Educating the Dragon

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding.

The first requires memory, the second, philosophy”

Abbe

“The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas

Since my last post before the Christmas break Greg left me a comment and mentioned… “Alan Peachy is sitting behind a lot of what I believe we will see in education over the next three years. Despite who our actual minister is. Have a look at some of his writings and what Bruce Hammonds says about him.”

I must admit my ignorance at the names he mentioned but with a little digging on the internet I found the following:

Alan Peachey is the National MP for Tamaki . He published a book entitled “What’s Up With Our Schools” in 2005, not to the best reviews where he spent a whole book addressing or re-dressing various aspects of the educational system. Where I agree that there may be much wrong with it I differ widely with the majority of his views to ‘save’ it. But let’s face it National was led by Brash who was on his Orewa speech run, upsetting Maori and polarising option. Alan Peachey, went a long way to doing that in the educational realm, but back then it all vaporised in the National loss at the general election. Vaporised may be the wrong word as it appears to have re-materialised now in the National fronted government, your right Greg , everything is suddenly looking rather “Peachey”.

It has been a whole year since I began with Breathe Technology and I’ve not starved to death. In fact as we reviewed the year just gone and I think it has been a productive year. Some of our highlights have been the development of the regional training sessions (some areas are going better than others) and the promoting at conferences. I can’t believe the effort required to take a business from zero to being known throughout NZ as a quality provider of professional development.
A personal highlight of mine was the opportunity to deliver my first ‘In-House’ training ; a challenge and a joy at the same time.
My area this year has been extended to include Wellington and Taupo which I’m excited about… a few more nights away but greater opportunity to visit schools throughout New Zealand. Leave a comment if you think I might be in your area, I’d love to call in on my way through.
We have talked about the development and flexibility of the EHSAS contracts, that schools cluster together and identify their own PD focus. I’d love to hear from you if your school has been involved in this project.
How similar to ICTPD clusters are they?

Yesterday’s Dom Post article entitled "School standards must be raised" had me nodding to begin with. Catchy title and all and very hard to argue against. Should school standards be raised? Nah, lowered I say, lowered. Far too many bright young things coming through and taking our jobs…. If we don’t teach them to read properly it’ll keep them on the back-foot for life! (cue evil laugh now).

I jest of course, I echo Sir Ken when he said "of course we need to raise standards…who would want to lower them, quite frankly." If I were to advocate for a more personalised- holistic approach to education, however,  I shall be in fear of being misquoted as someone being against raising standards in education.

The article in the DomPost raised a few issues for me. Not least of which is the very valid point that there was no Select Committee review of the legislation. So I suggest that we have our own Less Selective Review of the situation. The bill which was passed prior to Christmas can be viewed here . I think it needs some careful consideration.

The second point raised is that mentioned in the explanatory note: is to "raise standards of achievement … in the compulsory education sector". This is a very noble beginning, however I sense a note of blame and shame about this, enforcing testing across the board, from these results we can identify key age ranges that are failing our kids instead of merely lumping it upon high schools for poor NCEA level results. Moreover, are there not already systems in place that schools opt into, like asTTle,  that encourage assessment in both a formative and summative way?

Next there is the issue of "reporting children’s progress against those national standards". Which, if the schools I’ve worked in since coming to New Zealand are anything to go by is what we have been doing all along- Reading ages, NUMP levels and let’s not forget the National Curriculum with its overlapping levels verses ages, are all discussed with parents – in plain English, I might add.

Whatever happened to marking students against their own progress levels. Where were they at the beginning of the year, where are they now, what progress have they made, where do they need to focus for next year?

My next point regards Dr Peta Sharples comments about brown kids from poorer schools. Let us broaden out the category a moment and refer to decile 1 kids for fear of me being branded a racist by mistake. " You can’t put in what God left out" was one comment from a teacher I know.Supported, at least in part bu Steven Levitt’s comments.

I am not advocating that we are to merely write off a generation and chalk it up to a poor gene pool, but nor can we expect our recruitment and retention issues around decile one schools to do anything but get worse if teachers are potentially threatened with financial penalties for not sufficiently supporting their students toward success, and meeting those national standards.

Are we teachers just having a moan about extra workload or is national testing genuinely bad for our kids ? As Greg’s blog points us toward expert opinion from around the globe I consider this move mirroring the  ‘No Child left behind’ policy of the US that sounded so much like that of the late 80’s and 90’s rule of Woodhead and OFSTED . Neither of which has been too kind to either the teaching profession or the nation’s children. Teaching to the test and wide spread cheating by teachers to swell their results are all the result of a hard-lined policy toward education in the name of ‘Raising Standards’.