Friday, August 10, 2012

Important Matters: National Standards

Introduction


National Standards still continues to be a big issue in NZ education today. Just when the furore about it starts to die down the phoenix (as it were) rises from the ashes to live another day. At the end of last term we received a request under the official Information Act from the Dominion Post requesting the National Standards data we had submitted to the Ministry of Education as part of our Charter. As a new school, of course, we have not been required to submit a Charter – having no national standards data to provide. Therefore, this is not an issue for us this year, but it will be an issue for us next year and beyond.

Given the request by the Dominion Post, no doubt fuelled by comments about league tables made by Prime Minister John key, I think it is timely to give you my perspective on national standards. I want to reiterate that this is my view only.

The media and some politicians have been at pains to paint a picture of teachers as intransigent, “rednecked”, highly defensive and blockers of change in the face of a government attempt to try to improve the achievement of a percentage of our students who are not succeeding as they should in our schooling system and also to ensure parents get clear information about their children’s achievement. This is the view that many New Zealanders hold of the situation. Why wouldn’t they? What is wrong with trying to improve the education provided to our children and why wouldn’t more information about schools’ performances assist this? National standards makes very good sense…..until you begin to look at it more closely.

My whole career in teaching and particularly over the last ten years, has been all about improving the learning of students, but most particularly the learning of those in the tail end of achievement that the government is so concerned about. As a result of this concern, I am open to all possible ways of improving achievement. When national standards came out, my response was to look very closely at the standards and to consider how they could be used to improve the learning of students. During that close look, I realised that the national standards require a broader definition of achievement in reading, writing and maths than had been previously accepted. This seemed to me to be a good thing. So a group of us put in huge hours of work to develop and then review again indicators of achievement at the various year levels in reading, writing and maths. I believe these matrices have increased the breadth of the teaching programmes we provide. They have improved the quality of reporting to parents - who receive a more in depth analysis of their children’s achievement, and gaps in learning (next steps) are very clear. Learning programmes have been personalised more effectively, students are receiving a broader education in relation to reading, writing and maths and, particularly senior students are finding the matrices useful for taking responsibility for their own learning – they can see for themselves where their learning is at, they can set goals to improve and then can see the improvement as indicators are highlighted.

This is all great stuff and I am proud of the ways we are using national standards via the matrices to improve the learning programmes and then the achievement of students. So what are the problems? Why has the teaching profession been up in arms about the introduction of National Standards. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, the implementation of the standards was done with little or no consultation with the sector – with those who were required to make them work. Secondly and more importantly, being a broad statement of achievement, the standards do not provide a standard for achievement and therefore require interpretation by each school; the third reason, and also very important, is the likely impact of league tables on the quality of teaching and learning and achievement in its broader sense. However, before I discuss the above in more detail, I would like to summarise the school’s legislative responsibilities in relation to National Standards.

Legislative Requirements

NAG 2A refers to National Standards. In summary, the school is required to:

i. Report to parents on their child’s achievement in relation to national standards at least two times each year in plain language in reading, writing and maths. The report should tell parents if their child is working at the expected level for their age, or if they are working at a level above or below the expected standard. It should include learning goals in relation to the standards, next steps and plans for lifting achievement.

ii. Report in the board’s annual report achievement in relation to the standards – areas of strength, areas for improvement, the basis for identifying areas for improvement and plans for lifting achievement.

iii. Report in the board’s annual report how students are progressing in relation to national standards as well as how they are achieving.

iv. This includes reporting to the community on school-wide achievement against national standards.

From my perspective complying to i. above is valuable, although it has to be noted that just reporting on reading, writing and maths is not sufficient if we are concerned with providing a broad education to our students.

What are the problems then?

i. The standards do not provide a standard for achievement and therefore require interpretation by each school.

The standards are broad statements of achievement that direct educators back to a range of Ministry resources to work out exactly what the standard means. For example, in reading, schools are referred to the New Zealand Curriculum, the Literacy Progressions, Effective Literacy Practice etc. to develop clear indicators of achievement at each level. This means that each school is required to interpret the standards so that they become usable for reporting on student achievement in reading, writing and maths. The ministry calls these Overall Teacher Judgements. The central question here is: in the face of broad statements, how do we ensure that across New Zealand one teacher’s overall judgement of a student’s achievement is the same as another teacher’s judgement between schools? The answer is obvious – we can’t.

Further, to add to an already murky picture, what I discovered as I went between the different documents to develop clear indicators of achievement at each level is that there is some disagreement between these documents about which achievement indicator fits at which level. In the face of this, schools then have to make a decision about where to place indicators of achievement. I chose to always place the indicator at the higher level because I believe high expectations increase achievement. But other schools may make a different decision – therefore, there is the further likelihood of significant differences between how schools interpret the standards.

In my view what we have developed (the matrices) is Amesbury School’s interpretation of national standards in reading, writing and maths and therefore, I call them the Amesbury standards not national standards.

Finally, the standards require students to show achievement of an indicator consistently, most of the time, across the learning areas of the curriculum. Therefore, a single AsTTle writing sample, for example, is not sufficient to show achievement. We have many senior students who make the effort to punctuate their writing correctly in a writing test but do not do it in their other writing. We will not judge them to be achieving in punctuation at a particular level until we have evidence that they can actually transfer their learning across a range of curriculum areas and do it most of the time. This requirement, which is as it should be, introduces further opportunities for ambiguity. One school may look for consistent achievement across a range of curriculum areas and in another school a teacher might just use an AsTTle test or results from a STAR test and a running record to make their judgement.

None of this is actually a problem in itself. In the long term students will benefit from high expectations and will be better prepared for their educational futures. However, it definitely does present a huge problem when that data is to be reported on to the ministry and may be used to develop league tables. In this case, schools that are setting high expectations in relation to the standards will be disadvantaged in the public arena even though they are doing a better job. With the level of ambiguity in the interpretation of standards, league tables will be comparing apples with oranges or oranges with lemons.

ii. Likely impact of league tables on the quality of teaching and learning and achievement in its broader sense

The requirement to interpret national standards because they are such a broad statement of achievement is not a problem at all until you begin to use the data that is produced to compare schools and those comparisons are made public. When this happens, the idea of national standards becomes high stakes and forces schools to respond to the risks.

Whichever way I look at it, I can only see negatives resulting from any kind of public comparison of one school with another. This may be considered a public good in terms of giving parents more information about the effectiveness of schools. But the comparisons are unlikely to be accurate given the level of interpretation of the standards required by each school. And, of greater concern, are the risks of what this will do to the quality of education in New Zealand. Providing the public good of school rankings for parents is likely to significantly decrease the quality of the education their children receive. This clearly is not the intent but is the likely result.

At a time when we increasingly recognise the need to develop students to be:

• active and effective participants in and contributors to the knowledge economy;

• to be global citizens who see diversity as a social good;

• who are able to work effectively with knowledge and with other people to create new knowledge, new products and new processes across a broad range of areas;

• resilient and responsive in the face of continual change;

national standards reporting is likely to change the focus from learning across a broad range of areas to a very narrow focus of just reading, writing and maths. The risk is that schools, for very good reasons, will begin “teaching to the test”, and the other extremely important, rich areas for learning will be ignored.

It will also create a strong temptation to lower expectations in terms of overall teacher judgements and to misrepresent achievement data to look better.

Competition rather than collaboration will result. Schools will become reluctant to share their great ideas with other schools in case it assists the other school to look better on a league table.

Conclusion

None of the above is desirable and New Zealand education and our children will be the losers.

Schools with integrity about data and who are first and foremost concerned with students’ learning rather than a narrow take on achievement will be disadvantaged.

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