Student education

Mrs Tolley will go down as one of the disasters in education if her uninformed and simplistic views are imposed on teachers. The question is how strong will teachers be in resisting her reactionary ideas? We will find out next year.

‘May you live in interesting times’, the Chinese saying goes; or as Charles Dickens’s wrote about the Victorian Era, it is the ‘best of and the worst of times’.

Just as schools were becoming enthusiastic about implementing the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum the ‘new’ government is imposing its populist national standards in literacy and numeracy on schools; standards which have more than a whiff of the Victorian Era about them.

It all sounds simple enough. From next year all primary schools will have to test children against national standards in literacy and numeracy (reading writing and maths). Schools will have to report the results to parents in clear language, with suggestions on what each child needs to learn.

So what is the problem?

Well, like most simple solutions to complex problems, there is more to education than competency in the ‘three Rs’. And it is not that schools are currently neglecting them. Most primary schools already spend all morning on such skills leaving little time for other important learning areas. Those parents who assist in schools would attest to this but for many the cry of ‘back to basics’ makes equal sense and for populist politicians always a good vote catcher. Primary education suffers more than its fair share of scaremongering. Standards, it seems, are always falling without any real evidence. Many people feel there was a ‘golden era’ when all children learnt to read and write and do their sums but it is a hard era to pinpoint – particularly when you include the words ‘all children’.

It is time to move on from such polarization and name calling.Children deserve better from our nation’s leaders and shapers of opinion but it seems it is hard to shake off the legacy of Victorian thinking. Old habits of thought die hard. What we need are students ‘with the future in their bones’. As the Hebrew saying reminds us, ‘do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time.’

The Government claims parents are overwhelmingly in favour of their standards but the Ministry’s empty rituals of consultative meetings were more explanatory than democratic. A recent NZCER report indicted parental support was lacking.

Are New Zealand students failing?

International tests show that New Zealand students do well in the areas the national standards are focusing on. The Minister’s argument is that standards will further improve student achievement and help teachers solve the problem of the worrying ‘achievement tail’. The trouble is that there is little research or evidence to back up such claims and in the two countries that have gone down this testing line (the UK and the US) their students do worse than ‘kiwi kids’.

Creating a crisis to solve?

What this emphasis on the need for national standards is doing is creating a crisis to solve that does not exist and diverting valuable teacher energy and time from implementing our new exciting curriculum. As Francis Nelson, President of the NZEI writes, ”league tables driven by simplistic data and complied for the ‘titillation’ of the ‘blame the teacher’ adherents will see the highly regarded New Zealand Curriculum turned on its head.” Kelvin Squire, a past president of the NZPPF, has written that ‘Tolley’s folly’, the national standards, have ‘sown a political seed that somehow or other we can’t trust the profession.’

Editorials have been one sided in their view on teachers, accusing them of self interest and being frightened of what the tests might show. Even the president of the School Trustees Association writes, “that those who are scaremongering now need to get over it.” Scaremongering obviously has a better ring to it than saying ‘those with viable educational views that run counter to the Government’s intentions’.

Not all is lost – let the teachers teach.

The editor of the Sunday Herald got well beyond the Government’s press releases in its editorial of October 25 headed, ‘Let the teachers teach not count’. “Everybody knows best about education,” the editor writes, “by having been to school … no one claims that their experience of driving a car confers any specialist authority in automotive mechanics.” He says, the announcement of the education standards was calculated to induce warm and fuzzy feelings in parents by capitalizing on the anxiety parents feel about their children’s education, which can be relied on for a rich source of political capital. “For the widely trumpeted fulfillment of an election pledge,” he says, “it is a bad look.” Teachers, he believes, have a right to question things that are not in the best interest of their students. They are right to bring to parents’ attention that there is so much assessment of learning going on that there isn’t any time for teaching.

These are not the only concerns of educators.

New Zealand teachers have a proud reputation for being innovative and creative teachers; a reputation that has been put at risk since the imposition of the 1986 National Curriculum. The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum replaces this previously overcrowded and unmanageable curriculum. The new curriculum has been welcomed by teachers and widely acclaimed internationally.

It is ironic that just when teachers are becoming enthusiastic about the possibilities of the new curriculum the current emphasis on national standards will divert their efforts and the students will be the real losers in this confusion

'Good golly' says Mrs Tolley, '150000 failing children are asking us to save them by testing them to oblivion and branding them as below average'. Sir John Charmalot believes that, 'with big business and Auntie Herald on our side we can replace the nanny state with big brother know best. Working together we can destroy creative education once and for all'.


The truth of what is happening in schools to help all children achieve is being lost in by a cynical publicity campaign led by the government and assisted by the Auckland Herald and editors throughout the country. Read Kelvin Smythe's latest for more detail. Teachers are being told to do as they are told or else and are being unfairly scapegoated for school failure of students who enter school with little 'social capital' to take advantage of what is being offered. Teachers do their best. The system is the problem and standards are not the answer.

For an excellent crit of Auckland Herald see this blog by Russell Brown
The argument is really about if schools should be personalised to help all students achieve their talents and gifts, in the process of self realisation developing the competencies that they will require to thrive no matter what life throws at them, or should our system become more standardised so the products can be measured and blame apportioned for any failure.

The sad thing is that for two decades the powers that be have imposed formulaic 'best practices' on schools and required more and more testing. Creativity is already at risk. Managerialism has all but crushed teachers initiative and independence. National standards are the last straw.

Even testing guru John Hattie ( is for or against standards?) writes that 'applied uniformity across every school is a hopelessly crude way of raising student achievement and will result in teaching to the standards and narrowing of the curriculum'. What he says is the important thing 'is for children to be able to self assess their own progress and for teachers to give focused feedback. Most of all, he writes, 'students need a level of trust in classroom to admit out loud that they don't misunderstand something.'

It is respect and trust that is missing in the Minister's hard lined attitude as she happily discounts any contrary advice as 'mischievous' or 'taken into account'. Education is about working together and results in the building of 'social capital' of all involved - students, teachers and parents. Creative education builds on and extends the interests of the students and cannot be limited to success in literacy and numeracy as important as they are.

You get the impression it is either impose national standards or put up with no decent teaching of literacy and numeracy. Anyone who has visited a primary school would see the falseness of this position. Creative education is already being squeezed out by the current emphasis on literacy and numeracy.

The question we ought to ask about 'failing students' ( we know who they are) is why they can't read write and do maths at 15? Simply put they can't see the point of what is being offered. Why is this? How can we engage them? How can we make schooling more relevant? Why do so many children start so far behind at 5? When do students disengage? How important is the distressing home circumstances of the failing students? National's standards are a distraction to solving such issues and are more about a return to 'market forces' ideology.

Solving such problems requires a whole system approach not simplistic standards and blaming and shaming ideas that have already failed in other countries. Although New Zealand does have a a long 'achievement tail' it is important to appreciate that this is also the case in socially unequal countries particularly those that went down the market forces approach to politics and schooling.

It seems John Key see education as putting things into kids heads and then measuring what sticks - this is a 'banking' metaphor and appropriate for person who sees capital as something that can be accounted for. As for Ms Tolley she only has two or three programmed standardised answers which she repeats predictably. The complexity of teaching and learning is beyond her. Teaching is to be reduced to simplistic standardised ‘plunket’ graphs but with no farex available to fatten up kids only measuring them twice year. Maybe she should get management advice from McDonald's to assist her in developing this uniformity?

It does seem strange that the government happily overlooks the connections between the 20% of children living in poverty, the 20% failing in schools and the 20% ending up in prison?

This unfairness is where we ought to be paying attention?

If we follow the imported failed standards agenda we will see our school disintegrating under the triviality of measuring what we already know - akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And, like the Titanic the rich and poor alike will pay the price if we don't place some real innovative thinking into the debate.

We need some real future thinking not a return to past failed ideas.

National's standards are well below average if judged educationally and not by populist politics!.

Who will want to a teacher in such a standardized future?


And an excellent contribution by Alfie Kohn debunking standards

Read this story about the damage of national testing.

And a short story about national standards from NZ

This slightly edited article by Alfie Kohn has permission to be reprinted as long as it is acknowledged and not sold for profit.Published in Education Week January 14th 2010. It could have been written about the situation in NZ. Visit Alfie Kohn's site.


Debunking the Case for National Standards
One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers
By Alfie Kohn


I keep thinking it can’t get much worse, and then it does. Throughout the 1990s, one state after another adopted prescriptive education standards enforced by frequent standardized testing, often of the high-stakes variety. A top-down, get-tough movement to impose “accountability”– driven more by political than educational considerations – began to squeeze the life out of classrooms, doing the most damage in the poorest areas.


By the time the century ended, many of us thought we had hit bottom – until the floor gave way and we found ourselves in a basement we didn’t know existed. I’m referring, of course, to what should have been called the Many Children Left Behind Act, which requires every state to test every student every year, judging students and schools almost exclusively by their scores on those tests, and hurting the schools that need the most help. Ludicrously unrealistic proficiency targets suggest that the law was actually intended to sabotage rather than improve public education.

Today we survey the wreckage. Talented teachers have abandoned the profession after having been turned into glorified test-prep technicians. Low-income teenagers have been forced out of school by do-or-die graduation exams. Countless inventive learning activities have been eliminated in favor of prefabricated lessons pegged to numbingly specific state standards.And now we’re informed that what we really need . . . is to standardize this whole operation from coast to coast.

Have we lost our minds? Because we’re certainly in the process of losing our children’s minds.

To politicians, corporate CEOs, or companies that produce standardized tests, this prescription may seem to make sense. (Notice that this is exactly the cast of characters leading the initiative for national standards.) But if you spend your days with real kids in real classrooms, you’re more likely to find yourself wondering how much longer those kids -- and the institution of public education -- can survive this accountability fad.

Let’s be clear about the latest development. First, what they’re trying to sell us are national standards. It may be politically expedient to insist that the effort isn’t driven by the federal government, but if all, or nearly all, states end up adopting the same mandates, that distinction doesn’t amount to much.

Second, these core standards will inevitably be accompanied by a national standardized test. When asked, during an on-line chat last September, whether that was true, Dane Linn of the National Governors’ Association (a key player in this initiative) didn’t deny it. “Standards alone,” he replied, “will not drive teaching and learning” – meaning, of course, the specific type of teaching and learning that the authorities require. Even if we took the advice of the late Harold Howe II, former U.S. Commissioner of Education, and made the standards “as vague as possible,” a national test creates a de facto national curriculum, particularly if high stakes are attached.

Third, a relatively small group of experts will be designing standards, test questions, and curricula for the rest of us based on their personal assumptions about what it means to be well educated. The official Core Standards website tries to deny this, insisting that the items all teachers are going to have to teach will be “based on evidence” rather than reflecting “individual beliefs about what is important.” It would be charitable to describe this claim as disingenuous. Evidence can tell us whether a certain method is effective for reaching a certain objective – for example, how instruction aligned to this standard will affect a score on that test. But the selection of the goal itself – what our children will be taught and tested on – unavoidably reflects values and beliefs. Should those of a single group of individuals determine what happens in every public school in the country?

Advocates of national standards tell us they want all students (by which they mean only American students) to attain excellence, no matter where (in our country) they happen to live. The problem is that excellence is being confused with entirely different attributes, such as uniformity, rigor, specificity, and victory. Let’s consider each in turn.

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact, one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a heap of intellectual rubble.

To be sure, excellence and uniformity might turn out to be empirically correlated even if they’re theoretically distinct. But I know of no evidence that students in countries as diverse as ours with national standards or curricula engage in unusually deep thinking or are particularly excited about learning. Even standardized test results, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), provide no support for the nationalizers. On eighth-grade math and science tests, eight of the 10 top-scoring countries had centralized education systems, but so did nine of the 10 lowest-scoring countries in math and eight of the 10 lowest-scoring countries in science.

So if students don’t benefit from uniformity, who does? Presumably corporations that sell curriculum materials and tests can reduce their costs if one text fits all. And then there are the policy makers who confuse doing well with beating others. If you’re determined to evaluate students or schools in relative terms, it helps if they’re all doing the same thing. But why would we want to turn learning into a competitive sport?

Apart from the fact that they’re unnecessary, a key premise of national standards, as the University of Chicago’s Zalman Usiskin observed, is that “our teachers cannot be trusted to make decisions about which curriculum is best for their schools.” Moreover, uniformity doesn’t just happen – and continue – on its own. To get everyone to apply the same standards, you need top-down control. What happens, then, to educators who disagree with some of the mandates, or with the premise that teaching should be broken into separate disciplines, or with the whole idea of national standards? What are the implications of accepting a system characterized by what Deborah Meier called “centralized power over ideas”?

The reasonable-sounding adjectives used to defend an agenda of specificity -- “focused,” “coherent,” “precise,” “clear” – ought to make us nervous. If standards comprise narrowly defined facts and skills, then we have accepted a controversial model of education, one that consists of transmitting vast quantities of material to students, material that even the most successful may not remember, care about, or be able to use.

Finally, what’s the purpose of demanding that every kid in every school in every state must be able to do the same thing in the same year, with teachers pressured to “align” their instruction to a master curriculum and a standardized test?
I once imagined a drinking game in which a few of those education reform papers from corporate groups and politicians were read aloud: You take a shot every time you hear “rigorous,” “measurable,” “accountable,” “competitive,” “world-class,” “high(er) expectations,” or “raising the bar.” Within a few minutes, everyone would be so inebriated that they’d no longer be able to recall a time when discussions about schooling weren’t studded with these macho managerial buzzwords.

But it took me awhile to figure out that not all jargon is meaningless. Those words actually have very real implications for what classrooms should look like and what education is (and isn’t) all about. The goal clearly isn’t to nourish children’s curiosity, to help them fall in love with reading and thinking, to promote both the ability and the disposition to think critically, or to support a democratic society. Rather, a prescription for uniform, specific, rigorous standards is made to order for those whose chief concern is to pump up the American economy and make sure that we triumph over people who live in other countries.

If you read the FAQ page on the common core standards website, don’t bother looking for words like “exploration,” “intrinsic motivation,” “developmentally appropriate,” or “democracy.” Instead, the very first sentence contains the phrase “success in the global economy,” followed immediately by “America’s competitive edge.”

If these bright new digitally enhanced national standards are more economic than educational in their inspiration, more about winning than learning, devoted more to serving the interests of business than to meeting the needs of kids, then we’ve merely painted a 21st-century façade on a hoary, dreary model of school as employee training. Anyone who recoils from that vision should be doing everything possible to resist a proposal for national standards that embodies it.

Yes, we want excellent teaching and learning for all -- although our emphasis should be less on student achievement (read: test scores) than on students’ achievements. Offered a list of standards, we should scrutinize each one but also ask who came up with them and for what purpose. Is there room for discussion and disagreement -- and not just by experts -- regarding what, and how, we’re teaching and how authentic our criteria are for judging success? Or is this a matter of “obey or else,” with tests to enforce compliance?

The standards movement, sad to say, morphed long ago into a push for standardization. The last thing we need is more of the same.

We have a problem in our schools - it is one of disengagement which is at a worrying level at years 7 to 10.

The government with its popular mandate believes the answer is to do with poor teaching of literacy and numeracy in primary schools and intends to introduce the failed concept of standards against the wisdom of highly respected educationalists, the Primary Principal's Federation and the primary teacher union.

I had hoped that common sense would prevail and that at least a trial would be set up but it seems not. Yesterday the Prime Minister made it clear the standards are to be imposed this year and that school Boards that did not comply would be sacked.

And this from a political party that believes in initiative, freedom and individual responsibility. As I see it it is the the worst case of political interference ( social engineering) or a government imposing a centralized agenda on schools. State socialism of the worst kind - free market Stalinism.

Students are failing, there is no doubt about this; we do not need national standards to find out who that are and we know that the worrying problem of student disengagement increases between the ages of 12 and 15 or so. Imposing literacy and numeracy standards in primary schools will not solve this problem - it will make it even worse by distorting the learning experiences of students and distracting the time and energy of teachers.

What is really required is some rethinking of the school system which is just not possible to educate all the students in its present arrangement. The joy of learning, which all students are born with, is lost as students 'progress' through the system.

Standardisation might have worked in an industrial age but the world has changed dramatically and what is now required is the develop the creativity and initiative and individuality of all students. We need a school system that centres on helping each student develop their unique talents - naturally this has to include literacy and numeracy.

What is required is a personalised approach to learning from an earl;y age.Even primary schools the past decades have lost the creativity and have fallen into the trap of standardized or formulaic 'best practice' learning. The problem comes to a head in early secondary school when non academic students begin to lose interest.

Retaining all students interest in and joy of learning is the real challenge.

A recent survey in the UK slams schools.

'Many British adults say they did not realise their true potential until years after they had left school. A survey of 2000 people found on that, on average, they cited 22 as the age they found their niche in life.Nearly half of those surveyed felt they were regarded as average or poor students while they were at school. Of those, 15 percent they never really got the chance to discover their talent in the classroom because their teacher had written them off as failures.'

How will imposing national standards fix this?

Standards will mean that all students will be assessed twice a year and recorded as below, average or above average. As is is not possible for everyone to be above average students will continue to disengage from their own learning. This will be made worse by the ignoring of their special talents in the process. This is what has happened in the two countries that have developed such an approach - the UK and the US - both performing far worse that NZ!

If schools accept the imposition of the conformist standards then I am out of helping such schools but will remain as an advocate for teacher creativity.

For educators there is a choice to be made that will require leadership and courage.

Already those in the Ministry have learnt to dance to the tune of the new masters selling their integrity in the process as have those who deliver contracts for the Ministry.

Are schools next to cave in in this brave new 'big brother knows best' standardized world?