A letter from Anne Tolley Minister of Education to the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association / Te Wehengarua (PPTA), dated May 2010, clearly states "There are no plans to introduce National Standards for years 9 and 10.

The letter is reproduced below.

The Ministry of Education website contains a report from Gary Hawke, Chair of the National Standards Advisory Group, which records that the group at its June 2011 meeting agreed to a recommendation that “the Minister should authorize the Ministry to explore with the sector the desirability of extending National Standards to years 9 and 10.”

NSSAG chairs report on Ministry of Education website

The report was referred to in a Dominion Post article 1 July 2011.

National standards in high schools proposed

The Minister has indicated to PPTA that she is well aware of the problems of teacher workload and over-assessment in secondary schools.

Tweet

PPTA position on National Standards

Overview

The government’s intent is to implement National Standards in New Zealand primary schools despite a lack of evidence to show the policy will achieve anything positive. This is a misguided approach to a manufactured “crisis” with disastrous effects on students and teachers.   

The policy is driven by ideology. Research evidence shows that National Standards will not lead to improved outcomes for students.   They will simply label individual students as failures, and may lead to league tables that wrongly label schools as failures.  Many countries that have gone down this route in the past are now turning away from it.   Refusing to recognise the weight of local and international evidence against such policies is most unwise.

The problems

1. The policy is not educationally valid. PPTA’s Qualifications Framework Inquiry in 1997 established eight criteria for an educationally valid qualifications system and this policy fails on all these. In particular, the absence of trialling and the lack of a moderation system mean the policy will not be fair, nor is assessment against the Standards a productive use of teacher time.
2. Implementation will impact negatively on the broader New Zealand Curriculum. Teachers will feel pressure to focus only on reading, writing and maths instead of providing a broad and balanced curriculum to build children’s knowledge, skills and competencies.  This could lead to students coming into secondary schools with serious learning deficits in areas such as the sciences, social sciences, arts and technology.
3. Repeatedly telling students that they are achieving “below” or “well below” the expected level, even when they are doing their very best to succeed, will de-motivate them, leading to increased behaviour problems in primary and secondary schools.   The emphasis should be on progress, not on achievement at a pre-ordained level or standard.
4. Teacher morale will be negatively affected when students make significant progress from where they started yet are labeled as achieving below the expected level. This will particularly affect teachers in lower decile schools.
   Add comment (0)

Opinion

With the furore about the National Standards, it reminded me of an article Models of education reform: an interview with Prof. Allan Luke, that I found particularly compelling.   It was published in QTU’s professional magazine in November 2008.   

The introduction to the article links the Rudd government’s so-called “education revolution”, which includes a plan to link school funding with school performance, with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy in the United States.   Luke provides ample evidence that the Rudd government would be crazy to go down the same path.

NCLB in the United States has been highly problematic in a number of ways:
•    There are technical problems with the measurements used
•    There have been cases of actual fraud
•    It has done absolutely nothing to close the equity gap, nor to deliver consistent improvements in literacy or maths.