Kiwiblog

The Herald reports:

A working group of MPs has asked that parents of the worst- and best-performing students be given greater choice about how and where the child is educated and be able to take their government funding with them.

The Government was considering a modified version of the education voucher scheme for the 20 per cent worst-performing and 5 per cent best-performing students aged 6 to 16 years.

The working group on school choice was set up under Act and National’s supply and confidence agreement and chaired by Act deputy leader Heather Roy and made up of MPs from National, Act and the Maori Party

The report is online here.

I’m very supportive of any initiative that increases choice and flexibility for parents and pupils, like this one does.

Stuff reports:

The Government has intensified a developing standoff with teacher unions.

After The Dominion Post revealed yesterday early plans by the primary teachers union to strike over the national standards policy, Education Minister Anne Tolley hit back, telling Parliament she was “disappointed” by the unions.

“I find it really disappointing that the unions want to stop parents getting information about how their kids are doing,” Mrs Tolley said.

“This Government is on the side of parents and we’re on the side of kids.”

Now that is not a typo. The unions are not going to strike over more pay, or smaller class sizes. They are going to strike to refuse to implement the policy of the Government, despite an explicit election mandate for it.

As far as I can tell, Anne has bent over backwards to work with the unions. She even said she’d work with them to try and stop the media publishing league tables. But they seem implacably opposed to giving parents nationally consistent and relevant information.

I say bring it on. Let this be Mrs Thatcher’s miners. The unions plans to pressure school boards to refuse to implement the standards. My response would be no standards, no funding.

All power to the union when they are trying to get payrises for their members. That is their legitimate role. But the unions seek to determine the education policy of New Zealand. They think the voters and the parents are unqualified. This is a battle over who is in charge of the education system and who does it exist for – is it the unions – or is it pupils and parents.

If you think the national standards is crap policy, then you’ll get a chance at the next election to get them thrown out. Elections should determine policy, not unions.

The Dom Post Editorial:

According to Mr Key, as many as one-in-five pupils are being left behind. The consequences of that are as inevitable as they are disastrous. Without basic literacy and numeracy, there is little chance of succeeding in 21st century New Zealand society. It is no coincidence that research last year showed 90 per cent of prisoners are “functionally illiterate” – their reading and writing skills are inadequate to cope with the demands of daily life.

No coincidence indeed. The degree of hearing loss in prisoners also suggests not just a correlation but a causative effect.

The desire of parents to have clear, honest, specific and regular feedback on their children’s progress, achievement, and strengths and weaknesses in language the parents understand is reasonable. Parents – and, through them, their children – need to know how they are performing, and in a meaningful way. Despite some teachers’ belief that revealing to pupils and their parents that they are performing below the national standard will hurt their motivation, engagement and self-esteem, the alternative is cruelly unfair. Allowing parents and pupils to falsely believe they are performing adequately is a sure step to failure.

And this is not comparing to some standardised median or mean. This is not about ranking kids within a school, within a decile or even nationally. And it is not about ranking schools. It is simply about letting parents know if their child is able to do the basic numeracy and literacy skills that are expected of a child of that age.

British research suggests that putting too much emphasis on literacy and numeracy, and on the achievement of national standards in those areas, can see other parts of the curriculum squeezed into oblivion.

A nation of spellers who can add up but have little grasp of science, small exposure to the arts and only the occasional foray into physical education while at primary school, is not going to enjoy success either.

I agree. But basic literacy and numeracy helps immensely with science, the arts and even physical education.

There is no room for debate in one area, however. The decision by teacher and principal groups to boycott the announcement of the policy cannot be allowed to develop into an undercutting of its implementation. There are still murmurs of inflating assessments so that schools are seen to be performing well.

Teachers are public servants and that means they must follow the policies put in place by those who represent the people, the government of the day, regardless of their own personal views. They cannot simply decide to ignore them.

I hope they do. But at times I get the feeling they want to be the equivalent of the British coalminers union of the 70s.

The Herald reports:

The new national standards will narrow educational opportunities for children, says the country’s largest teaching union.

“It all adds up to teaching to a very narrow focus and ultimately narrowing educational opportunities for children,” said New Zealand Educational Institute president Frances Nelson.

The union has been opposed to standards since National announced their introduction.

The standards were part of National policy before the party was elected to Government. Despite almost a year of talks, the Government has failed to reach an amicable agreement with the teaching unions.

NZEI – which represents about 45,000 people in the education sector – did not attend yesterday’s formal launch.

The union is holding a forum next month to work out how the standards will sit alongside “everything else we do in terms of teaching and learning and getting the best results for students”.

Ms Nelson said the national standards were causing upheaval and the main issue for the forum was to “ensure a focus on improved student achievement across the broader school curriculum not just in literacy and numeracy”.

I am genuinely confused here. If a pupil can not read or write or count, then what are these other areas of achievement they may be doing well in, that don’t need basic literacy or numeracy?

Ms Tolley said it was hard to understand how teaching reading, writing and maths would narrow education opportunities.

“If they cannot do these basics, that is when opportunities are closed off.”

Indeed.

The Press reports:

Senior public servants failed to pick up a payment blunder for more than a year, costing the Ministry of Education more than $20 million.

The mistake occurred when a 4 percent funding boost to about 2000 early-childhood centres was allocated twice in the same round, meaning more than $20 million was over-spent.

An internal report obtained under the Official Information Act said human error involving an inexperienced and overworked ministry staff member led to the original funding mistake.

It was compounded by a poor peer review that meant the error went undetected for 14 months.

My question is, where is the accountability? If you worked for a private company and you made a mistake that cost the company $20 million, you would no longer be working there.

The Dom Post reports:

Prospective teachers could skip specialist university training and be fast-tracked into the classroom under a plan to cope with an ageing workforce.

Under the scheme, anyone who already has a master’s degree could bypass teacher’s college and learn on the job.

The suggestion follows a high-level meeting between Education Minister Anne Tolley and controversial United States schools leader Michelle Rhee.

Controversial is often applied by the media as a label for someone with views that journalists disagree with. It is a way of saying “Do not listen to this person”.

So before we look at what Rhee said, who is she. Is she some sort of academic whose has controversial theories never actually trialled?

Michelle Rhee is a 39 year old Korean-American who is the Chancellor of the DC Public Schools system. She is also the founder of The New Teacher Project that has recruited 10,000 teachers in the last ten years.

As Chancellor she is responsible for 168 schools, with around 58,000 students. 84% of her students are black.

So this “controversial” woman is in charge of the public schools of one of the poorest areas in America, and in an overwhelmingly Democratic area.

So what does she recommend:

The Washington DC schools chancellor has caused debate with proposals to give star teachers huge pay rises, fire ineffective ones and introduce a voucher system that gives pupils from low-income families thousands of dollars to attend private schools.

That sounds pretty good to me I have to say. The article actually has it wrong thought. She did not introduce the voucher system A voucher system for 1,900 low income families has been operating since 2004 (before she was appointed). She just does not oppose it.

Does she see it as undermining public education?

The five-year pilot program is up for renewal next year, but Ms. Rhee doesn’t see school choice as a threat to her mission in the public schools. She shakes her head. “I would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent’s ability to make a choice for their child. Ever.” Instead, she sees the competition presented by school choice and charter schools as part of the process of raising standards in the public school system at large. “We have an excellent choice dynamic for parents here… I’m a huge proponent of choice…” People have tried to get her to commit to a ratio of public schools to charter schools. Ms. Rhee won’t play that game. “I don’t enter this with defensiveness, about protecting [D.C. public schools'] share of the market. I believe we should proliferate what’s working and close down what’s not. Period

She doesn’t say that vouchers are the remedy for repairing public schools, she just says that choice is good and the answer to failing public schools is to close down the bad ones, and pay great teachers heaps more money.

I’ll be delighted if Anne Tolley moves in this direction. I’ll also be very surprised.

The Herald reports:

Many 5-year-olds are starting school unable to count or complete the alphabet, despite years of pre-school education. …

Rosemary Vivien, head of Edendale School in Sandringham, Auckland, said the Ministry of Education had outlined general expectations of what children should know when they started school. These included being able to count to 20, knowing the alphabet, recognising colours and being able to write their own name.

More than half the children who started at Edendale, a decile 5 school, could not do that. …

Ms Vivien and Ms Procter both said the problem was not the result of poverty or families who spoke English only as a second language.

This is pretty disturbing stuff. Education should start in the home, not just once they turn five. The sad thing is that while some kids will quickly close the gap, at present a fair chunk go through school not meeting even basic literacy and numeracy standards. And this has major consequences for them as individuals, but also for our overall economy and our crime rate.

My niece turned five late last year and could proudly count to 100 and back – both in English and Maori.  I sort of assumed that counting to 100 was pretty standard for pre-school. Certainly counting to 20 should have occurred.

I have said many many times I would take money from tertiary education and stick it into pre-school or early childhood education. The cost of Labour’s bribes (now maintained by National) of interest free student loans is in the hundreds of millions and you could do so much by spending it on kids before they reach five so they don’t struggle for the rest of their lives.

The Dom Post reports:

Federation president Ernie Buutveld warned league tables would create a “blame and shame” culture, which could lead to schools being shunned and children feeling inadequate.

Principals wanted the performance data exempt from the OIA. The issue was a bottom line, he said. “This can only impact negatively on our children.”

A bottom line. That’s fighting talk.

The more the education unions demand that school assessment data be made more secret than SIS data, the more I want to see that data.

It is very sad that this is now the unions’ top priority in education – hiding assessment data from parents. I think it explains a lot of the problem we have in the education sector.

Trans-Tasman had a very witty peice on this on Thursday also:

Education Minister Anne Tolley has an intriguing battle on her hands – one which is going to make or break her as Minister, and possibly make or break the Govt. The battle over centralised reporting of school results, and the scare campaign over “league tables” has probably only just begun. The Principals Association, the Post Primary Teachers Association and the primary schools union, the NZEI, all came out bitterly against the proposals, as did the provisional wing of the teacher unions, the Labour Party.

The provisional wing of the teacher unions – that is so damn apt.

The Government should stay absolutely firm on this. Certainly I hope the teacher unions see sense, but if they don’t – then Labour and the teacher unions have just handed National a battleground issue which will be hugely popular. Those on the side of suppressing school information will be amazed at how out of step they are with most New Zealanders on this issue.

What is most disturbing is the profound contempt it shows for parents and the public. Yes a league table can be a dodgy statistic. But hello there are many dodgy statistics out there. The job of Government is not to suppress information because it thinks people are too stupid to understand its limitations. You explain it. You put it into context. You provide further information.

John Key is a nice man, who would rather everyone compromise and stay happy. He doesn’t go picking fights to make himself look good.

In a way, it is a pity. Labour and the teacher unions seem to be auditioning for the role of Mrs Thatcher’s National Union of Mineworkers with their threats of refusing to report information, and that suppression of assessment information is a bottom line.

If I was a political Machiavelli I could think of nothing better than a year long stand-off against the teacher unions, and making the next election a referendum on whether or not teacher unions or the democratically elected Government gets to run the school system.

It is an issue on which you are guaranteed the support of every media outlet in New Zealand – except the education reporter for Radio New Zealand. This suppression of assessment data is primarily aimed at stopping the media accessing it.

Idiot/Savant blogs on the bill promoted by Labour to supress school assessment information:

There are a number of problems with this. In addition to being “class-based” (that is, targeting information based on its content or type rather than the interests its release might prejudice), it also categorically forbids release. And that has never been part of our OIA regime. While the OIA allows information to be withheld if there are good reasons for doing so, it doesn’t make it mandatory, and an organisation can always just release information if they feel like it. This amendment would forbid them from doing that. It effectively recreates the Official Secrets Act specifically for schools. The “justification” for this – that the public might “misunderstand” or “misuse” the information – is decidedly authoritarian.

This is a nasty regression from Labour, and one which undermines a fundamental part of our freedom of information regime.

I made a similiar point yesterday – this proposed law would make school assessment data more secret than security and intelligence data. The Government has the discretion to release security and intelligence data, but Labour want school assessment data to be prohibited from ever being released.

Such a wonderful commitment to open government and accountabilty for the $6 billion we spends on schools.

NZPA reports:

Mr Mallard today suggested a change could be made to the Education Amendment Bill currently before a select committee , or a separate bill could be drafted.

“I see it as a really good way of unblocking a problem that we’ve got,” Mr Mallard said this morning.

Quality information was important, he said, but it did not all need to be made public.

He did not think individual school information needed to be published.

“At the moment privacy reasons means that individual children or individual teachers information can’t be made public but school information could be.

“I think if we restricted that that would mean only national information was published so that we could test the system.”

The school information would be available for the Education Ministry and Education Review Office.

“So if there were major anomalies of schools going off the rails educationally that information would be easily available.”

This is such a wonderful idea by Trevor, I think we should take it further. We spend $6 billion in schools yet the rationale is that only the Education Ministry and ERA need to be able to access information on individual schools.

So lets extend this to the entire Government. It is unfair that the media sometimes publish unhelpful stories about a Government agency based on information released under the OIA. This can lead to undermining confidence in that agency.

So using Labour’s logic, I propose that only national information for the entire Government be published in future. Only Treasury and Ministers need to know individual agencies information.

So if you ask under the OIA how many staff at your agency earn over $100,000 – then the only response will be “The Government in total employs 7,201 staff who earn over $100,000″ rather than listing it for each agency.

There is no need for us, according to Labour’s logic, to know the details of each agency. We can trust Treasury and the Government to take action if there is a problem.

There are other ways Labour’s new principle can be implemented. It is unfair that death rates in hospitals can be compared. This is unfair to larger hospitals that take on the more critical cases. So in future it will be illegal to publish information about deaths in individual hospitals. The Ministry of Health will collect this data and they will act on it if any hospital goes off the rails.

It also seems to me it is unfair that people can compare the levels of rates between different local authorities. A simplistic comparison is bad as different Councils provide different facilities. So again taking Labour’s principle forward, Councils will no longer reveal what their level of rates are. The Department of Internal Affairs will monitor Councils and let us know fi any go off the rails.

There are so many examples. It is also unfair to prison guards at a particular prison that their escape rate can be compared to other prisons. After all it does not take into account different security classifications.  To prevent the public from making an ill informed comparison on a league table, we will not publish individual prison escape levels.

Readers might like to post in the comments more examples of what should be removed from the OIA under Labour’s new principle that the publci are too stupid to know and compare, and that the important thing is the Government Departments have the information for their use.

UPDATE: Someone has emailed me a copy of Labour’s OIA Bill. It only allows schools to share information with the Ministry of Education and the ERO. This means that schools would not be able to give NCEA information to the NZQA!

Also Labour’s bill bans schools from voluntarily releasing their overall achievement data. It is a giant Orwellian step backwards and reminds us all that Labour is concerned about the teachers unions, and not parents or students. The bill says:

Despite any other provision of this Act, organisations including, but not limited to schools, the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office, must not publicly release school level assessment information.

This makes school level assessment information more secretive than security information held by the SIS. You see the SIS are allowed to decide what information they release. Labour’s bill would see the Government and schools lose any discretion over publishing assessment information.

National should run full page advertisements in every newspaper with copies of Labour’s bill, explaining how Labour wants to ban the publishing of school assessment information. I’m seriously – they should hit some donors up for $100K and it will knock Labour down a good 5% or so. I suppose there is no need when they are 20% ahead, but this is a huge blunder by Labour.

I’m appalled at the attitude from the principals’ union that they may not report results from national standard tests, because shock horror they might be made public.

Even worse Labour is advocating a law change, so that the public can be blocked from being able to obtain this information under the Oficial Information Act.

We (the taxpaying public) spend almost $6 billion a year on the school system. They are meant to be accountable to parents and the community/public. And instead they are demanding a law change to hide what their performance might be, backed by Labour.

I don’t care much one way or another about league tables.  Certainly the Government has better things to do than publish such things.

But there is a massive difference between whether or not the Government should publish something, and whether or not it should prevent members of the public from obtaining information on a school and publishing it in any form they like.

It is appalling arrogance to demand that such information be suppressed because you can’t trust the public to interpret it properly. That is the start of the slippery slope to an Orwellian country.

If someone wants to go to the trouble, they should be able to publish “league tables” on schools on as many criteria as they want.

One organisation could do a league table based on drug offences at school. Another could do a league table based on the level of “voluntary” fees. Another could do a league table based on suspensions for misconduct. And another could do a league table based on the average number of years experience of teachers. And shock horror someone might do a league table based on exam results. And hey someone else might do one based on exam results, but adjusted to take into account socio-economic factors in their home zone. And yet someone else might do a league table based on sporting success.

The answer is not less information, but more. If you don’t like a league table compiled by an organisation, then criticise it, or do your own one. If you think the media’s reporting of local results is sub-standard then blog about it.

But whatever you do, don’t support Labour’s plan to exempt schools from the Official Information Act to keep the teacher unions happy.

UPDATE: No Right Turn has already blogged on this also, and pleased to say he agrees that what Labour is proposing is wrong.

The headline in the Press is “Govt to fast-track school league tables“.

However reading on, it turns out the Government is not publishing any league tables – it just is not supressing information from the media.

Tolley said individual pupil achievement details probably would not go to the Ministry of Education, but each school’s performance would.

The Government could not stop the media from accessing the information and producing league tables, she said.

“We have a society that values freedom of information. Personally, I think the more information that’s out there the better,” Tolley said. …

“The best disinfectant is fresh air …”

What a refreshing attitude from a Minister. But no surprise the reaction:

Frances Nelson, the president of primary teachers’ union, the New Zealand Educational Institute, said there was strong resistance to league table”.

“When you get a league table it makes schools focus just on the things that are going to appear in the league table, and that’s what narrows the curriculum,” she said. “They are really disadvantageous to kids and we will continue to lobby against them.”

The institute wanted legislation to stop the information made public.

Of course it must be kept secret. Parents and prospective parents can not be trusted to have information on schools. That might then lead to them making a choice about what shcool to send their kids to, and choice is bad and evil. So bad and evil that we must legislate to supress information.

Chris Carter has attacked, well basically every high school on the North Shore. He claims:

“To be quite honest that’s the problem with the North Shore high schools. They’d all employed extra staff based on their foreign fee-paying students giving them that extra revenue, because … it’s the biggest concentration of high-decile high schools in one area in the country and they’re essentially in competition with each other for students.

“So they’d overextended themselves, parental donations were sliding, international student fees were falling – so somebody had to be blamed for the schools employing fancy ballet teachers, fancy swimming teachers, extra PE teachers, extra support for special needs.

How dare those schools employ extra support for students with special needs. Labour condemns such things.

Just as it was a bad idea for National’s Allan Peachey to get in a shouting match with Selwyn College, I am not sure Labour will see it as a good thing to have their Education Spokeperson trying to pick fights with every high school on the North Shore. Not the way to build bridges in opposition.

I had to laugh at this extract from the Dom Post:

The prospect of incompetent or dysfunctional boards being sacked has alarmed some education experts, …

I am sure it has. Shit if you start sacking for incompetence at the board level, think of the precedent it sets lower down!

To be fair it goes on to say they want to make sure there are enough qualified people to be Commissioners.

A reader sent me this article from the New Yorker:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material.

That sounds about right. You would learn as little as possible with the bad teachers – maybe half what you should, while the great teachers inspired you to go beyond the curriculum and learn for its own sake.

That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

This is very much in accordance with the NZ research recently referred to.

And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

I’d rather use that money to pay good teachers more.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

And not everyone can be a great teacher. But indeed we all know from our own experience that there are some people just not suited to be a teacher. So encouraging them out of teaching (by keeping their pay lower than their collegues) and replacing them even with average teachers will have a massive effect,

Today’s Herald Editorial looks at the recent report on student success:

The number of children in a school classroom is obviously important to the education each can receive but for many years now we have been led to believe it is the single most important element. Class sizes, or teacher-pupil ratios, have been the profession’s explanation for every deficiency discovered in the service it is providing. Reducing class sizes has been its suggested solution to every problem.

If I was cynical, I would look at the loop – NZEI/PPTA advocate for more teachers, more teachers = more NZEI/PPTA members = more money for NZEI/PPTA.

Governments have generally accepted the profession’s advice and the ratios have been reducing, though the teacher associations always want them lower. When the Herald invited the main political parties’ education speakers to summarise their policies in the recent election campaign, Labour’s minister Chris Carter, began: “I would continue to support teachers, as we are doing with lowering class sizes, by dealing with the issue of pay.”

National’s spokeswoman, Ann Tolley, made no such commitment and now that she is Education Minister she must be glad she did not. For the results, just published, of an important research project by an Auckland University professor of education, John Hattie, have challenged the notion that class size is the most important factor in a pupil’s progress.

The 15-year study, drawing on results of 50,000 items of research on pupils’ performance around the world, came to the unsurprising conclusion that the quality of a teacher’s interaction with pupils, particularly the “feedback” they received for their efforts, was most important.

So the answer is better teachers, not just more teachers. And that means better pay for the better teachers.

Pay for performance may always be too hard for national negotiations that would need to find agreed measures of excellence. But it would present little difficulty if left to school principals and their boards. Principals have to know which of their staff make the effort to interact well with pupils, which of them the pupils readily trust to ask for help and receive a useful response. Dr Hattie says the desired level of trust is very rare.

The new Government appears to have no interest in challenging teachers’ national pay negotiating system but it may have to if it wants to encourage and retain the best. At least it now knows that the quantity of teachers is much less important than their quality. Ms Tolley says the Hattie research will have a profound influence on schooling. Let us hope so.

I’d have the national “award” as a guidline for schools, but let each board and principal pay teachers what they determine they are worth. The best teachers should be on over $100,000 – without having to become departmental heads.

The SST reports on a “study of studies” on student achievement done by Professor John Hattie of Auckland University. It has been a 15 year study that merges results from 50,000 indiidual studies of 83 million pupils.

So what does it show:

… that the key to effective teaching is the quality of the feedback students get and their interaction with teachers.

Anne Tolley is welcoming it:

The research has been dubbed “teaching’s Holy Grail” by an influential UK education journal, the Times Educational Supplement. National’s new education minister, Anne Tolley, says it will have a “profound influence” on the future of schooling in New Zealand.

Hattie says:

Auckland University professor John Hattie, who authored the study, says some of the results fly in the face of National’s popular election promise to reduce class sizes. He believes extra money should instead be spent on boosting teacher salaries. “Class size has a pretty small effect… and I wonder why they would spend a penny on it.”

He also believes it is time to revisit the controversial idea of performance-related pay for teachers.

I am all in favour of higher pay for teachers, so long as there is proper performance pay. The top teachers should be earning six figure salaries. But none of this automatic pay scale nonsense.

Hattie used these studies to rank 138 aspects of schooling and found that overwhelmingly, student-teacher interaction at schools came out on top.

Number one is “self-reporting” when the student knows exactly how well they are doing and can explain this, as well as any gaps in their understanding, to their teacher.

Tactics such as letting students take turns to teach the class, and teachers doing post-mortems on their own lessons, are also key.

Heh I used to teach the maths class – even at intermediate school!

And teachers, Hattie says, should ask themselves, “how many of the kids in your classroom are prepared to say, in front of the class, `we need help’, `we don’t know what’s going on’ or `we need to have this retaught’?”

He says that sort of trust is too rare which is why he wants to work out a way of paying teachers extra for excellence, rather than experience.

“It’s a lot easier to throw money at smaller classes, more equipment, more funding, to worry about the curriculum, to worry about the exams. “It’s a hell of a lot harder to differentiate between good and bad teaching… I think we need to spend a lot more policies on worrying about this.”

Tolley says that although rewarding teachers for excellence is a “tricky issue” it needs to be on the table, particularly as Hattie is close to defining what makes an excellent teacher.

I think this research and its implications are terribly exciting.

Of course the PPTA is against:

Kate Gainsford, head of the secondary teachers’ union, defended teachers, saying they deserved praise for being in the classroom despite in many cases poor resources, pay and support.

She says teachers are already using many of the interactive methods. But she points out that to have time to interact with students, classes need to be kept smaller and that some now have more than 30 students, despite what schools’ teacher-student ratios claim.

“This is not rocket science. We know that relationships between students and teachers are very important. And we know how those relationships can be supported, and how they can be eroded.”

She emphasises that teachers need to be backed up by resources, policies and training.

Gainsford says it would be “extraordinarily problematic … on so many fronts” to work out an excellence-based pay formula. She would like to see the focus on supporting “all kids, in all classes, in all schools”, rather than on a sorting mechanism for teachers.

Why does there need to be a formula? Other workplaces do not have formulas. They have employers who agree on a pay rate with you, based on their judgement of your experience, ability and worth. This is not some untested concept, but the norm in most sectors.

I was very pleased but slightly concerned to see National announce an extra $2 billion over four years to improve our schools. But the concern disappeared when they made clear they had included the cost in their overall fiscal package.

Even better they have released their total fiscal policy paper, so one can see how all the promises can be paid. This is something Labour has not done despite all the resources of incumbency.

There were two education announcements today.

Labour announced it would borrow more than $200 million a year (once fully implemented) to give out cash to students. It will not result in one more student being educated. It is simply a cash hand out to students.

National announced it would spend $47 million a year on boosting literacy and numeracy in schools, because almost 1 in five kids are leaving school unable to read, write or count. There is no point in keeping kids at school until they are 18, if you have let them get past age eight without checking their numeracy and literacy.

It’s a pity the eight year olds don’t get to vote.

The funny (as in sad funny not ha ha funny) thing about Labour’s announcement is that at the PREU lockup, I turned to a journalist and said “There goes any chance of universal student allowances”. He agreed with me. It was inconceivable that after announcing a decade of deficits and $20 billion more debt, that the Government would be so reckless as to do such a thing. I guess we both under-estimated their willingness to fuck up the economy in order to retain power.

It goes without saying that technology will only grow as an important part of NZ life, and the NZ economy. Hence the standard of our education system in relation to ICT education is vital to us.

Now I missed it at the time, but the NZ Computer Society has had a panel of professionals spend a massive amount of time assessing 18 NCEA ICT-related Technology Achievement Standards, to see which which of them were most suitable in preparing for tertiary study and for end-user computing.

Their 119 page report is here. And for those who want the summary, the press release is here. They key paragraph:

NZCS Chief Executive Paul Matthews today said he was horrified to discover that not a single Technology Achievement Standard proposed for access to ICT and Computing met the set criteria. “Secondary School Computing education should be about preparing our young people for further ICT-related study and for computing in general” Matthews said today. “This report has found that New Zealand’s current ICT-related Technology Standards are failing terribly on both counts”.

The NZCS is the professional education and standards body in the ICT sector. So when they say 0 out of 18 NCEA standards meet the grade, you have a problem. TUANZ have also expressed their concern and their frustration at the lack of progress.

NZCS makes a number of recommendations:

1. Creates appropriate achievement standards to address the assessment vacuum that exists in the area of Computer Science at the secondary school level.
   
2. Recognizes that Computer Science is NOT a “technology”. Computer Science is about computation (numeracy), logic, and the study of algorithms and problem solving within a computational paradigm. It needs a syllabus which defines a coherent body of knowledge, relevant practices, and associated achievement standards.
3. Removes computing from the grasp of the technology curriculum and align it with subject areas that are more relevant to the various disciplines. For Computer Science, Mathematics is the logical choice. End-user computing fits best with the subject areas that use the tools.
4. Establishes a rationale for defining achievement level criteria. For example, in achievement standards which require production of a product, the sole criterion for achieving should be that the product works according to specification (bar minor deficiencies) – i.e. is fit for purpose. Merit criteria should require that the product works (as for achieved) and has desirable qualities (such as well-documented, efficient, easy to use, robust, maintainable, extendable, …) and excellence requires the previous criteria plus planning and other deliverables which relate to the particular practice (not necessarily Technology) that is being assessed.
5. Creates externally assessed Achievement standards which assess a common body of knowledge under exam conditions similar to those available in the Mathematics curriculum.
6. Re-moderates the technology achievement standards with a view to aligning the cognitive levels to the NQF level definitions.
7. Surveys technology, computing, and potential computing teachers to gain insight on their perceptions of the value, relevance, and effectiveness of the existing technology achievement standards with respect to their effect on teaching workload and morale, and student attitudes towards computing as a future career.
8. Surveys year 10 – 13 students (and their parents) across the country to determine what motivates them into choosing (or not choosing) computing as an area of study at tertiary level.

The next Minister of Education should be looking at these as a priority. Our skills shortage will only get worse if we don’t even made the grade with our own students.

The Government is looking to add an extra year of on-the-job training as a requirement for teacher trainees.

This looks to be a sensible reaction to the problems reported of many trainees not up to scratch.  The ERO found:

Almost half of beginner secondary teachers and a third of novice primary teachers did not reach the required level of competence.

That is an appalling situation. The move for an extra year training is a good step in the right direction – but I doubt it is a full solution by itself.