Editorial - Sept 25, 2012

It was good to see the sun come up on Saturday morning. There had to be some doubt that it would given Friday's release of the first set of broad data generated by the Government's much maligned national standards in reading, writing and mathematics. Not that the figures told anyone anything they didn't already know.

Allowing for the apparent fact that the data were not reliable, although no one has explained why, they confirmed what has long been recognised, that a significant proportion of primary school children are not doing well in the educational basics, even if Education Minister Hekia Parata was "excited" that the data were consistent with other national and international information in that a "significant number" of children were found to be reaching or exceeding national standards in each key area.

Specifically, 76 per cent had reached or exceeded the national standard for reading, 72 per cent in mathematics and 68 per cent in writing. It is less exciting to consider that 24 per cent, 28 per cent and 32 per cent, almost one-third, are not.

Maori and Pasifika children, and boys, are struggling more than others (and girls). Again hardly unexpected, but that didn't deter the primary teachers' union from labelling the data as a "further" blow to schools and children's learning.

Just how information regarding how children are achieving, or not achieving, represents a blow to schools and learning in general remains something only the NZEI understands. Parents might withdraw children from poorly-performing schools and enrol them elsewhere, but that isn't likely. Many of the schools that are struggling will be rural, where parents have little choice regarding where their kids go. And some parents aren't especially fussed about how their children are doing. In any event, would a mass exodus from poorly-performing schools be a bad thing? If so, bad for whom? It's the kids we're talking about, not their teachers.

The tension rose another notch for the NZEI when data for 1000 schools were placed on the internet so parents could see for themselves how local schools had fared. Again that has not spelled the end of the world. A parent who takes interest in their child's progress, or lack of it, will already have a reasonable idea of how the child is doing, regardless of this information. It's actually not difficult to assess how a child is faring, or for a community to assess with some degree of accuracy how any given school is performing, without a national testing system. The sad reality is that many of the parents of the 24, 28 and 32 per cent won't care. If they did they would have done something by now.

The NZEI, however, seems to believe that the fact that a significant proportion of kids are not getting the basic education they will need later in their schooling, and as adults, will have come as news to parents. Vice-president Frances Guy said last week that the data were misleading, and would damage schools and their communities. Releasing data and allowing media to draw up league tables would create winner and loser schools (memo to NZEI - we already have winners and losers) while for many parents and children, being assessed as below or well below standard would reinforce a sense of failure and would do nothing to boost children's motivation.

That supposes that the fact that many kids aren't doing well has thus far been unknown to them, and that they should be allowed to fail, and be failed, in secret. These kids and their parents are being offered a fool's paradise, where everything will go swimmingly until the Government spoils it. Of course, the fact some kids aren't learning to read, write or do mathematics will become apparent at some point, but that doesn't bother the union. The important thing, it seems, is to pretend that everything's okay, and not to allow children and their parents to be burdened with the reality that the former are struggling and that the latter need to know that.

Kaitaia has not needed national standards to understand that a lot of kids have not been doing well. Former principal Kelvin Davis routinely shared the results of testing of new entrants when he led Kaitaia Intermediate School, and they were alarming. The bald fact was that children were arriving there from contributing schools well off the pace in terms of literacy and numeracy. Many achieved significant improvement in their two years there, but others didn't. Surely those contributing schools didn't need national standards to tell them that many of their graduates were struggling?

Frances Guy did make one sensible statement last week, that kids learn in very different ways and often that's not linear. Not everything that counts can be measured and not everything that is measured counts. True. It is also true, however, that a lot of kids are emerging from their compulsory education woefully ill-equipped for life as adults. And however they might prefer to learn, either they can read or they cannot.

Much of the union opposition to national standards appears to be based on an aversion to criticism of teachers, deserved or otherwise. To some extent that's understandable. Years ago it was a standing joke amongst Kaitaia's Mangonui County councillors that every farmer was an engineer; it would be just as pertinent to say that every parent, and especially every politician, is a teacher. The problem for the unions is that the results of their members' endeavours can be quantified, and there would seem to be room for improvement.

It has not assisted their case that last week's data did provide one "surprise", for teachers if not some parents, in that kids in bigger classes were often doing better than those in smaller ones. Kelvin Davis may have offered some explanation for that some years ago when he floated a proposal to establish a regime whereby schools in the Kaitaia district would specialise to cater for children with particular interests/strengths and educational needs. He warned that as school rolls fell, so too could the standard of teaching, the rationale being that committed teachers would leave schools that were waning in favour of others that were not. Teachers who did not make the top echelon were more likely to stay where they were.

That is not to say - and Kelvin Davis certainly did not say - that small schools in and around Kaitaia do not have good teachers. The Far North, where many schools are small, has some spectacularly gifted, committed teachers. It is also home to a lot of kids who aren't doing well, however, and hopefully the advent of national standards will begin to change that.

Lots of things impact on a child's educational achievement, many of them having little if anything to do with the school they attend or who teaches them. For some kids the die is well and truly cast before they ever set foot inside a classroom. National standards won't change that. National standards, of themselves, are unlikely to have much impact at all on any given school's reputation or performance - most communities have a pretty good idea about the job their schools are doing without being influenced by government data.

Improvement will come when the Government takes the next, more important step, of providing the help a great chunk of the primary school population needs to do better. Identifying the problem, again, was the easy part. Now it needs to do something about it.