Pagani on National Standards
October 18th, 2011 at 4:00 pm by David FarrarA refreshing blog from John Pagani:
Principals say they say they can’t give us objective measurements of how our kids are doing in relation to his or her peers.
I don’t believe them. No one believes them. Principals themselves don’t believe it.
What’s really going on is they believe it’s not desirable. And parents think principals are wrong.
Parents know that by a certain age their kids should be able to do some things.
No parent is saying ‘mark my child as a failure.’ We know every kid is different. But we cannot know if they have talents or if they need help unless we know whether they are making as much progress as other children.
Exactly. I just wish Labour had the same view as John Pagani on this.
I’m glad we’ve moved on from the days of ‘this child didn’t make it so that’s the end of that’. But what we want teachers to tell us now is: ‘it’s ok, this child is doing about the same as all the others’; Or, ‘a bit better than I would expect for her age’; Or, ‘he needs help to catch up, and this is what we are going to do.’
And many parents are frustrated those clear statements are so damn hard to get.Instead, principals hit us with glibness like this: “You can’t write a novel with 3 letters.” Excuse me. I know you can’t. But I don’t want you to write a novel with 3 letters. I want you to tell me in clear language whether my kid is doing about as well he or she should be doing for his or her age.
One can communicate whether or not a child is achieving at the minimum level expected for that age group, without labelling them a failure.
It drives parents nuts to hear teachers say ‘it’s hard to tell you when kids have grasped something’, or ‘you can’t say a child should have learned a skill by the age of 8.’ If most children have learned something and ours hasn’t – we really want to know that. And when you won’t tell us, we think that’s about your discomfort with accountability.
And it’s even worse to tell us, “Underachievement is so closely related to poverty and unemployment and other issues beyond the school environment.” So what? Even an unemployed or impoverished parent wants to know how their kid is doing. It is arrogant and nasty for principals to make excuses before they even give the kids a chance.
I’m not a teacher basher. If I didn’t think we were lucky to have so many talented and professional staff who do so much, I wouldn’t want to trust my kids’ education to them. This debate is held back by people who sneer at teacher unions and repeat crocked ideas imported from countries behind us in educational achievement.
I sneer at teacher unions, but not teachers. And there is a big difference. I actually want the good teachers and principals paid much more and given the ability to manage their schools more fully.
In the comments, one person said:
I am a former secondary teacher. Kids are measured at Y11 onwards through NCEA. Why wait until then to find out they are struggling. Kids already know where they fit into the class structure so why try fooling them. The sooner weaknesses are identified, sooner they can be corrected.
I have found over recent months that many secondary teachers are very supportive of national standards. The reason is that so many kids and parents never realise they are struggling or not achieving at a high enough level until they get to secondary school, by which time it is almost too late. So this puts huge stress on the secondary teachers and worse parents blame them, because they say that they never got told Johnny wasn’t doing okay at primary school, so if he now isn’t doing okay at secondary school, it must be that school’s fault.
Related posts:
- Herald on National Standards
- Laws on National Standards
- 5:1 support for national standards
- Dom Post on national standards
October 18th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Its great to see a Labourite actually seeing sense but just when you think they might not be total morons they go and hand over the keys to their industrial relations policy to the unions and prove that they are unelectable retards.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Privatize the education system and that will solve the problems.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
@ Falafulu I agree but only if you take the dead hand of the state of the curriculum as well.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 4:40 pm
FFS this is what parents have been saying all the time. It’s just common sense. You need standards to be able to measure how your kids are doing. And also, how can you put kids through to the next level based on nothing? I don’t see why some are against national standards.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 4:44 pm
Did someone hack his blog…?
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 4:44 pm
That is a great burst of common sense.
There is a certain type of person whose attitude to their employeer is: “That bastard earns so much more than me, why should I work hard?”
They are generally the people who lead the complaining, who resist accountability, and in my experience most union reps are drawn from that group.
Excuses for non-performance are elaborate and detailed, but the thing that always sticks out is that it is them not perfoming, and this often drags the overall performance of a team down.
It could be that this resistance to national standards is that group of people imposing their worldview on New Zealand.
It is unfortunate that it is at the expense of our kids.
(Next week in PopPsycholgy Today: Protesters and the opressive father complex: did daddy not listen to you?)
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
As a secondary teacher, I think some sort of national standards are desperately needed in primary schools, because I see so many kids come into Y9 so far behind the 8-ball that they don’t stand a chance in the high school environment. If they don’t have a nice, neat, easily identified learning disability, they just fall through the gaps at high school. Subject teachers do their absolute best, of course, but when your job is to teach the four processes that lead to earthquakes in a Geography class, it’s hard to spend the time necessary with a couple of students who can’t even spell “earthquake” or write a coherent sentence. Standards are needed, as long as they are better than the abomination that is NCEA.
One of the worst problems is that a lot of primary schools, to get rid of their most unruly students (many of whom are unruly because they just can’t do the classwork), “promote” them to high schools early (i.e. if they were born in July, they will get 6 months less than most other students not because they have reached a certain standard early, but because they are naughty). So you have a set of kids, younger than their peers, much further behind them in capabilities, and with a well-hardened fuck-this-shit attitude towards school coming it at Year 9.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Oh but it would be mean to the pupils not to promote them to the next class. They should be put in to more advanced classes where they won’t understand anything, will drag down the rest of the class with disruptive behaviour and be set on a path to a lifetime on the benefit. That is far better than embarrassing them by holding them back somewhere where they might have a chance to learn.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 8:40 pm
I had a watch of the video, the arguments are contradictory. They first say the standards don’t use a hard measure like a moderated testing regime, but then say standards cause teachers to teach to the test. They also say it’s not a teachers fault that a child doesn’t learn, it’s the fault of poverty and unemployment. I went to school with a boy who was raised by a single mother in a very impoverished situation, and now he is one of the world leaders in his field.
Vote:October 18th, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Left leaning John Pagani?
Vote:It reads like an Act Party press release!
October 18th, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Unit Standards don’t work. I have written about my experiences with them at http://willsheberight.blogspot.com/stupidity-of-unit-standards.html
If we go back to external exams with maybe a 33% internal assessment component, I think that would be a good thing.
Vote:October 19th, 2011 at 7:26 am
I’m sorry, but the Labour hack Pagani is not worth reading. Period.
Vote:October 19th, 2011 at 9:39 am
I got told by the HOD Maths at the secondary school I work at that less than 40% of our incoming Year 9s this year were at the level we would expect them to be.
Vote:We are not a low decile school and most of our contributing schools are not either.
October 19th, 2011 at 9:43 am
unit standards?
Vote:these are already being phased out – look at the NZQA website – unit standards are either expired or expiring at secondary school level – or do you mean some other unit standards?
By the way – I also did not like unit standards.
October 19th, 2011 at 10:30 am
Sticking to National Standards is about the only reason I would vote National.
Ann Tolley has done well to stick to her guns in the face of hostility, condescension, and patronising behaviour by Labour hacks, teacher union hacks, and some of their media fellow-travellers.
Why else was Mrs Tolley moved up the National list?
Vote: