Kiwiblog

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.

Firstly the unions are back to squabbling with the Minister, and it is unsure how sifnificant the agreement trumpeted yesterday is. I have asked the Minister’s Office whether or not the actions planned to make it difficult for media to report league tables includes any changes to the Official Information Act.

So long as the OIA is unchanged, I don’t see how one can stop people compiling whatever tables they want. Hell, I might even help set up a wiki where parents can report the data for their local schools

So for me I don’t care too much what the Govt does, so long as they do not touch the OIA.

But on the subject of the education unions loathing for any sort of comparison of school achievement, I have to quote this wonderful note placed on Facebook yesterday by Mark Unsworth:

I totally support the teacher unions right to protest against being able to rank schools according to how well they perform. This cuts across the hunt for mediocrity which is so important to some in NZ .How dare some parents who want to know how good an education their children are getting.!! And as for the media having access to the information !Bloody hell what would Stalin have thought about that?

I would like to see this move taken further however.
I would start with Fair-Go, Target and the Consumers Institute and that dreadful Consumer magazine that tells us which products and companies and service providers are dodgy or unreliable. Who needs that useless information?

Magazines that reviewed and ( gasp) rated cars ,electronic goods, and new technology need to be ditched as does LINZ which tells us which suburbs are considered desirable. Imagine what would happen if that information got out? Wine, beer and restaurant reviews and rankings, what a waste of effort .Do we really need to know how good a wine is before we drink it? Doesn’t that take the fun away. The same goes for those silly websites travelers use to check out accommodation. A bed is a bed no matter whether its 1 or 5 star, you still fall asleep.
Next on the bonfire would be rankings of investment returns for Kiwisaver and other super schemes. People who can find out who is performing well poorly will only go and move their money and we don’t want that do we. Best we protect those who are not up to the job just like we do with teachers and schools.

NZ will obviously need to pull out of any agencies such as the UN ,WHO,OECD,ILO etc that rates how we compare with other countries on a wide range of indices. That material would be dangerous in the hands of taxpayers wouldn’t it ?

The media need to have a jolly good look at the way they report sport as well. Do we really need league tables for rugby, football netball etc? Surely it’s the taking part that matters. Who really cares about “Top 4 finishes” and semi-finals? It’s all too elitist .I can imagine the TAB may struggle paying out bets when all horses are deemed to have crossed the line together but they will cope .

Last and not least we need to ensure that some of the dangerous new Apps available on i-phones overseas are permanently banned .They allow phones to scan barcodes and customers can find out how one retailer’s price compares with others around the country. That would cause mayhem and only encourage consumer choice. Who needs that in NZ?

I have huge respect for the hard and often unrewarding job that teachers do. However the blinkered view that the teacher unions have that says neither individual teacher or school performance can be measured can only ever be detrimental to our future .They need to move into the real world .

Bravo.

A good editorial from The Press also.

The Dom Post reports:

After months of disputes, Education Minister Anne Tolley has struck a deal with primary school unions that will see them work together on its controversial national standards policy.

Under the agreement, the Government has confirmed it will make it as difficult as possible for the media to produce league tables that rank schools.

It’s good that the unions will not try and boycott the national standards (as they are important), but I’d like some more details on how exactly the Government plans to make it difficult for the media to produce league tables. I sure hope they are not talking a law change.

It follows a threat from hundreds of primary school principals to boycott the policy unless changes were made to limit public access to performance data.

The peace deal with NZEI, the Principals Federation and the School Trustees Association follows months of disagreements between the groups over the introduction of the policy, which will see pupils from years 1 to 8 assessed in numeracy and literacy against national academic standards from next year.

Mrs Tolley told The Dominion Post the deal was a “a momentous occasion”.

“I can’t stress enough that it took my breath away that we have all for the first time sat round the table and said, ‘Yes, we are going to make this work together.’ That is fantastic.”

She said she told the groups she was prepared to work with them to stop the use of league tables. “We want to make it as difficult for you [media] as possible. It will be too hard and too much work and not worth it in the end. There are a few ideas we will discuss as to how we can do that.”

I’m fascinated as to what these ideas might be, because I can’t see what will stop media requesting achievement info for a school under the OIA, and then using that to compile a league table – should they so wish. Personally league tables have limited value and are overly simplistic, but I don’t believe you stop the media from publishing them, if they decide to.

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.

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.