NZEI joins fight against misuse of “National Standards" data

23rd September 2011

NZEI joins with others to fight misuse of “National Standards” data

The education sector union NZEI Te Riu Roa is banding together with two other educational organisations to fight the use of misleading “National Standards” information being used to compare schools.

NZEI, along with the New Zealand Principals Federation (NZPF) and the Boards Taking Action Coalition (BTAC) share very real concerns over the potential misuse of flawed “National Standards” data on student achievement.

School communities will soon face the requirement to submit “National Standards” data into the Education Ministry which would then be available to be constructed into school league tables.

NZEI is making this joint statement with NZPF and BTAC:

“We believe that participation in a process that would use unreliable and nationally inconsistent data to form league tables poses a serious threat to New Zealand's highly successful quality public education system, to teacher professionalism, to the well-being of schools and their communities and ultimately, to our children's learning”.

The threat of “National Standards” information being used unfairly is now very real says NZEI President Ian Leckie.

“The fact that the Standards are so flawed, the level of moderation is so inconsistent, and implementation is so varied around the country, means that any student achievement data based on them will be completely unreliable. Despite whether schools are using ‘National Standards’ or not, they feel very strongly that it would be unfair, if not dangerous to be judged and compared against them”.

The centralised collection of “National Standards” data has been a major concern for schools since “National Standards” were first signalled and introduced.

According to the School Sample Monitoring and Evaluation Project 2010 carried out for the Ministry of Education 93% of principals and 71% of Boards were moderately to very concerned about league tables.

Ian Leckie says the education sector has tried to get a commitment from the government that Standards data will not be available to unfairly rank very different schools, but it has refused to give any such commitment.

“We’ve already seen hundreds of schools taking a stand over “National Standards” in regards to their charter requirements. They have been bullied into compliance because they did not want to break the law but there is an even bigger battle ahead in terms of handing over “National Standards” based student achievement data to the Ministry which can then be used to draw up unfair league tables,” he says.

ENDS

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