jan Lee's Page

Hi Jan,
I think that there are a number of issues to consider in relation to national standards.
First, should the government know the levels of its students in relation to core curriculum? The answer is yes.
How should the government collect this data is the issue. They have gone with national standards.

The complicated thing with National standards is that they aren’t normed and are untested. They also do not match the assessment that is already in place. PAT scores, Numeracy levels, Writing exemplars and so on that give us a benchmark as to where students should be at by a certain age do not necessarily correspond to NS.


So as educators what do we about it?

The workshops on NS have been extremely helpful because of the discussion about OTJ. The fact that whether students are achieving a standard is done through overall teacher judgement means that we can use our observation, in class tracking and testing and formal assessment allows us to make that decision as educators (something that we have always been doing anyway). There is no formal test.

So moderation within schools is extremely important. Moderation across schools would be the ideal but of course the logistical nightmare of doing this is an issue.

Will NS improve students learning? Yes and No! It may help schools refocus their curriculum back to the basics. Reporting to the ministry on NS will make all schools revaluate their curriculum priorities. This is not to say that most schools don’t already do this of course.

Some of the NS exemplars also are really useful for guidance.


Are there problems with NS, yes! Should we fight the implementation, get upset and paint the NS out to be the devil No!

Part 2

What are people really scared about? Performance pay related to NS and National ladders and the implementation of National Testing. I believe it’s as simple as “If our students are below the NS then we will be judged as poor teachers and our pay will be reduced because of this!”

Of course we all know that where you teach will often affect the level of your students. No one wants excellent teachers criticised for poor NS levels because they teach in a lower socio economic area.

Lets keep an open mind on NS. Look at how we can improve them and make them work in our schools! The key is OTJ and the power is still with the educator in my opinion.

We have worked hard at Fernside to incorporate NS into our reporting. We reworded the standards as much as we could into plain language so that we could report them to our parent community. The feedback that we received from the parent community was they wanted to know whether their children were below, at or above the standard. That's really what parents want.

I think the main problem is that the standards are an ideal not an average. They are untested and have been developed backwards from NCEA. The progressions for children are not linear, that is you can not trace backwards from an end point and expect children to be at a specific level at a specific age. You really need to test whether this is realistic for children to achieve. In fact some standards are very unrealistic. NS should be a normed sets of standards, but I guess the government didn't want to set aside 3 or 4 years to collect data and norm the standards. But what is the solution. We either work with the government to improve on the idea and implement them in a practical way. Or we fight the implementation and resist NS.

I am not necessarily for or against NS. I think the government has a responsibility to collect data on reading, writing and maths levels. NS may not be the best way to do this. However that is what they came up with and we are better to work with them so we can give constructive feedback to the government and hopefully change them for the better.

What I am against is spokespeople from organizations trying to demonize the Standards, telling me what to think and how to act and politicizing the issue. I think that there has been some very clever work done by educators to keep the decision with the teachers rather than implementing a formal test.

What do you think? Andrew