur union run job sector.
There mentality is back ion the early mid 20th century They are a bunch of cloth capped cloth eared morons.
August 19th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Can’t understand all the fuss from the teachers and NZPF.
Received the first report based on the new standards from my boys school (he is just about 6) and was great to see them compare where he is against what the standard is. Was just a graph that they showed you where he was based on months at school versus level of reading and maths. This was delivered to us face-to-face with his teacher so it was explained to us what we were reading.
He is my eldest child so I have no idea what he should or shouldn;t be able to do so having some form of comparison is very useful so we can help him at home where he needs it.
My boys school put out a newsletter to parents about it ages ago basically saying the government funds them and the government as part of their funding contract has said we need to adopt the standards so we will – no questions asked.
Oh, and it is a public primary school.
August 19th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
right on fatman43us (150), NZPF and the NZEI are one in the same, unfortunately the same happened to the PPTA with the free thinkers who founded SPANZ swallowed up by the union, the battle over national standards is no different to other education policy battles with the unions where the government of the day has a huge task to disseminate information compared with the union’s ability to marshall teachers and principals, who have enormous influence with parents and the community, to spread its gospel
August 19th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Teachers and, sadly, principals, need to get their heads around the fact that they are employees of the parents, and that the kids’ needs for quality education comes before their desire for a job for life regardless of performance.
In Switzerland, I understand, the parents hire the teachers directly in the cantons.
There’s very little central bureaucracy and those teachers are paid, on average, $120,000 a year.
What do you think the standard of those teachers is likely to be?
And do you think they’d consider the imposition of standards the great challenge of the age? Somehow I doubt it.
I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who knows more about the Swiss education system. Does it contain lessons for New Zealand?
Meanwhile a Merit for Anne Tolley and the Nats on this one.
I was livid when she was colluding to prevent the publication of league tables. But I loved her speech the other week when she told the teachers (or was it principals?) to just do as they’re told. Spoken like a true school marm!
If the Nats’ education policies keep improving at this rate, they may soon be a match for the Australian Labor Party.
August 19th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
What makes teachers and Principals think they are unique in having performance assessments, which are available for all to see. I work in an Emergency department. Records of our performance are published locally daily and quarterly reports are avaliable online. We embrace it. We have used this data to make improvements and improve our performance.
I would like to think that schools and principals exist for pupils, ie Future NZ inc. It would seem that Pricipals thinks schools exist for Principals. Pupils are just a blight to their profession.
August 20th, 2010 at 10:40 am
@Grizz
The nice thing about ED deparments is that the statistics are objective – how long was someone in the ED. Noone asks subjective questions e.g. about the quality of the suture work – above standard, at standard, below standard.
The things that teachers are being asked to do are very subjective – it’s purely the teacher’s informed opinion. There is no (or very little) moderation, there is no uniform test process, there is no appeal process.
As a doctor you must know about the difficulties of testing things e.g. doing a blood test for prostate cancer. There is a high chance you’ll get a wrong result because the test isn’t that great (and the consequences can be pretty dire).
That is the problem that I have as a parent – the tests aren’t that great. As a statistician I know that when this type of data is compiled the amount of noise and bias will increase so that only the strongest signals will get through. The strongest signal is that socio-economic status matters and that’s what we’ll see.
Also you’ll know that randomised trials beat out observational studies because who gets assigned to what treatment matters. Children aren’t randomly assigned to schools or classes and teachers aren’t randomly assigned to school, classes and pupils. Trying to judge teacher performance based on an “observational study” rather than “a randomised trial” is going to lead to some misleading results.
We owe to teachers, if we are going to judge their perfromance by statistics, to get the statisitic right and to make the judgements fair. A teacher with lots of ESOL students and kids with high medical needs should have that taken into account.
August 20th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Look David you’re just an abysmal, lying, arrogant piece of rubbish. ……….
http://www.thestandard.org.nz/teacher-bashing-morons/
Well the standard says so it, must be true !
And in other news MickeySavage now posting as Greg Pressland at the same hell hole and running for council on the super city …… God help us all !!
August 20th, 2010 at 11:47 am
@Bevan
OK, I’ll raise you 2 million coal miners.
Parents aren’t experts in educational assessment. They’re one of the key consumers of school reporting, so of course should have a say in what metrics they want to see – but if that demand will lead to state provision (and implicit endorsement) of incorrect information then we shouldn’t do it.
We need to balance what parents want to see with what will actually help them and schools make better decisions for their children. The (almost unanimous) opinion of education experts is that the proposed national standards won’t.
August 20th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Being a parent, I still can’t figure out how my daughter is doing in high school. I couldn’t figure it out when she was in primary school. My son graduated from high school and can’t grasp how well he did. I think you need something to measure by otherwise it is all puffery. I like John Ansell’s post. Teachers and Principals are employees. They have forgotten this which is unfair to the kids. By the way, the worst customers I had were teachers. They never listened and if there was a problem, they would be shouting the loudest. I lost a lot of respect for teachers after that. They live in a protected world.
August 25th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
National Standards do not tell you where your child is in relation to other children or an average – they measure against a newly created measure that is untested and not based on any research. I think as parents we should know where our children are at in relation to where the average is for their age but National Standards does not do this or claim to do this. In fact a child could be reading at their age level and still be below the standard – this will just leave more parents confused. The real issue seems to me to be about talking about hwere our childrena are at and how to meet their needs and get them learning whether they are above or below any standard.
Grizz commented about teachers having performance assessments which are available for all to see. like in the health industry however would it be fair to pay a terminal cancer nurse less than a maternity nurse because more of his/her patients die? Or do we IQ test five year olds and gauge our expectations of their entire schooling on that? It just doesnt work in schools. Do we exclude distruptive students (at the detriment of our society) so that our outcomes look better on the surface? How do you compare declie one and ten schools and all the variables? Teachers of course do have performance assessments already.
The equivalents of National Standards in the UK and USA have led to huge educational problems. I thinks princiaplas would be morally wrong to sit by and impliment sometihing if they believe it will determentally affect our children and what ever side iof the fence you sit on on this issue there is alot of evidence to suggest that it quite possibly will do a lot of damage and that it has been rushed in without consultation.