National Standards: Why parents should be worried

Why parents should be worried. Why the system won’t deliver.

As the debate over National Standards gains momentum, New Zealand Principals’ Federation President Ernie Buutveld explains why parents should be concerned about the system, and tells us why it won’t deliver on the government’s promises.

You will have seen a lot of headlines about National Standards in the news lately, with two recent reports underscoring the difficulties that schools are having making sense of them, and outlining the risks the system poses to children and schools.

An NZCER report showed that children making “normal” progress for their year level would be judged to be “failing” when assessed against their Year level National Standard for Mathematics. An ERO survey conducted in terms 1 and 2 of this year and released in the past week found that 80% of schools were not well prepared in their preparedness to work with the National Standards.

Neither report came as a surprise to teachers and principals, who have been trying to make sense of the standards for half a year now.

Six months on, schools are discovering the flaws in the newly legislated system. Many boards of trustees, now that they are trying to engage with these standards, are starting to see this too. Parents, faced with confusing mid-year reports delivering far from the plain-language reporting the system promised, are now starting to understand that National Standards may not be the cure-all the government promised.

Parents, teachers and principals alike want our students to do better, and we share the goals that this National Standards system aspires to. Educators don’t believe that the standards will give parents an honest or full picture of how their child and school is doing. National standards have the potential to harm children and schools by creating a confusing picture about student achievement and labelling vulnerable students in ways that will damage their learning for life.

National Standards were a key plank of this government’s election strategy, and were sold as a panacea for many things, from unemployment through to the crime rate.

The system is an overly simplistic approach to the extremely complex problem of what is known as the ‘tail of underachievement’ in our schools.

There is a small number of children in our schools who are struggling – for all sorts of reasons. The number varies. The Minister of Education believesthe number is one in five. This is still just less than the OECD average of 21%, but significantly higher than the numbers cited by educators and leading academics, who agree the reality in our primary schools is more like 15-16%.

Regardless of the debate around numbers, applying a new measurement tool to struggling children won’t help them do better.

Some of these children are struggling for all sorts of reasons – poor situations at home, social issues like poverty, transience and learning differences just some of them.

National Standards assume that children learn in a sequential, linear manner, that there are standards that apply to all children every year irrespective of children’s normal but individual rates of learning. Signposts or benchmarks however offer useful guides to inform progress and next steps.

The way the National Standards system has been designed, there is a range of different answers a teacher can give about whether a child is ‘at’, ‘working towards’ or ‘above’ the standard. The Standards have room for different interpretations thus making them subjective. One teacher’s ‘at the standard’ is another’s ‘working towards’, and so on.

Because the National Standards are interpreted differently in every school, they won’t give parents an accurate picture about how their school is doing, when compared with others.

There has been a lot of talk about league tables, but the reality is, each school uses the standards in slightly different ways, so comparing standards-based data about individual schools really is like comparing apples and oranges. Evidence from overseas tells a sad story about schooling that has been subjected to this sort of high-stakes environment.

Principals are in a difficult position. The government has told them that they are legally obliged to make the standards work, even though educators strongly believe they will harm, not help, children and schools. We have tried to work with the government to help them understand the limitations and dangers of the current National Standards system, but so far, our concerns have fallen on deaf ears.You can expect to hear more from principals in coming weeks, about their concerns about National Standards and what parents need to know about them. We would urge every parent of a pre-school, primary or intermediate aged child in New Zealand to learn more about National Standards, ask questions, and be very cautious about any standards-based reporting they are given.

ENDS

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