Friday, 12 March 2010
WHAKATANE school principals are united in their opposition to the Government’s national standards reporting regime for primary and intermediate pupils.
Whakatane Principals Association president Raymond Hodgson said in his eight-year involvement with the district’s principals he had never seen an issue provoking such a united response.
“I have never experienced such a collective outcry from this group against any piece of Government legislation,” said Mr Hodgson, the principal at Matata Public School.
His colleagues were “not a particularly militant bunch” but the long-term implications of national standards were so significant that they were being taken “very seriously”.
Led by East Coast MP and education minister Anne Tolley, the Government wants to regularly test children from year 1 to 8 in reading, writing and maths to measure problem areas and learning strengths, and to track progress against a national benchmark.
The desired result is for teachers to be alerted to problems and for intervention to occur more quickly.
Mr Hodgson said Whakatane principals believed adopting the standards in their current form, and without reassurances from Mrs Tolley, could harm children’s education.
Until their concerns were dealt with, they would continue to object strongly to the introduction of national standards in its current form.
Rex Wilson, the association’s deputy president and principal of Allandale School, said he believed in measuring how successfully his pupils learned to read, write and perform arithmetic, but not in the new standards in their present form.
He said unintended adverse outcomes could swamp the benefits national standards set out to achieve.
One risk was the publication of league tables reporting how many students were above, at, below or well below the national level for their age in each school.
“The suggestion is that parents will be able to choose the best school using this information.”
Mr Wilson said schools already measured pupils’ progress regularly and, at Allandale, this information indicated dramatic improvement in achievement levels.
“The essential thing is that we are comparing ourselves with ourselves - we are constantly seeking to improve our performance, much like an athlete attempting to improve their running times.
“What we don’t need to do is to compare our data with the school down the road,” he said.
“This will add nothing to the process, as the school down the road has children who are different from ours.”
Gene pools differed, children came from different home backgrounds, the rate at which they developed was different, as were their interests, strengths and weaknesses.
“To suggest that a parent can compare data from one school with the school down the road and make a judgement about how effective either school is, is quite wrong,” Mr Wilson said.
It was the difference schools made to the students they taught that mattered and there were “simply too many variables to be able to compare one school with another using national standards data alone”.
Mr Wilson said no matter how good some schools taught, they would be unable to measure up to neighbouring schools where children were drawn from higher socio-economic areas.
“My teachers are fantastic but across New Zealand high-decile schools will always come out on top.”
He said four university academics - professors John Hattie, Martin Thrupp and Terry Crooks, and emeritus professor Lester Flockton - wrote to Mrs Tolley late last year warning that flaws in the new system were so serious that full implementation over the next three years was unlikely to succeed.
“It will not achieve intended goals and is likely to lead to dangerous side effects,” they said.
The repeated labelling of young children as failures would be self-fulfilling, they told the minister. It would damage their self-esteem and turn them off learning and achieving in literacy and numeracy, and other areas.