Testing times all round

Teachers and parents are right to mistrust the false economy that standards generate, argues Perry Rush.

A close examination of the recently published national standards reveals that it really is a case of "back to the future".

Staff rooms in primary schools around the country have fallen unusually silent.

The Ministry of Education has begun to roll out a programme of confidence building.

Business as usual is the mantra; momentum is encouraged.

But it will be hard to achieve that momentum when this policy flies in the face of recently published international data highlighting the negative impact of standards and vociferous disapproval from educators.

National standards have been "done" to the teaching profession despite significant opposition.

It is this meddling in the guts of the profession that rankles.

This policy has significant implications for how schools work, how teachers teach and how children learn and yet it is the very advice from those trained to do the work that has been steadfastly ignored.

It is a measure of how little political capital teachers hold that the politics of inclusion applies to coalition partners and their rainbow policy agendas but not to the collective advice of teachers and principals.

It is particularly worrying that the Ministry of Education is choosing to "sell" the standards as congruent with the revised national curriculum.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

National standards and the revised curriculum represent a mess of ideology: a soup.

No matter how hard you stir it, the component parts just keep separating.

Standards centralise achievement expectations but the curriculum localises achievement; standards understand achievement to be linear and age-referenced but the curriculum enshrines the unique nature of achievement personal to each learner; standards understand assessment to be fixed and owned by the state but the curriculum demands assessment to be fluid and include the student; standards reinforce the dominance of literacy and numeracy but the curriculum dictates a broad and balanced approach.

The standards are evidence of the absence of consultation with the teaching profession.

Of particular note is the recently published assessment and reporting expectations that have clearly been constructed by bureaucrats so mired in their own expertise that their peripheral vision is missing.

They herald a new era of assessment overload.

National standards assessments are appropriately arrived at from a variety of sources.

This is best assessment practice but the advice of assessment experts who have sought to ensure standards are not judged by one test on one day has been counterproductive.

In order to be accurate, assessment from a variety of sources necessitates moderation.

This requires teachers to bring samples of children's work to compare with that of other children at the same stage in order to agree on what constitutes normal achievement for the standard measured.

If this were to occur for all assessments in reading, writing and maths, there would be only a scrap of time given to the job of teaching.

Anything short of full moderation makes standards-based assessments in the New Zealand context subjective and unsafe.

It is a strange irony that "one test on one day" while not desirable would have been less disruptive to the quality of teaching that has held New Zealand consistently at the top of international indices of educational performance.

The unpalatable truth is that if teachers want time to teach, then something will need to go: teachers will need to give up doing something of value.

Recent media commentary has taken the easy option: lambasting teachers for the perception that they don't want to be measured.

Sadly, these commentators have missed the point.

National's raison d'etre for standards is the introduction of competition between primary schools through the use of simple (and inappropriate) comparative measures.

Anybody who has sat a test knows that a test tells what it is designed to measure and what it measures might not be what has been learnt.

The inability to generate achievement data that is absolute makes the generation of an education marketplace that compares eggs with eggs impossible.

There is an undeniable whiff of the Treasury in the desire to measure.

Schools are being required to evidence improvements in productivity and, in the minds of the technocrats who drive policy, only student achievement data in the form of bald numbers will suffice.

Although there will be many who will be convinced, the data tell a lie.

Teachers and parents are right to mistrust the false economy that standards generate.

The Government should be reminded that in the absence of any meaningful engagement with teachers, the responsibility for the impact of national standards on children's learning sits squarely on its shoulders.

Perry Rush is principal of Island Bay School in Wellington.