Kiwiblog

Narelle Henson at Stuff reports:

Frustrated bosses say they can’t find suitable workers for even the most basic of labouring jobs despite the high unemployment rate, as they deal with people who turn up drunk if they come to work at all. …

But despite the many jobless, employers say continual absenteeism, substance abuse and poor work ethic appear to be making a lot of them unemployable.

Dave Connell, vice-president of the New Zealand Contractors Federation and managing director of Connell Construction, who is juggling operations in the Waikato and for the Christchurch rebuild, said 100 people responded to a Trade Me job advertisement for a junior construction role, but not one was suitable to hire.

“We are letting seven people go for every one we keep,” he said.

“I have had some people last half a day and walk off the job with $800 worth of [work] gear on them; one guy had six sick days in two weeks, and we have had issues with physicality too.”

Mr Connell said he was desperate to fill positions, but could not find anyone with the right attitude.

It will take many years to fix these problems.

The first is we need to stop people leaving school with inadequate literacy and numeracy skills.

The second is we need to install a work ethic in people from their teenage years. That is why I don’t support a minimum wage for under 18s, and why I support welfare reform.

Eric Crampton has also been analysing the national standards data. he finds:

Decile matters greatly. All else equal, a school one decile higher has about a four percentage point increase in pass rates. But, decile matters at a decreasing rate: moving from Decile 2 to Decile 3 correlates with a 3.3 percentage point increase in maths pass rates while moving from Decile 8 to Decile 9 only improves pass rates by one percentage point.

Class size matters: schools with more students per teacher have higher pass rates. I suspect reverse causation here: for a fixed budget, those schools that are able to run larger classes are likely those that have fewer discipline problems and so are able to put those resources to other uses.

Ethnicity matters. A standard deviation increase in the proportion of Maori students reduces aggregate pass rates by 1.3 percentage points in reading and 2.2 percentage points in math. Similar trends exist for Pacific Island student ratios. I’d be pretty cautious in interpreting this one: if you run things decile-by-decile, the effects mostly disappear. The biggest negative effect seems to hold in high decile schools, but by the time you get to Decile 10 schools, the median school has only 5.9% Maori students. Results then may be a bit sensitive to a few outliers on the right hand side. Like Luis, I’ll refrain from doing much more until the official results come out.

Single sex schools seem to do well; boarding schools seem to do poorly.

All interesting data.

There are decile 1 schools providing pass rates twenty percentage points or more above what we’d expect, given their characteristics (that’s the 0.2 number on the y-axis); there is one decile ten school providing pass rates more than twenty percentage points below what we would expect given its characteristics. Differences in school performance simply do not come down only to decile. Decile’s the most important thing. But differences in performance among schools of the same decile by definition have to be about something other than decile. I can’t tell from this data whether it’s differences in stat-juking, differences in unobserved characteristics of entering students, differences in school pedagogy, or something else. But there’s something here that bears explaining. 

And this is the potential value. Identify the schools doing best and worst, and try to emulate them and help them respectively.

Somehow the left think this is a bad thing!

Teacher unions fear assessment data being released because they worry about league tables published by media. And look I agree a league table which takes account of no control factors is not very helpful.

But what has excited me about the data being released, is what some real data experts can do with it (talking of data experts the Herald editorial moaned about “ A high priesthood of data analysis bemoans news media interest” which has caused me to label Keith Ng as Cardinal Keith!). An example is Luis Apiolaza at Quantum Forest. First he did the standard average proportion of students meeting the reading standard at each decile.

So you look at that, and think wow it is all about decile. But he then looks at the variance in each decile, not just the average.

The box shows the middle 50% for each decile, and the line in 1.5 times that interquartle range. What this shows is that the lower decile schools may have a lower average, they have much more variability. This is good, because it dispels some of the myth that all low decile schools have few students meet the national standard.

What I think this data may allow, is to then look at that huge variance in decile 1 to 3 schools, and identify the factors that have some schools higher than others. Eric Crampton has tweeted he has started some analysis and ethnicity is a big factor.

Of course this is all just a snapshot of data, and the lack of moderation means you take care with it (but does not make the data useless by any means). Th real value will be over time, as we get trend information.

I suspect there is going to be lot of sites doing their own analysis of the data.

The Herald reports:

The majority of people polled think schools should publicly release their national standards performance data.

Results from a Herald-Digipoll survey showed 60.3 per cent of people agreed that schools should be forced to release the information.

The survey showed that people aged 18-39 years old were overwhelmingly supportive of the idea, with 70.4 per cent wanting data released.

While the last time I looked Labour’s policy was to amend the Official Information Act so educational data is suppressed and not made publicly accessible.

The Herald on Sunday reports:

Primary schools have disclosed controversial data about pupil achievement, with the surprise revelation that children in bigger classes and bigger schools get better grades.

The Herald on Sunday has conducted a comprehensive survey of schools’ national standards results, before the Ministry of Education publishes them this week.

At schools with fewer pupils for each teacher, around 70 per cent of children are achieving national standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. But at schools with more pupils for each teacher – in effect, bigger classes – the pass rates rise to about 80 per cent.

What would be interesting is to have the results broken down by decile and size. As low decile schools get more funding, they may have a smaller class size. That is only if they spend it on more teachers and not operational costs.

But regardless it backs my view that the impact of smaller class sizes is minimal, unless it is a massive difference. In other words a size of 15 will make a big difference compared to 30, but a class of 25 compared to a class of 27 will not.

It would have been nice of the HoS has told us their definitions of smaller and larger class sizes, so the calculation can be checked. There isn’t enough info in the story to verify it.

First the criticism by the NZEI:

So, what will National Standards league tables actually tell you?  Not much.  In fact, they will be very misleading if you are using them to judge school effectiveness.

They won’t tell you the level of improvement of children at a school, nor how engaged or happy individual children are, whether the school is meeting the individual children’s needs and whether the teachers are inspiring them.

Actually they will, eventually. Sure the first year is static data, but what I will find fascinating is the change over time. As for the other stuff, yes national standards data is only one piece of data. The answer is to supply more data, not less.

John Hartevelt who was the project manager for the project responds:

Many people told us not to publish the information you see on this site.

They fought to stop us. Some sent us bills for the privilege of their school’s data. Others buried the figures we asked for in complex matrices and pages of indecipherable bumph.

Well done on Fairfax for persevering.

Anyone who read the National Standards results as a proxy for quality would be quite foolish. We wouldn’t do that and we don’t suggest you do, either. For starters, they are not moderated, so one school’s “well below” may be another’s “at” or “above”. There is just no way of knowing – yet – exactly how the standards have been applied across schools.

But even if they were moderated, the standards alone could not tell you everything about how a school is doing by its pupils. As many of the experts we canvassed for this project have noted, quality is most evident in what a school does to push its pupils up, not in how well they do at attracting the brainiest, most-privileged kids in the first place.

Absolutely.

Our data handling processes have been checked by independent experts. Every school page includes decile, roll and funding statistics and a link to the school’s latest Education Review Office report. We have reported in detail across the country on a range of schools to help show that there is more to any of them than the numbers you see on this site. And we have commissioned a range of views on National Standards to debate the issue in their own words.

The link to the ERO reports is useful.

My old school is Island Bay School. I lived near St Francis De Sales and the local Intermediate was South Wellington.

Island Bay is decile 10 (which surprises me), St Francis decile 9 South Wellington decile 7. A comparison of the three is here. A very easy to comprehend format.

Hekia Parata has announced:

Education Minister Hekia Parata says National Standards data reported for the first time has set a baseline of Years 1-8 learner achievement.

The data shows that 76 per cent reached or exceeded the national standard for reading, 72 per cent of learners for mathematics, and 68 per cent for writing. 

“Of particular interest is the consistency of the achievement trends in writing, reading, mathematics by ethnicity and gender with other system ‘health check’ studies such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).

“So although we are only in the early stages it is exciting that this first set of data is consistent with other international and national information, and that a significant number of children are reaching or exceeding the National Standard in each of the three areas.

“I want to acknowledge and thank parents, teachers, principals, boards for all that they do that makes this possible.”

What this implies is that most schools are behaving responsibly and moderating consistently against the national standards. What will be great is we can now monitor over time what proportion of students are achieving the national standard for numeracy and literacy for their age.

The demographic breakdown for at or above the national standard for maths is:

• Boys 72%
• Girls 73%
• Maori 63%
• Pasifika 57%

For reading:

• Boys 72%
• Girls 80%
• Maori 65%
• Pasifika 58%

For writing:

• Boys 61%
• Girls 75%
• Maori 58%
• Pasifika 54%

The deficit between boys and girls when it comes to reading and writing remains concerning.

It would be interesting to have data on Asian students also.

That data on individual schools will be out next week. It will be interesting, but I won’t be reading too much into it. The trend information from schools is what I think will be more important. So long as the national standards do not get scrapped by a Labour/Green Government, we will very clearly see which schools are improving over time, and which ones are not.

Nanaia Mahuta blogged:

I asked a question in the House yesterday on the Government’s quest to embed National Standards based on ‘ropey’ data. I received criticism that Labour’s position on National Standards and League Tables was sounding fuzzy. A prod and a poke led to this post from that criticism.

Just so I am clear from the outset, Labour does not support National Standards and League Tables.

I asked in the comments:

Nanaia – you’ve said Labour does not support league tables. Does that mean Labour supports an amendment to the Official Information Act to prevent the public and media from being able to access school assessment data? Because unless you are not prepared to change the law, I’m not sure your opposition will have any impact.

Then Bill Courtney said:

First of all, a change to the Official Information Act could be one way of keeping the data from public view. This is what Finland does, as Finland has no form of national testing or school ranking lists. In fact, they have abolished the equivalent of ERO and school inspection systems simply do not exist. In simple terms, they don’t need them, as all their schools are excellent! But I doubt that any NZ government would be enlightened enough – unfortunately – to follow the Finnish model .

Now Courtney does not speak for Labour, but he is a prominent opponent of national standards, is often quoted by the education unions and recently a spokesperson for the John Minto led Quality Public Education Coaliton.

So it is good to realise what Courtney actually wants. Parents to have no information at all. No national standards, no NCEA data, no educational data, no ERO reports, no ER) – in fact no school inspections at all.

The Herald editorial:

According to Waikato University education professor Martin Thrupp, schools will use tricks to portray themselves in the best possible light in National Standards results that will be published next month. He is probably right. The opportunity for varnishing has been apparent since the Government decided late in the piece to allow schools to set their own goals and measure their pupils against them. That was a major mistake which has resulted in information from primary and intermediate schools that the Education Minister describes as “variable” and the Prime Minister as “ropey”. It is not, however, as Professor Thrupp believes, a reason to withhold the data.

Most parents want their children in schools where they have the best chance of achieving well. Whatever its flaws, the information to be provided on the Government’s Education Counts website will be keenly read and of some use. The site will not rank schools in league-table fashion, but will show achievement data in regions and how individual schools are performing against National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics in each region and nationally.

I’ve said this before – the answer to poor data, is better data – not some sort of totalitarian supression of public information.

Almost all data has flaws. GDP data is often revised in later quarters. Does that mean we should ban GDP data?

GDP is measured slightly differently by other countries. Should league tables of GDP growth be banned?

Opinion polls can have different methodologies. Should all polls be banned?

Unemployment data is based on a survey of 30,000 households and has a some quality issues with it. Let’s ban releasing unemployment data shall we?

NCEA results are not consistent data, due to internal assessment. Some say NCEA data should also be supressed by the state.

I’ve highlighted how some universities rort their PBRF data. But the answer to that was improving the PBRF data, not banning publication of the information.

Let us not treat parents as moronic simpletons who can not be trusted to make decisions about their children’s education. Parents, like all of us, will take the national standards data as one of many inputs into their decision.

Stuff reports:

Schools have been told to disregard the advice of a primary teachers’ union and instead release controversial National Standards performance information.

Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem has written to all schools after some brushed off requests for the data with a pro-forma response provided by the New Zealand Educational Institute.

Dame Beverley said the advice NZEI had offered “conflicted” with that provided by the New Zealand School Trustees Association.

“In my view boards of trustees are entitled to rely on the advice conveyed by the NZSTA. However, boards that rely on the advice conveyed by the NZEI risk an adverse finding being made against them by an Ombudsman under the [law],” she said.

Schools that had acted, or were considering acting, “in accordance with the NZEI advice” should reconsider, she said.

Those that continued to refuse or extend release of information would face an investigation, which “may find that a board has acted unreasonably or contrary to the law”.

Schools are publicly funded and must obey the law around public entities – simple.

Lance Wiggs blogs:

A group of academics signed off on a letter against school league tables. The stated logic may work in an academic research setting but is inappropriate to apply to the real world. We should instead publish the measurements, improve the measurements and their context over time and, most importantly, focus energy and resources on understanding the issues and helping the schools at the bottom of the league.

Exactly. If data is not perfect, them people with a genuine interest in giving parents information and choice will focus on how to improve the data, not call for it to be suppressed.

Some of the more detailed responses:

The argument is that schools have high variability between each other and across years. It’s a combination of measurement error based on inconsistent and low samples and the national standards only measuring numeracy and literacy and not more holistic skills.

However to improve something we first need to measure it, and if we can’t measure it accurately then an approximation will do. In business that means using surveys of customers that have clear sampling bias, reacting more to customers who complain and even believing what we read in the papers. We know all of these sources are incomplete and have bias, but we can account for it somewhat, and are much improved by using the input. The online advertising industry is a lovely example, using a system for measurement that is clearly wrong to measure traffic, but while it is wrong, it is wrong for everyone, and it’s only the starting point for a conversation.

It’s far easier to start a conversation about the quality of a school when confronted with a combination of the socieoeconomic data about the catchment area and the National Standards results over time.

Exactly. Parents are not morons. Few are going to just look at a league table and say we’re going to decide solely on that. Information on how schools are doing with national standards will be just one of many inputs.

I understand the natural academic reluctance to never release data that is potentially wrong, and I see that in business sometimes where companies do not want to release an imperfect product. But while they are polishing the bezels yet again competitors are releasing their inferior but higher selling versions. Similarly we should release the data, and call on the power of academics, hundreds of thousands of parents and even students to provide both sunlight as a disinfectant and the right context.

The answer to bad data is good data, not suppressing all data.

While even a small minority, and this is not a small minority, wants access to our data, New Zealand has a policy and obligation to provide it. Arguing against releasing data is quite remarkable for a group of academics. It should be easier to understand school performance than to read about individual student’s private lives on Facebook.

Most academics support the Official Information Act as a wonderful thing. Educational academics seem to regard it as a bad thing.

John Hartevelt at Stuff reports:

The Government appears set on publishing primary school performance data, criticised by a teacher union as “junk information”.

Education Minister Hekia Parata yesterday said she would consider setting up a website similar to the MySchool resource that operates in Australia.

The Australian example “deals with a number of the concerns that have been rumoured” about the risks of league tables, Ms Parata said.

Comparisons between schools on MySchool were only between “statistically similar schools,” giving a fairer picture of performance.

“I think that parents vest a lot of trust in the principals and teachers of the education sector – and so they should – and that trust should be returned by letting parents know accurate information about what’s happening,” she said.

I think it is far better to have a database which allows parents to do “smart” comparisons, such as between schools with the same decile rankings, rather than just leave it to the media to compile their own tables.

The solution to bad data is good data – not banning the publication of data.

Dalefield School in Carterton has been one of the high profile schools agitating against National Standards. They have claimed:

Dalefield School principal Kevin Jephson said the standards would reward only those pupils “who arrive at school from extremely advantaged backgrounds such as inherited intelligence, emotional security, financial prospects and pro-active parenting”.

And in today’s Wairarapa News we read:

A Wairarapa school will come under special attention from the Ministry of Education after most of its students failed the National Standards benchmark last year.

But Dalefield School principal Kevin Jephson, who voluntarily went public about his school’s results, said the standards were invalid and inappropriate for his school.

Only 11 per cent of Dalefield’s students met the reading standard, 2 per cent the writing standard and 7 per cent the mathematics standard, he said.

One can understand why the principal has been so much against national standards.

Mr Jephson said the primary school sector had known all along the achievement components for National Standards were unrealistic for most primary schoolchildren.

Really? Well later on we read …

But Gail Marshall, principal of Solway Primary School in Masterton, said she had utmost faith in National Standards as a workable system.

The standards were trialled at Solway ahead of being rolled out nationwide.

The 2011 assessment at Solway found 91 per cent of Years 4 to 6 pupils met the reading standard, 87 per cent the writing standard and 82 per cent the mathematics standard.

“What I like about the standards is that it shows very clearly what the kids need, and we can target that. This year we’ll be concentrating on writing and maths and we can target toward that end.”

What an excellent attitude.

Now some of you might be wondering, like me, well Dalefield may be a decile 1 school and Solway a decile 10 school. So I checked.

Dalefield is decile 5 and Solway decile 6. Not a huge difference. Certainly not enough to explain why Solway is a magnitude higher in terms of the national standard.

Having said that, I would not rush to judge Dalefield. Maybe there is some genetic quirk that means all their pupils turned up to their school with inferior skills to those as Solway. Hence I would wait a year or two and see how each school does in lifting achievement over time.

If only 10% of first years at Dalefield can meet the national standard, yet by year six it is say 60%, then that is arguably a better result than a school where say 80% of first years are at the national standard, and they stay at 80% by year six.

The solution to concerns about bad comparisons or league tables, is to have good data easily accessible, such as in Australia. Let parents see how kids at a school do over time, let parents see how schools compare within the same decile etc.

But I think it is a good thing that parents of Dalefield students now know 90% of their kids are not at the national standard. It allows them to have a conversation with the school about how they plan to lift their improvement.

UPDATE: This is interesting. In comparing the two schools, Dalefield’s school roll is 16% Maori. Solway’s is 32% Maori. Solway is the one which has an 80% to 90% achievement rate, compared to under 10% for Dalefield. So that’s one excuse Dalefield can’t use.

Victoria Robinson at Stuff reports:

Schools might withhold student achievement statistics if the government does not prevent national standards information being used to create league tables, the New Zealand Education Institute says.

All schools must submit their student achievement data based on national standards to the Education Ministry by May 31.

But the NZEI said yesterday some schools might refuse to do so if the government did not prevent the information being used for league tables comparing each schools’ academic achievement.

The Government can not prevent media from seeking school assessment data and reporting it. It’s called living in a free society. The only way this could be prevented was to amend the Official Information Act to exclude school assessment data.

Anyway I have a solution for any school that refuses to submit their student achievement data. No parent should be forced to attend a school which won’t tell parents how well the school is doing, so I’d remove all zoning protection for any school that with-holds assessment data.

This would allow parents to vote with their feet. Any child at that school would automatically be guaranteed entrance into any neighbouring school, if the parents wish to have their children at a school that doesn’t suppress achievement data.

The Dom Post editorial:

Among those most depressed on election night were probably many teachers, their trade unions, and school principals.

I’m not so sure about “many” teachers. Most teachers don’t give a stuff about politics and just want to get on with teaching. It is the teacher politicians who devote most of their energy to educational politics that would have been depressed, but they are a minority of teachers.

The first John Key-led government made a priority of ensuring children can read and write – the foundation for all later learning – and parents getting school reports in plain English.

Known by its shorthand name, national standards, the policy was steadfastly adhered to by Mr Key, who consulted educational experts before the 2008 election on what would make the most difference to the one in five children who leave school illiterate and innumerate.

The policy was equally steadfastly opposed by the primary teachers’ union and the Principals’ Federation, chiefly on ideological grounds.

Their biggest fear is that once data on how schools are doing under national standards is reported to the Education Ministry, it will be available to the whole community, which will learn which of the schools they fund from their taxes perform best.

Outraegous. I’m waiting for Labour to announce a policy that they will ban league tables not only for schools, but also for hospitals. It is appalling that Tony Ryall publishes which DHBs have the quickest times for A&E waiting times and cancer radiation treatment. Not all DHBs have the same sort of patients, and Ryall’s hospital league tables should be banned as they are unfair to the hospitals not at the top.

But it is criminal that up to 20 per cent of students leave school unable to read, write and do arithmetic.

Former Labour Party president and new Howard League for Penal Reform chief executive Mike Williams gets it: he is desperate to find literacy teachers willing to help prison inmates. Why would that be necessary if current education policy works as well as teachers claim? After all, those jailbirds went to school somewhere.

The NZ educational system works very well for the average student. However it works very badly for the bottom 20% and not that great for the top 10%.

If children who are failing can be helped to succeed by a different prescription – think kura kaupapa or Rudolf Steiner, for example – the trial is worth conducting to see what can be learned from it.

Absolutely. A great win for ACT and for New Zealand.

All the groups which campaigned against national standards are against charter schools which would be exempt from national standards.

The teacher unions insisted national standards should be trialled before implementation, yet are furiously against charter schools being trialled.

Are they worried the trial might be a raging success?

First John Pagani writes a post on national standards I agree with, and now Rob Salmond does a post on assessment data which I also largely agree with.  Rob blogs:

The Los Angeles Times has produced a detailed set of estimates about how much value each teacher in Los Angeles adds to their classroom. That is hugely valuable information. New Zealand’s education establishment should be doing something similar.

I blogged last year on the remarkable data published by the LA Times. It basically measures the effectiveness of individual teachers.

Why should we follow the Times’ lead? Because it helps us to reward great teachers and provide remedial support for teachers in difficulty. And because it allows us to diagnose, early, easily, and with reasonable precision, what is going wrong when a school is performing badly. Is it one or two bad teachers? A bad english department? Poor school-wide leadership? Or is the issue in the community itself, a problem at home rather than in the classroom? The data can answer that crucial question better than a big round of finger-pointing in front of an inspector from ERO.

We can do all kinds of helpful things with this information. If one school has a dysfunctional maths department and there is a great maths teacher at another school, the government can fund the Board of Trustees to pay generous incentives to convince the great teacher to take on the troubled department as HoD. Same thing for giving great teachers powerful incentives to teach at generally underperforming schools.

Absolutely agree.

It is true that there are already multiple ways to assess teachers in New Zealand. There is teacher registration. There are periodic assessments against professional standards. In some situations, there are Teacher’s Council investigations. There is ERO. Those are all good things to have, and this data-driven assessment should be used to extend those assessment regimes, not to replace them. The data based assessment does add real value, however, both as a nationwide diagnostic tool for educators and administrators and as an individual assessment tool for rewarding great teachers and helping others improve.

True. But with teacher unions so against even allowing data on schools to be collated and analysed, I can only imagine how far they would go to stop what Rob proposes.

Who should find out the results? Well, the teachers for a start. They need to know how they are doing. And their local Board of Trustees. And the government folk should know, too. They are collectively charged with improving the educational outcomes for New Zealand’s tragically long “education tail.” Once they know how their teaching resources are distributed, they can better shuffle them around to make the system more effective.

Which is of course what the Government is trying to do with national standards, as well as give parents better information.

Parents should probably get some information about how their kid’s school does compared to other schools with similar student demographics. That is a valuable accountability mechanism for Principals, who get paid good money to be accountable to their local communities. But unfiltered league tables of area schools do more harm than good, presenting an apples to oranges comparison as if it were apples to apples.

The answer to bad league tables is good league tables. Not banning league tables.

Parents should also not get access to individual teacher rankings. Here I disagree with the Times. Why? Because it is little more than a recipe for school administrators to be drowned in a tide of the pushiest, over-caffeinated parents demanding that Little Johnny should move over to that excellent Mrs Paki’s home room. Now! We don’t get to see the latest performance review of the cop that pulled us over, or the nurse in the hospital ward, or the customs agent at the border. And rightly so. Teachers are no different.

I’m okay with parents not seeing results of individual teachers, so long as School Boards and the Government does.

Rob also says in his comments:

Secondary teachers with a BA and a teaching diploma start at $47k and can earn up to $71k at current scales, even without any of the additional salary Units under the control of Boards of Trustees. The top of their base salary scale is more pay than 90% of New Zealand adults recieve, according to IRD data. I think **great teachers** should receive substantially more compensation than this, but I do not think **all teachers** should get a big raise.

Again I agree. I’d love School Boards and Principals to have the ability to have performance pay.

A 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.

A reader has pointed out something I missed in Labour’s announcement last week:

“Labour will give schools a choice. We believe that lifting education achievements is best left to the experts in partnership with parents, and our plan allows that to happen.

“But for any school community that genuinely supports „national standards. and believes it provides the best way to get results for their students we will not bully them into submission.

So some schools will use national standards and some will use the standards against the national curriculum. This should ensure it is impossible to get any meaningful data to compare schools with. The union will be happy.

I blogged yesterday on how Labour’s policy appears to be keep National Standards, but rename them and don’t give the Government the data. I suspect their policy has not matched their rhetoric as they realise there are so many parents who really appreciate getting a plain language assessment of whether their child is achieving to the level needed to have adequate literacy and numeracy.

A reader has made a useful observation:

Mallard’s big attack has been on moderation. How do you know that school A is judging a child against say the Year 1 Nat Std in the same way as school B is judging a child against the Year 1 Nat Std.

If you accept that is a valid criticism (and Moroney has continued to run it) then Labour does nothing about it.

Labour has said they will “Determine the New Zealand Curriculum level a child is achieving.” But how do they know that two schools will make the same call without moderation. You’ll have to train and trust teachers – as National has suggested we do.

The Union’s support of Labour’s policy only shows that they don’t actually care about the issue of moderation – they just care who is fronting the policy.

So this confirms the moderation argument was always a red herring.

There is a National Standard in reading, writing and maths for each year – Years 1-8.

There are 8 curriculum levels covering children from ages 5 through to the end of high school.

That means there are approximately 4 curriculum levels covering children from Years 1-8.

It means the information is going to be meaningless. If you have a 5 year old child they will be judged against the curriculum level 1. They’ll continue to be judged against that when they’re ages 6 and 7 basically. That means for 2-3 years you’ll get bugger all meaningful information because you are being assessed against the same standard for 2-3 years.

So its national standards lite, with less meaningful standards. What a great triumph for parents and pupils.

Labour seem to almost be embarrassed by the policy. Only two Labour MPs have tweeted about it.  Their website has just a single page on it, there is no post on Red Alert about it and no questions in the House on national standards.

Sue Moroney announced for Labour:

Labour will require schools to use recognised assessment tools and teacher judgement to:

1. Determine the New Zealand Curriculum level a child is achieving.

Sounds like saying will determine how a child is doing against a national standard.

2. Show a child’s rate of progress between reports over the course of a year.

Sounds like the current requirement to report to parents against a national standard

3. Identify children not achieving within the curriculum level appropriate to their year at school.

Oh my God, that’s labelling them failures.

4. Decide and report the next learning steps.

5. Report this information in plain language to parents at least twice a year.

Wow almost identical to the current requirement to report progress against a national standard for their year twice a year to parents.

So what is the major difference between Labour and National’s policies?

Basically it is just that Labour will not have schools send their assessment data into the Government, hence preventing the media from being able to report on the number of students at a school who are meeting the national standard. That way those evil league tables are prevented.

And that is what this whole fuss has always been about. Opponents of national standards have been intellectually dishonest because the unions have always made clear that if the Government changed the law to remove school assessment data from the Official Information Act, then opposition to national standards would cease.

So Labour’s policy is effectively to keep national standards but to not have the Government have any idea of how well a school is doing, in case that information got made public. God forbid prospective parents know how well a school is doing.

The NZ Herald reports:

Protests by hundreds of schools against national standards in reading, writing and maths have been called off.

Schools are required to report on students’ learning in relation to national standards, however, many schools have refused to include the standards in their charters this year.

They faced statutory intervention if they did not.

Yesterday, the Boards Taking Action Coalition (BTAC) recommended schools who had opposed including national standards in their charter alter it to include them, but make it clear the school was forced into it, BTAC spokesman Perry Rush said.

I suspect the reason they have done this, is they realise Trevor Mallard is not going to become Minister of Education in 11 weeks time. They were hoping they could outlast Anne Tolley, but they failed.

It has been such a fuss about nothing. The national standards are a minor but useful additional reporting requirement. Schools keep all their current assessment tools. All that is required of them is to moderate those against the national standard framework and include that extra data in school reports, and provide it to the Government so the government has some comparable data.

Whale Oil blogged how media uncritically reported an NZEI media release as news, including this line:

3News has the head­line: NZEI begins inde­pen­dent assess­ment of National Stan­dards [empha­sis mine]

And the release says:

A teacher union is fund­ing inde­pen­dent research into the impact of the new National Stan­dards in schools. …

“Given the absence of a trial of National Stan­dards and the deep con­cerns the pro­fes­sion and school com­mu­ni­ties have, NZEI has decided to fund this research in a bid to get robust evi­dence about the impact of National Stan­dards on teach­ing and learn­ing,” he said.

The project is being run through the Wilf Mal­colm Insti­tute for Edu­ca­tional Research at the Uni­ver­sity of Waikato and is headed by Prof Mar­tin Thrupp.

Both Whale and I have been blessed with the psychic ability of Deb Webber and Ken Ring and we can predict that this research will conclude that national standards are a disaster and have a hugely detrimental impact on teaching and learning.

Well actually we can’t predict the future. Instead Whale just used Google:

Hmmm… I won­der if this is the same “inde­pen­dent Mar­tin Thrupp that has railed against national stan­dards in March 2010, and is it the same Mar­tin Thrupp who is very active on the national Stan­dards protest site, includ­ing this blog post about how to get trac­tion in the media against National Stan­dards and the same mar­tin Thrupp who sent an email of sup­port to the NZPF for their action against National Stan­dards?

I’m now awaiting the Government of Libya to announce they have appointed independent human rights expert Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi to lead independent research into whether the Government of Libya has breached any human rights.

A reader writes:

This site is absolutely brilliant.  As parents of four children, this is exactly the kind of information that my wife and I want so that we can make informed choices about where to send our children.  It allows you to compare your school (or any school) to statistically similar schools or to other local schools.

Why can’t we have something like this here?  And apart from protecting their collective backside, what could NZ teachers possibly have against this information?

http://www.myschool.edu.au/

It is a great site. National should pledge to create such a site in its second term.